Me And My Blog: 12 Months Of Blogging

Today, September the 6th, marks the 1 year anniversary of Is There Food.

12 months ago, that first post wasn’t massively significant; it was a simple welcome. The second post, two days later, was regarding a band called Sigur Ros that I’d just heard of Radio One. That seems like an incredibly long time ago.

Why? So much has happened since then. For a start, my son has got older. He’s started crawling, walking, talking. And while in one way it seems like that was only five minutes ago, thinking back on it seems like an age. But this isn’t a post about my son, it’s a post about my blog; my site, Is There Food.

I didn’t create any kind of success criteria for my site. What’s the point? Only a presumptuous fool would think they’ll automatically acquire readers, or recognition. I didn’t have any goals of achieving a certain number of visitors, or of coining in thousands of pounds thanks to Google adverts. At that point, I didn’t even think anyone would read my site.

On October the 12th, 2005 I posted a response to Apple’s “iPod with Video” announcement. To my surprise, amazement, and - if I’m totally honest - joy, I got linked to from C|Net’s article summarising the response. I was, as we say, massively chuffed.

I had, initially, planned on being a journalist. Maybe, in some wild fantasy, I was going to be a novelist. Throughout my more formative years, I wrote almost constantly. I can recall some of the short stories I wrote. I can even recall some of the outlines I came up with, which have never made it to written form. On certain days, I tell myself I’ll start writing fiction again.

It didn’t happen. I’ve got too much of an affinity with computers and technology. I can’t help it. Becoming involved with computers, be it support, or development, was - with that mythical 20-20 hindsight - inevitable. But through computers, I’ve returned to writing. Starting a blog seemed like a silly idea until I installed Wordpress. Writing regularly seemed like something I used to do, not something I do now. That said, the frequency of posts lately is perhaps not best described as regular. But I’m working on that.

Theme Change: Three Columns Of Goodness!

For the last few months - specifically, since March - Is There Food has been powered by the awesome K2 theme.

K2 is essentially designed for a screen resolution of 800 x 600. The stats for visitors to this site suggest that not many people actually use that resolution these days, and so I thought it was time to embrace the extra space and add a third column on the side.

Again, rather than reinvent the wheel, I thought I’d build on a theme that already existed. And, seeing as I’d become so well acquainted with K2, it made sense to use Bharath Kumar’s superb K2 modification: 3 Column K2 (or, as I like to think of it, 3K2).

It’s taken me a while. I’ve worked with several releases of 3K2, but never managed to get the theme to a usable stage before Bharath released the next version, and I started again. With the release of K2 0.9.1, and 3K2 0.9.1, I’m happy to say that I’m done.

Things aren’t quite finished yet - I need to spend a little more time tweaking the icons in the right-most side panel, for one thing - but I’m happy enough with how things look to start using 3K2 now.

If you find anything that looks odd, doesn’t work, falls over, breaks, or hurls abuse at you, please let me know. I’ll do my best to patch it up as quickly as is humanly possible. Unless, of course, the abuse is warranted.

Hopefully, at the very least, you’ll find things are quicker than they were before.

Thanks for reading, hope you like the tweaked design.

The Hat Goes To Wales

Me, my family, and the mighty Tilley hat went to Wales for the week. More on the Tilley hat later - suffice to say it’s a thing of wonder.

Update + Photo

I’ve not been posting with a great deal of regularity lately. Things have been busy. I apologise.

All that is coming to an end. Normal service will be resumed shortly. In fact, better than normal; I have some plans for the site…

One last thing: Zooomr are giving away Pro accounts to anyone who’ll link to a hosted image from their blog. I’m a sucker for free, so you can have a picture of me wearing a cooler bag on my head, and I’ll have a free Pro account - deal? In return, I promise to write about the site in a bit more detail. Oh, and apologies in advance…

And I don’t even like football…

Portugal.

That’s who I’ve drawn in our seemingly inevitable office World Cup sweepstakes: Portugal. Nothing against the Portuguese or Portugal itself, but it’s not exactly a team that fills me with a sense of proud certainty when it comes to winning the handsome top prize. But it doesn’t really bother me - the World Cup is about to begin, and sweepstakes are part of the fun.

England, my proud nation, will play their first match tomorrow. I’ll be watching it. Or rather, I’ll be listening to it while I work. I know, I know: How awful to have to work on a Saturday. In fact: How awful to have to work on the first Saturday of the World Cup, and during England’s first game. And I don’t even really like football.

I say like; I don’t necessarily mind football, it’s just that there seem to be so many, so much more interesting things I could be doing. That’s not to belittle those who love the sport - I can see the appeal, it’s just that it’s never really been a high priority for me. And yet, here I am, moaning about missing the first match. Why do I care?

And the only honest answer I can come up with is: I have no idea. Is it the fact that our lads are second favourite to win? No: I’ve been let down so many times - We have been let down so many times - that part of me doesn’t really believe that we’ll win. Is it because I’m fiercely proud of my country or heritage? Wrong again: Despite everything that’s going on, I still love my country, and I’m still proud that we can represent ourselves at this level in a global tournament, but I don’t really believe we’re special beyond all other nations. We don’t have any more right to win the cup just because we invented the sport…

The only reason for my interest, that I can put my finger on, is the atmosphere. The weather on our usually rainy little island has been gloriously sunny over the last few days. Every where I drive, on my route to work, or to the shops for groceries, I see England flags. They’re attached to cars, draped over back seats, hanging from the windows of houses, and even flying from flag poles in front gardens. Every time I turn on the radio, switch on the television, or load the BBC news page, I confronted with more stories about Rooney’s broken (or hopefully not so broken) foot, Sven’s plans for victory, and our national hero’s (again, hopefully) activities in Baden-Baden.

Normal Service…

…will be resumed shortly.

Apologies for the lack of updates over the last couple of weeks; things have been busy.

I’ve got a raft of updates coming soon; I’ll be introducing a review feed so you don’t have to see rubbish like this appearing in your RSS reader of choice. I’m also planning to make it easier to find the RSS link (it’s over there…on the right…down a bit…got it!), and to provide an explanation of RSS for those that perhaps haven’t yet been introduced to its wonders.

In terms of reviews, I’ve got Chocolate and Incident On And Of A Mountain Road from the Masters of Horror series, X-Men 3, and I’ve even suffered the horrors of Andre The Butcher, so you don’t have to. I’ve got two Doctor Who reviews coming, and hopefully a third after tonight. And to top it all off I’m going to a preview showing of Hard Candy on Monday, so that’ll be up asap too.

So, much to come - just bear with me while I sort all this tedious work stuff out and things will be back on track before you know it.