Cheers all.

There’s also now a short clip of the Hitchhikers’ Guide to explain the name of the weblog. Check it out. But don’t sue me.

Ahem.

I realised last night that the hellish import procedure I went through to get my posts out of the old Blogsome site was to some extent in vain.

It turns out that the XSL stylesheet I used to turn the Blogsome Atom feed into RSS 2.0 chose the summary field and not the description field for each item to use as the RSS description.

The practical results of which is that all of my imported posts were truncated to about 300 characters, and links and images were stripped out.

I’m going through all of them gradually putting the needful back in.

Arr.

On a related note, there will now only be 5 items on the front page (another loading time measure). Also, you’ll now be able to get 20 items through the RSS feed instead of the previous 10.

This site is now hosted by DreamHost. The move went very smoothly – and everything’s working now, including nice permalinks!

It should load a bit faster now too.

However, I picked up a comment on this blog which Akismet (correctly) identified as spam:

HostMonster | admin@hostmonsterwebhostingreview.com | http://www.hostmonsterwebhostingreview.com/ | IP: 68.3.51.196

Hostmonster is a really nice choice of a host, feel free to drop by and tell our readers about your experience.

I’ve removed the links, but the email address and the website address linked to hostmonsterwebhostingreview.com, which, unsurprisingly, gives hostmonster a 100% positive rating, and opens with the stunningly unbiased remark:

We have tested the service and know the owners of HostMonster. They are one of the truely great companies that we have had the pleasure of dealing with.

Sorry, but I don’t support spammers. If this wasn’t done by someone acting on behalf of HostMonster, then I apologise – but why would anyone go to the trouble of registering a domain like that if it weren’t for some commercial benefit?

Here’s the WHOIS output for that domain:

Registrant:
   Domains by Proxy, Inc.
   DomainsByProxy.com
   15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
   Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
   United States

   Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
   Domain Name: HOSTMONSTERWEBHOSTINGREVIEW.COM
      Created on: 31-Aug-06
      Expires on: 31-Aug-07
      Last Updated on: 31-Aug-06

   Administrative Contact:
      Private, Registration  HOSTMONSTERWEBHOSTINGREVIEW.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
      Domains by Proxy, Inc.
      DomainsByProxy.com
      15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
      Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
      United States
      (480) 624-2599      Fax -- (480) 624-2599

   Technical Contact:
      Private, Registration  HOSTMONSTERWEBHOSTINGREVIEW.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
      Domains by Proxy, Inc.
      DomainsByProxy.com
      15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
      Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
      United States
      (480) 624-2599      Fax -- (480) 624-2599

   Domain servers in listed order:
      NS97.HOSTGATOR.COM
      NS98.HOSTGATOR.COM

All posts from the old blog have been moved over – but unfortunately, moving your (very nice) comments over in a simple way wasn’t possible given the constrains of Blogsome – though I’ll continue to investigate ways to do this.

Many thanks to all for making this blog worth writing!

I’m still thinking up things to put here. In the meantime, here’s the best photo ever taken:

Via the K2 website

This weblog is now enabled for Safari-powered blue squidgy address bar RSS button goodness!

Right folks, I sound like the alcoholic who promises not to go back Mr. Daniels, but I do enjoy posting here and so I’ll undertake to make much more of an effort to post things up here but two things have been preventing me from doing so: firstly university and social commitments (well, drinking in the union is, strictly speaking, not a commitment as such but we don’t want this to happen to the dear old Gamezone in Strathclyde, now do we?). Secondly I’ve just been reading a lot of other blogs and have come to the conclusion that some of the Slashdotters may well have a point: I’m probably demonstrating this right now but a hell of a lot of them are pretty well self-serving inverted pyramids of piffle. Which I will discuss further in the next post…

Hi all, I’m making a few changes to this site, some of which have already been done and the rest of which should be completed over the next few days. I’ve been enjoying having a place to post my thoughts, and though I caught on to the blogging thing quite late on, I think I am getting the hang of it. My site is performing pretty well in terms of hits but I’d ideally like to get a regular readership, and I’ll be publishing more regularly with this in mind. I’ll be posting a little more in terms of personal stuff rather than just comment on technology and politics, and I’m also going to change some of the layout and jiggery-pokery going on in the background to make the site more intuitive. There’s plenty which can be done with WordPress, and other users here on Blogsome are doing great things with the templates and whatnot, so I’ll be making the most of the GPL license and incorporating my own twist on these ideas into the site. Finally, the site name is now ‘Earth: Mostly Harmless’ – partly as it’s a more obvious Douglas Adams reference and secondly so that it doesn’t reflect on me! Because I’m… bad… or something… yes. Questions/comments? Click here to get my email address, or post your thoughts here.

Graeme

Hi there everyone – this is my new blog. I’ll be moving everyhing over from my old blog at Blogger over the next few days, as WordPress seems much better to me, and free hosting is not to be sniffed at!

In the short term, a lot of the articles I’ll be posting here will be slightly out of date as I’m retrospectively posting articles from my Blogger weblog and backdating them. Stay tuned for some new stuff too. Feel free to comment!