March 01, 2005
I got back from a great holiday in Italy on Sunday. Despite there being no snow (which is pretty crucial to snowboarding), we both had a great time and no broken bones this time!
I was informed yesterday by a friend of mine that Bloglines isn’t reading my RSS feeds correctly. Odd, because my RSS reader app is working fine. But doing some digging around on the EE forums it seems that my hosting provider (Dreamhost) doesn’t serve it’s default php files as UTF-8, but in a different format. I’m therefore getting a mismatch on the feeds and Bloglines is unhappy with it.
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December 13, 2004
Without the eggs or chips. Rubbish. MT Blacklist is just not working well for me. I came in this morning to over 800 comments on the system, true Blacklist caught about 700 of these but still the hit on the server can’t be good.
Life with EE is looking good so far, although I haven’t delved too much into it yet. I discovered some problems with posting comments behind our firewall in work, which is a bit odd.
There’s going to be a new look here at markboulton.co.uk, probably in the new year, once I get EE up and running. It’s going to be a lighter, fresher design and with ditching MT i’m able to go XHTML Strict with the code. It also looks like i’ll be saving about 20% in page weight as well with the new design. The portfolio section has been reworked which such make it a bit more usable. It’s also taking advantage of EE’s excellent category management system with category specific pages now, which are lacking at the moment.
I’ll be posting more about EE as I go along.
December 08, 2004
I’ve been getting slowly frustrated with MovableType (as you do). First off, there’s Comment Spam. Horrible. Last weekend I ended up with over 1000 comments which I had to delete manually. I shouldn’t have to do that. I also shouldn’t have to impose registering restrictions for the people who want to comment to the site.
But that’s not the main thing.
Update: I’ve made the plunge, more to follow once i’ve fathomed out Expression Engine a little more. Thanks to Simon at Collylogic for his advice.
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November 22, 2004
I’ve never been so badly spammed as the past three days. thankfully MTBlacklist caught most of them - over 2000 in three days! Nightmare. So, if you see the odd comment by Gay Hentai Porn, you can safely say one has escaped me.
October 15, 2004
New portfolio entries in the archive.
BBC Scrum V and BBC Ocean Row is some work from 2003. I thought i’d better start adding the archive stuff before the list just gets too big!
October 01, 2004
Just posted the first the series of the Grid Articles. The first in the series - Why use a grid? - explains just that. The rest of the grid series:
- Why use a grid?
- A grid for the printed page
- A website grid
- A purists view on website grids
- Where next?
Any comments about the latest, and upcoming, articles can be posted here.
September 10, 2004
Following a link from Jon Hicks, Ecto 2 beta has been released, in fact i’m posting this entry on it.
I’ve been using Ecto for a while now (ever since it was called Kung Log) to quickly post to this site. Quick, efficient and cheap and intergrates seamlessly with MovableType. In fact I rarely delve in the MT interface on a daily basis as Ecto is installed on my machine at work.
So, what’s changed in version 2? Quite a bit actually. Some of it good, some of it strange.
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September 02, 2004
Just tried using the dynamic template functionality in MT3.1 and, yes, it broke the About section completely. I’m currently scouring the MT forums to try and fix it. I think MT still thinks it is building a dynamic site, when in fact it’s not. Also, that section has some complex subcategories going on in it, so that could be a problem too. Bugger. Anyone have any suggestions?
Update: Ok, fixed the category archives now and the dynamic publishing is working. Just got to sort out the navigation and the homepage. Discovered a slight glitch in MT’s template management. If you are linking to a template, you have to delete what is there in the editable box, then save and rebuild. That way it references the external template again. Took me ages to fathom this out.
Update 2: Not bothering at this point. Until six Apart resolve some issues with the sub-categories and the complexity of going dynamic, i’m not going to bother having just got this site up and running. I think i’ll carry on with thinking about getting the content ship-shape. D.Keith Robinson has a good write up and he explains the reasons why i’m not bothering very well.
I'm a graphic designer from near Cardiff in the UK. I've been a designer for over ten years now and primarily work on the web. I'm still partial to a bit of print every now and then though. I used to work for