September 2005

I’m good me!

Over at my photoblog - Photao - I have managed to get the new template half finished and implement what Photoblog type users of Blogger have been searching for since the dawn of Photoblogs. A template that has a large single photo displayed - but also has thumbnails of previous images to be used as navigation to previous images. This is easy to do if you want to edit your template every time and manually insert the image source code - but as Blogger sometimes has horrendous publishing issues - this is not acceptible. To accomplish this I began by changing the text in the title field of each posting to the same http:// address as the image source.

I then set blogger to only show one posting at a time.

Within my template code, i removed the list of recent items completely (and the entire sidebar) as this only shows as many postings as you have told blogger to display on the screen (ie One). To create the section that shows the thumbnail images, I headed over to Feeddigest and set up an RSS feed of the Photao blog for free. Make sure you have the RSS feed turned on though! I then modified the feeds HTML template within FeedDigest to include an IMG SRC tag around the title field text - which then creates a link to the image itself rather than just displaying the text:

Feeddigest then allows you to copy some code into your blog which displays the feed. In this case it is just a feed of the last 15 postings made into images from the same blog! The free version of FeedDigest is restricted to the last 15 items. Here is the code I am using at the moment to get the feed into the footer area of the Photao blog:

This means that when I post a new image, I can make a standard posting through the Blogger interface, add in the image and text (if required) and as long as I put the URL of the image into the title field, the RSS feed will be updated correctly and (most importantly) automatically. And as I store all my images at the excellent Flickr, I can use the URL of the smaller size versions of the image which are created for you in the title field which makes loading times quicker. The only problem (a very minor one) is that you will also have to remove the posts title field from your Blogger template. So if you want to give your images smart and fancy names, you will have to enter it as standard text above or below the image.

The template is far from finished though - so watch out for more whizz-bang design changes soon! EDIT: Just found out that I got mentioned over on the FeedDigest website too!

Technorati Tags: photoblog, feeddigest, blogger, RSS, template, photao

Mrs Taoski and I watched Monsters Ball at the weekend. However, I may have missed some vital plot bits (as I was ironing at the time) - but what the hell was it all about?

Here’s a few plot points for the mentally impaired:

• White policeman executes man on death row.
• White policemans son kills himself.
• Convicts fat son gets killed in a hit and run.
• Three deaths before 1 hour is up.
• White policeman gets jiggy with convicts wife.
• Convicts wife buys White policeman a white cowboy hat.
• White policeman ditches frail racist father at a home to die.
• Convicts wife moves in with White Policeman.
• Convicts wife finds out White Policeman fried her hubbys brain.
• They eat Chocolate Ice Cream.
• The end.

And she won an oscar for that? At least she had the decency to show her breasticles!
Great direction, great photography, good atmosphere……Crap film.

If a gay jumped on your back, would you toss him off?

• Design my mates website for him over at flights-physiques.co.uk.
• Do some artwork - quite fancy doing a collage actually.
• Do the ironing.
• Play Burnout Revenge on my XBOX after kicking the wife off the TV.
• Do some homework sheets for the kids on the PC.
• Design how I want my garden to be.
• Do the paperwork / filing etc.

My wife recently started drawing again (to fill the void of both kids being at school). She is still pretty good considering that she has not picked up a pencil for nearly 20 years.

My parents who have both been artists and art teachers in their time (and who still paint) have been giving her lots of encouragement - not that she needs it. Last night I got out my portfolio containing my artwork from my GCSE, A Level and Foundation Year art courses i did at school/college so that they could all see what level I was at.

Some of the work I do remember, alot I do not (we’ll blame Reefer Madness on that one). What I was quite pleasantly suprised to find is that some of it is actually quite good.

My art tutor at college (deceased) was a cantankerous surly man who made it perfectly clear that his real ambition in teaching was to get to the pub at lunchtime. He was quite rude to me about my work and I remember him making several of the female students cry over their work being too “twee”. I quite liked his brash manner though and we did get on ok - until he called me a “Cunt” and said that I would be “laughed out the door” of Manchester University as I did’nt have lots of oil paintings to show them at my interview. That was back in 1990. 15 years later and i’m into computers. I hardly even write with a pen any longer - let alone draw!

I now feel under pressure to perform! Whilst I was not brilliant at life drawings or oil painting I did have a flair for abstract designs and compositions. I was much happier listening to some Hawkwind and doing odd surface textures and patterns than doing a full blown portrait of a naked man, out to get some extra cash in the evenings. Maybe I will try to do something again… I do feel scared though. Scared that it will all be crap and that I will have lost the ability completely.

I will take some photos or scans of some of my work in the next few weeks and will upload them when I get time. My dad thinks some of them are brilliant - but he would say that, would’nt he.

Note: Picture is by R B Kitaj who’s narrative painting style I emulated during my college years.

Oh…. B3TA, we salute you

1. Walked in 2 separate woods on 2 separate days.
I do like my local countryside. Tall trees, mud and making my 6 year old believe that there were Goblins in the bushes following us and that chesnuts growing on the trees were Hedgehog Eggs.

2. Avoided a horse who had thrown its rider.
Only to be attacked by her dogs and ignored by her after I ran back to check she was ok

3. Ate too much Shepards Pie.
MMmmmm… my favorite. Totally veggie too - but found that it had mushrooms in though! :puke:

4. Listened to “Zen for Beginners” on my iPod.
“To have a beginners mind is to have an empty mind….” WTF?
“The mind and the body are not two or one, or two together. They are two AND one…” WTF? “Concentrate on your breathing… become the swinging door…” WTF?

5. Got a cold :sniff:
Kids back at school = three of us have now got a cold. Great!

“The book is better than the film”

Not being a *proper* book reader, I cannot really uphold this statement. The last time I read a *real* book was during the first year of a sleepy slumber, commuting to Birmigham. The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings in case you were wondering. As the years progressed I started to listen to audiobooks on the train and did all the Harry Potter books. I have also recently read the new Harry Potter book in PDF format which I got from.. er.. somewhere.

I recently taped Harry Potter and the Prisoner Of Azkaban and watched it last night with (the current) Mrs Taoski. I was obviously expecting too much - as it was total shite.
The acting was bad and the characters were totally wooden. It really was nothing like the book.
As per usual with these types of films, they were referring to things that you would have only known if you had read the books. They did this in LOtR too - but made up for the omissions with the Extended Editions. I had to end up explaining bits of the plot as Mrs Taoski was unaware that the black dog really was Sirius Black.

Crap, crap, crap, crap CRAP!
Lets hope the next film is better.