Blog: A Day In The Life
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Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Goodbye Blogger...?
Blogger have announced that they will be discontinuing their FTP service, which means that users will no longer be able to publish to their custom domains. This severely affects me as my blog is powered by Blogger and I publish via FTP, which means I will have to come up with an alternative solution to continue my blog.Funnily enough, I'm quite glad of this announcement. Yes, it's forcing change up on me, but it's change I've been considering for a little while now, without knowing I would actually have to. I've started to notice the limitations and drawbacks of using Blogger to power my blog - things like its annoying way of interpreting markup, and it being difficult to update the template (especially for older posts) which makes it difficult to roll out template changes, minor or major. Also, I have been learning PHP and now I power all my sites with it, so having pages controlled and restricted by Blogger makes more work than necessary, which can be a pain to deal with.
Blogger does have some good purposes which do help me out, like its rendering of serveral pages containing different blog posts - so say one post could be shown on the homepage (if it's one of the latest 3 posts), it would also have its own permalink (a page containing that one post by itself), and if it's been tagged with 'Parkour' then it would be viewable on the 'Parkour' tag page too. At the moment I wouldn't be able to write self-updating functionality like this myself. I could do it manually but this would just be time-consuming and very inefficient.
I have to make a series of decisions - where do I take the blog, and how do I get it there? Do I migrate to another blogging service - and if so, temporarily or permanently? Do I write my own temporary fix? Do I write my own blogging platform - and if so, would it work in the same way Blogger did?
Ideally, in time, I will write my own Content Management System which will manage my entire site, not just the blog. It will work exactly how I want it to, and it will be perfectly suited my own personal requirements - bespoke for my own purposes. PHP may be the language I write this in - it may not. By the time I get round to doing it properly I might be writing in a completely different language. If I do a proper CMS in PHP I will have to utilise a MySQL database to manage the content.
It'll be sad to leave Blogger - I've always been proud to say I use Blogger and described myself as a blogger. I've been using it for nearly 5 years now (this is my 84th blog post!) and I've even got the t-shirt:
Labels: Internet, PHP, Programming
Posted by Ben Nuttall at 01:08 
Friday, 15 January 2010
Midnight Ice Climb Up Helvellyn
Some friends & I decided to make the most of the snow by heading to the Lake District for a midnight mission up Helvellyn one Friday evening in mid-January.
I was due to return to Manchester from spending the Christmas holidays at home, and as the mountain passes over the peak district from Sheffield were closed due to snow, I was forced to get the train. This meant I was restricted in what I could take with me, knowing it would be at least a week before I could get the rest back. As I had planned to do the Helvellyn trek that evening, most of the stuff I took was kit for the climb! I had two large rucksacks mostly full of kit & gear, and my laptop bag with me on the train. I got off the train at Manchester and went straight to Gordon's flat to sort out kit. We checked through what we had with us, trying to share kit evenly between the group, making sure everyone would be sufficiently warm & safe. We nipped to a local outdoor shop to stock up of a few bits & pieces and at about 8pm set off for Blackpool, which is where Gordon's brother Alex lives.
We arrived at Alex's house, checked through kit, stocked up on food and ran over the routine in the garden by practising the rope systems we might have been needing on the hills. After a couple of hours of kitting up and getting ready for the ascent, we headed to the Lakes in the cars. Setting off later than planned (around 11:30pm) meant we were starting the climb early Saturday morning. We had a bit of an epic getting up one of the mountain passes to the place we were starting from, as the snow was so deep on the road that our cars got stuck. We had to get the ice axes out early and smash up the thick snow and shovel it to the sides for us to pass.
We parked up and began the trek. We started with only a few layers on, with several more packed away in our bags as we would get hot & sweaty on the way up but knew as soon as we stopped higher up, we would get very cold very quickly.
The night sky was clearer than I've ever seen it. You could make out several constellations and see the North Star. The trek up was very hard to endure for our calves, and trekking through deep snow made things difficult. We had two home contacts Gordon was keeping in touch with to let them know we were on track - the situation was that we would text or call them at each checkpoint and if we were more than an hour and a half behind schedule (which had been adjusted at our later-than-planned start) and unreachable they were to call mountain rescue and give all the information they had about our position and where we were headed.
Anyway, they say a picture is worth a thousand words so here's the rest of the story in several thousand words' worth of photographs:
P.S. Just so you know, we got home safely, although exhausted, with a touch of frostbite on Gordon's part. Tip: never be the one everyone asks to open their food because you're only wearing one pair of gloves at the top of a mountain.
