Yeah OK, I’ve not updated my blog in like 7 weeks aside from increasingly annoying Twitter digests, which I have now disabled. Life has been busy as ever, and I’ve been working hard at Netbasic, often (much to the annoyance of Hannah) working late. Freyja is already 7 months old, nearing 8 months now, and she’s just such a character. She’s happily sitting up and loves playing with Daddy (providing he gets home from work before she goes to sleep!). Her first tooth is very slowly but surely coming through which is great, but the last couple of days have been hard for her and she woke up at half 10 the other night, which was very unlike her.
We had friends over on Saturday – it was nice to actually see some of my friends for once! We’ve learnt that having a baby can make socialising very difficult, and many of the things we used to do are not so easy any more, so it was refreshing that Tom & Soph came over to see us and a good night was had by all!
Yuletide is approaching already, and this year we’re off to Andorra with the family for a skiing trip. Freyja will be a little too young to remember it but I’m sure she’ll love the snow. Unfortunately I’ve learnt that my mum may not be able to ski due to her leg being sore and she’s had an injection and stuff from the doctors, so she needs to take it easy. Although having said that, she’d love to spend every day with her three gorgeous grandchildren!
In other news, I’ve been working hard on a new project of mine which some of you will have heard of. I’m not far from releasing it as public beta version, but more news when that happens. I’d love to commit to saying “Yeah I’ll blog every few days again”, but since Freyja was born my life has pretty much entirely evolved around her (of course!) which leaves me very little time – and the spare time I do have I spend watching films with Hannah! I will see if I can blog more frequently, as some of you have complained to me for not blogging so much and letting it fill up with tweets…
If you’ve used the contact form on my site before, you’ll probably recognise it as the bells-and-whistles WordPress plugin cforms II. It was fairly simple to set up, if a little complex for what I needed.
Today was the last straw really and I got fed up of it. All I wanted was a plugin that allowed me to put a form on my contact page, and that was that. Instead, I got that, plus it seemed every time I logged into my admin UI, I needed to upgrade it.
I don’t mind the odd upgrade, but cforms II just got annoying. When I upgraded to WordPress 2.7, it because much easier to upgrade it, so I carried on. But now, due to some quarrel which frankly I don’t care about, there is a permanent message saying that you have to update manually – which I just can’t be bothered with really. So cforms II has lost out, and I’m now using a new plugin which I hope will need upgrading less frequently and generally be less bulky… Contact Form 7.
Yeah I know, I got really sloppy over Christmas and totally forgot to blog. So here’s an update in a clear, concise unordered list.
- Amelie, my newborn niece is doing great (born 23rd December 2008!)
- Christmas was fantastic, we had a mountain of presents both at Hannah’s mums and at my sister’s, including a one-of-500 pressing of Primordial – Dark Romanticism on picture vinyl, Fallout 3 (at last!), COD5, a high-definition video camcorder and several other awesome presents.
- We spent £500 on kitting out the nursery – it’s looking awesome, and the last piece is the wardrobe, arriving tomorrow.
- I made my first Jamie Oliver recipe yesterday, a Chicken and Leek stroganoff – very yummy
- I made my first home-made loaf of bread yesterday, and it beats shop-bought bread hands down. So easy as well!
- I went to our “local” pub, the Parson’s Collar on 28th with the Frosthold guys, not bad. Very drunk.
- We played Munchkin Quest for the first time on the 29th. Very cool!
- Frosthold played a cracking gig at the Wedgewood Rooms on the 30th, as well as releasing our new CD, called When Brothers Fought In Arms… see the Frosthold website for details on how to buy a copy!
- I made a new Frosthold website incorporating the new artwork, and also in OO PHP5 instead of the old top-down PHP4 the original one was written for.
- We had a 4D scan of the baby yesterday. We determined it is 99% a girl, but she was so curled up with her hands and legs over her head that we couldn’t get a good 4D image – we rebooked for next week!
If I went into much more detail I’d make an enormous blog post, so I’ll leave it at that, but I promise I’ll start blogging more!
Regular readers of my blog who visit the site (not just subscribe to the RSS) will have noticed over time, since I made this theme and released it on June 3rd 2008, my blog slowly changing and looking more sleek and refined. I’ve literally just finished the comments CSS, so comments are nicely boxed up and styled, rather than the basic numbered list. Also, people might’ve noticed the sidebar suddenly shifting to the left. As Sii says, the posts being below the search box makes more contextual sense as well. I also recently added a shiny RSS icon, made by Jay Hilgert. Looking at the picture to the left (it’s the only one I have unfortunately so it’s a bit low-res), you can see how much it’s changed.
And thinking about it, how much I’ve changed as well! I’ve been dabbling an awful lot more in trying to make things XHTML compliant and using CSS in the proper fashion recently, and after a bit of modification to the Picasa widget, my page is fully XHTML 1.0 Transitional valid. I’ve not bothered making it strict yet, as generally widgets made by other people take a lot of work to make them strict. In fact, up until Matched.co.uk went under, my pages have been non-compliant due to non-compliant Matched.co.uk ad code.
And last, but most certainly not least, the biggest change is of course the pregnancy, which is coming along swimmingly by the way!
Those of you who read my blog regularly might notice that I’ve added a couple more AdSense ads to my page, a leaderboard at the top, and an ad in the first post, in addition to the sidebar Adsense unit that’s always been there.
I’m trying to monetize it a bit to cover the cost of hosting for my various websites, but now that my Matched.co.uk ads are paying out quite well, I’m considering dropping them to help make the site look a bit cleaner. I am earning a very small amount from the Adsense units, but I think it might be better to just get rid of them for a nice clean site look…
What do people think… obtrusive? Shall I get rid of them? Or keep them?… I wonder…
