Website Archives

Anyone who's taken a detailed look at the home page may have noticed that there was text under the photos section for something called “Gallery” but no link to anything. Well, it's something I've been meaning to do for a while and finally got round to a bit of it at the weekend. Basically, just taking photos that I've taken and turning them into something different. An expression of art I guess, but I'm not very arty so that may be a bit misleading.

Anyway, I've managed to get round to creating a staggering two pictures so it is with this impressive array that I open the photo gallery. Hopefully you will like what gets created here. If not, shame really as I'm not going to do anything to change it. Karen likes the “Warhol William” so there's probably going to be a sequel and maybe even a series of these. If you have any constructive comments or thoughts, let me know.

Foreseeing the need to create and distribute video content, particularly with William's birthday coming up, I purchased more hard disk capacity for the web server. Look forward to a forthcoming article "Too big for your own blog" to be posted on the BYOB site that describes how this process was achieved.

So, we now have video content available online. So far there is just material for the family. There was some footage on the camera that Karen must have taken at some point that I turned into some small 30 second clips and then there's a couple of big ones from the little one's birthday.

Now, if I've got everything right, there will be two links for each clip. The first will take you to a page that will play a low resolution clip embedded on the page in Windows Media Viewer. The second link will take you to a download pop up. The only thing I haven't really had the chance to test properly is whether or not playing the clips online is any good given that I'm running this over a DSL connection. Hopefully it works OK, certainly if you actually want the full resolution video, downloading is fine. If you have any problems, let me know.

To see the videos click this link.

Yes Folks. That crazy Mr. O has been at it again taxing the locals at The Stag. Try your luck with quiz number 5 in the Bumpkin Quiz.

I know you've all been waiting with bated breath to find out what amazing feature I'm going to add to this site. Well, wait no more for it is here!

Tada!

Introducing the Caption Competition.

This page contains odd photos that I've either taken or come across that I think lend themselves to various captions. Partially inspired by the Miss Teen USA comments of Miss South Carolina, featured on this blog site, as that entry could have been titled almost anything.

So, take a look at the Caption Competition and see how creative you can be. If you do, you could win absolutely nothing as there really isn't much of a competition going on, but I couldn't really think of another title to call the page. I suppose I could have just called it caption or create a caption for the photo, but I'm hoping some sucker will see the link on the home page and end up there in the belief that they may win something.

Now that we've started to get a fair amount of content on the site, seemed like a good time to put some archiving in place. Actually, not really archiving, just figured that it would help load the blog pages quicker if they only loaded entries made in the last 60 days.

This filter is only being applied to the OBlogs, Stuff Blogs and Website Blogs. The other blog pages don't have too much content, or, in the case of the BYOB blogs, it made sense to leave the full list intact.

This just means that if you're hunting for an old article, you may need to click the archives link (under the search box on the Blog Bar to the left). Additionally, the search and weekly mail links will take you to a new page to view single blog entries. The simple reason for this is so you will always be able to get to an article from an old link (old being any link from here on in, not any before today as that would have required me to be psychic and know what it is I was going to build for the archiving). Otherwise, if you had a link from over 60 days ago, it would take you to the current page and the article wouldn't show up there as the page is only displaying articles less than 60 days old. Now it goes to the single blog entry view that has access to all articles, figures out where you are and puts a button under the title that will take you to the article in its category listing (OBlog, BYOB, Stuff etc.)

Hope this makes sense. To be honest, it was easier to set up than to explain.

It's time to scratch the old noodle again and figure out if you're smarter than a country bumpkin. Yep, quiz time again. Follow the link to the quiz page to test your knowledge.

Do you know what this is an aerial photo of?


Go to the quiz page to find out. If you just want to see this quiz, filter on “Quiz 4”.

Trip to Walnut Creek on Saturday provided two great opportunities:

• Take some photos of William
• Drink Beer

Given that we're looking to move to in this general direction, it seemed like a great opportunity to get out and wander round. Talked to a couple of guys I'm working with and figured we'd all meet up to let the kids run round, then go to the pub for some lunch and a couple of beers. Click to see the Photos from Walnut Creek



Great Saturday.

To those dedicated fans that tried to log on this past Sunday afternoon only to find the website was down, I apologize. The simple reason being that I moved the site. If you look carefully, you will notice it's down and to the left a bit.

Actually, what I did was move all my stuff downstairs. Something I've been contemplating doing as the room where the computer was gets really hot and isn't really condusive to housing computer equipment. It also meant that I could take a trip out to the local computer shop to buy stuff. Doesn't really matter what (in this case it was wireless stuff). It's just the opportunity to spend money on toys and then to come back and set them up. Puts a smile on my face.

But with every silver lining there's a big black cloud waiting to piss down on you. And in this case, it was the turn of the flat pack furniture. Worse than just assembling flat pack furniture is attempting to unassemble it, move it and then re-assemble it again. The initial assembly struggles with the fact that tab A will not fit into slot B and that you seem to have too many G screws but not enough H screws - but still you manage to figure it out. The unassemble, move and re-assemble process results in the fact that tab A easily fits into slot B, but it now flaps around as the hole is now somewhat bigger than the manufacturer intended it to be. Screw G has just fallen onto the floor and the cat is now chasing it across the living room. Still, the right amoung of shouting seems to have done the trick as we're all back up and running with tables that resemble tables. Nothing's collapsed yet anyway.

Friday afternoon saw an early finish to work and, with the sun shining, the need to exploit the situation and go out. Figured we'd go for a little trip to the beach.

Anyway, everything was going well. William loves water, so we took him for a paddle. And then came the big wave (relatively speaking anyway). I guess that's one of those lessons from the school of hard knocks. Not actually sure what the message is - “watch out for waves” or “the Pacific is bloody cold”.



It therefore seemed appropriate to create a page with the pictures. To see the rest of the pictures from the outing click William at the beach.

I've had this page up for a week or so, but haven't linked to it as hadn't really got enough stuff on it. It actually serves no purpose whatsoever which is what makes it so good. It really started as a test page where I was practicing javascript (as I'm not very good at it) and then morphed into a kind of lets see if we can make things change color and move around the screen.

I guess it's the page designed to make you go oooh and aaah. Basically, load the page up, click to show the panel and then click around on the options and see what happens. The fun starts when you put text on the screen. If you get the text rotating and then set to follow the mouse with the style apart, you can create some amusing effects. Well worth 10 minutes of anybody's time. Probably not more than 10 minutes as that would make you really sad.

So, the link is to the Ex-Perry-Mental page.

I will admit to looking at the works of many others in order to create this page. They all seem to want some notation in the code, but given that this was created from so many different pages and then completely hacked to bits, that wouldn't really make sense, so, here's the list of sites that I found pretty helpful:

Code Lifter
Dynamic Drive
Hypergurl
Javascript Source

Thanks