Labels: Featured, Mountain Climbing
Posted by Ben Nuttall at 22:32
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
This Week in Technology
I seem to have spent the last hour doing little else than sharing links to BBC News articles on technology. There seems to be so much going on at the moment, so I thought I'd write a short post to mention a few of them.Dolphin Browser for Android
I just came across this app tonight (free from the Android market) - it's an alternative browser for Android phones which has more advanced features than the standard one, such as tabs, easy sharing, select text and so on. The standard browser is ok (it isn't Google Chrome, which isn't available for Android as yet, but should be in time - it uses the Webkit rendering engine - the same as Chrome and Safari - which is the best one of them all) but I find it rather limited as although you can have multiple windows open at once, they aren't displayed as tabs and only the one in focus can load at any time. Apart from this feature being available in the Dolphin Browser, it also has a number of other functions I wouldn't have thought to ask for.
It has a fantastic share function which allows you to post the current page to Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Gmail, Text Message (all by default) or a particular app you have installed which supports sharing. It also supports gestures which you can set to perform a range of actions - so that, say, swiping an L-shape on the screen with your finger goes forward in the browser, or a backwards L-shape to go back, N to open a new tab, and so on. You can personalise them to do whatever you like.
Anyway, I've only opened it once to see whether it was any good, so I'm bound to find many more uses for it. I have Opera installed too, but I don't really like it and only use it if I have a problem with the standard browser.
Google Nexus One Mobile
This week, Google released their first mobile handset (although I'm not sure what makes it more Google than the first few handsets with the Android operating system). It's been released in the U.S. as far as I am aware, and is due for release in Europe in the second quarter of 2010. It's set to be made available on Vodafone in the UK, which is great news for me as I'm with them now (with my HTC Magic Android phone) and wish to stay with them. I've got about another 9 months before I'm due for an upgrade, so I'll have to see what's on the market then - maybe the Nexus One will still be the main contender, maybe something newer.
Anyway, it looks great - pretty much the same as my HTC Magic, with a few more good points to it, like the inclusion of a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack! Oh and apparently Google Maps comes with voice directions, telling you where to go while showing you 3D imagery from Street View! That's even better than a SatNav!
Firefox for Mobile
Apparently Mozilla have been building a mobile app for Nokia smartphones, which they will roll out to other smartphones in due course - including Android, but not the iPhone, as Apple are being very restrictive of what they will allow to get on to their devices (like Google Voice & Adobe Flash - and similarly, they restrict iTunes from synchronising with any device other than an iPod or iPhone, so users can't sync music from iTunes to a non-Apple mp3 player or mobile phone). Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what Firefox is like on a smartphone, but for now I'm happy with my recent discovery of the aforementioned Dolphin Browser.
Google Chrome OS Demo Video
The Google Chrome OS was announced in July of last year, and I'm terribly excited about it - as for one I love the Chrome browser, another I love the idea of a free & open source browser made by Google, also my mobile phone is powered by Google's mobile operating system Android (also free & open source), and I simply love everything about Google and its ways of furthering technology and its applications in society.
Anyway, today I caught an article on BBC News which showed a demo video of the Chrome OS in action - and straight away I could see how they had thought about extending the browser into a whole computer system, and even at a glance I knew I could see how it worked because it was purely simple and completely logical. The shot I saw had the look of the Chrome browser, with two small tabs to the left of where the browser tabs are positioned, only an icon's width: one containing the Chrome OS logo; the other containing the Gmail logo. It was logical that the Gmail icon would be a permanent tab containing the user's email, and the Chrome OS icon would drop down to show other applications to run, such as documents, pictures and so on, similar to the Start menu in Windows, or the similar variants in other systems such as Mac OS and various versions of Linux, but simple and minimalist. This was demonstrated in the video.
Google Homepage Celebrates Gravity for Newton's Birthday
If you were to go to the Google homepage on Monday, you would have seen an apple tree draped along the top of the lettering in the logo. Upon the page loading (it now loads only the logo and the search & I'm Feeling Lucky buttons until the user moves the mouse, when the other links and information fades in to view), an apple literally fell from the tree towards the bottom of the page. Google often celebrates the life and achievements of historical characters such as scientists, mathematicians, authors and inventors (as well as other celebrations such as the olympics, Christmas, Easter, and so on), but this is the first time the logo, however imaginative and brilliant, has ever been animated.
Labels: Android, Computers, Firefox, Google, Internet
Posted by Ben Nuttall at 03:29
