From the category archives:

Blogger

Think again…

by taoski on January 25, 2006

I had this great idea.

I would install Apache and Wordpress locally, following the instructions over here and publish a work intranet blog thing to help us feed out information to the members of our (small) section.

I have recently been fiddling with this setup on my machine at home and if you are lucky, you might even find my test Wordpress blog lurking over at http://taoski.blogdns.com - but only if my firewall lets you in, the Apache stuff is running and the kids are not playing Backyardigans games on the web.

It works pretty well - especially for testing out Wordpress - which is way, way, way more advanced than Blogger and looks pretty cool. I still intend to migrate to Wordpress and my own domain at some point - but as you can guess from my previous post, cash and my spare time might be a little tight!

Anyway. I get the site set up at work and its all working but Apache just keeps on crashing!

Crashing when I attempt to upload a file during a post, crashing when I try to post a test comment and crashing when I move the mouse too fast after drinking too much coffee.

I'm on the late shift tonight - so I might have time to play with it a little more.

Ahhh… the joys of a technical job… Don't you just love it?
It used to be all "exciting", "innovative" and "rewarding" but now it's just "boring", "samey" and "mundane".

I wish I had used my A-Level art and A-Level Graphics Design for something rather than just creating a pile of quickly deteriorating artwork under my bed or making the odd kiddies party invitation on MS Publisher.

A nice design job like DriverChris does would be nice….

09:50: Turn up to work with expensive "Michael Caine" glasses, expensive sharp suit and expensive coffee in hand.
10:30: Start "design" work after reading The Guardian and sending emails to your "pretend mates" on your Blackberry.
12:00: Off to the Wine Bar for lunch with "Fifi and Charles" from "The agency".
13:30: Back to work to sketch out that idea that came to you as you "piss-chased" some chewing gum round the urinal in the wine bar.
13:40: Get distracted for a while by minimising the windows on your Mac to "the dock" and back again. You forget the idea you had. Time to have a power-nap.
14:30: Play with your Mac a bit more and read some websites about design and Audi cars.
15:00: Team meeting in the office. See who's got the brightest pink shirt and discuss the future of "frameless fixed-width inline CSS templates" for your customer portfolio.
15:50: Return to the desk and fiddle with Illustrator/Photoshop/Quark until the boss goes home.
17:00: Off home on the tube with your iPod, another expensive coffee and copy of Stuff magazine.
18:00: Get home to your lonely flat. Cry in your Findus "sad and lonely microwave meal for one". Go bed early after watching Trinnie and Susannah, getting tipsy on sparking white wine and being all confused over your sexual preferences….

Is the grass greener? Who knows?

I won't. I am doomed to be stuck at this desk whilst a telephone headset burns a ridge into my skull, I fix the same faults I resolved 4 years ago and the world passes me by.

EDIT: Just found this alternative program for running Apache and MySql locally to run Wordpress: WampServer

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I’m on the move

by taoski on January 11, 2006

After "a good hard think" I have decided to make the switch away from Blogger.

Not that Blogger is crap or slow or full of spam blogs and is generally seen to be the AOL of the Blogging world or anything. Blogger has served me well over the years but I want more control over my blog, how it looks, functions and is accessible.

I am going to buy a domain name, some webspace and host a WordPress blog there.
I will also amalgamate this blog, my Photao Photoblog and Music Club blogs into one giant tri-headed beast.

Wordpress will also allow me to create sub-blogs for subjects - so I could have a personal blog, a tech blog and a blog about my pet rock, Mr Stone Knee Boy (joke! - honest). I kind of have a picture in my head of how it will all pan out and work - but we shall see. Webspace and a platform like Wordpress will allow me to customise the site to my needs.

The Newlinks boys made the switch away from Blogger quite a while ago and are still going strong on their nice Drupal based platform. Drupal is also possibly "in the running" for providing the front end for my new site. This is even more customisable than Wordpress but may be too much for what I need. I have got a website to design for Flights-Physiques.co.uk and wish I had got him to purchase a business hosting service so I could install Drupal or Wordpress. At least then he could update the news section of the site himself!

Taoski.co.uk is available as a domain name and I can use Wordpress to import all my Blogger posts and comments - so watch this space suckers!

Related links: Wordpress for beginners, Wordpress Themes, Working with Wordpress.

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Please wait….

by taoski on December 29, 2005

Re-publishing your blog for the 200th time… please wait.


Ever get the feeling you spend too much time farting with little CSS niceties in your template when you should be sleeping? 2 hours to make the comment background to alternate between grey and dark grey! Wahoo. I get the feeling it was not worth it now. Then again - I did it myself!

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Photoshop Kubrick Header Template

by taoski on October 26, 2005

Hot on the heels of my previous posting about the Kubrickr header image generator - and bang on the money after Mr Noxious slated my new header design in favor of the old logo (in a LOST stylie) comes a copy of my photoshop template for the Kubrick "Blue Blob" header.

Made from two layers, you can either customize on top of the "blue blob" or remove it totally for your own "free form" enjoyment. I was starting to think of a new design and made this template to help me. Hope others can benefit from using this too!

Grab the template here
Get the Kubrick for Blogger template here

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Clockwork Headers

by taoski on October 24, 2005

Just found this neat little web based tool to automatically make "Kubrick style" headers for your blog (the template championed by myself and Nick). Images are pulled from Flickr by entering an appropriate tag and then manually cropped to make the JPG which is then downloaded to your PC.

It will never replace spending hours on a tedious multi layered Photoshop/illustrator image (only to find it looks crap at the proper size) but it could be a good way of finding a starting image though.

Not sure why the site will not pull out my Photao tagged images though. Odd.

I still would (eat my own arm for) like a version of the Tao of Mac kubrick slideshow header which is done in Macromedia Flash and pulls random images from Flickr. It just gushes class! Just need some (reliable) webspace i guess.

Found via the Great Flickr Tools collection.

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The Holy Grail

by taoski on September 28, 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.

bloggertitle

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

formatting

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:

digest

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:

code

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!

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