The Dear John Letter

Sometimes it's difficult to commit to the time and effort requred to maintain a good relationship, we should all know and recognise this. So it is time for the Dear John entry here.

You must have noticed that the frequency of my visits here is very minimal, and despite having a fondness for (almost) everything Google does, I have another blog, elsewhere.

There. I said it. It feels like a weight lifted. I have another blog now. I like it better, I update it more often (sometimes...) and I can keep much better track and control over it, I know it doesn't offer everything that this site can but I have already commited to it. Of course I will still keep an eye on everyones blogs here via the lovely Google Reader so don't fret, I am not really leaving you.

So, blogspot bloggers, if you are interested you can now read my blog over at http://www.spoiltcat.com/blog

And while I'm at it, those of you who know what's what can follow me on twitter @spoiltcat and for more personal daily updates @ryanwoolies

I hope we can still be friends BlogSpot/Blogger.com

Everybody Loves Kittens

In amongst all this talk of coding and web geekery I've forgotten to share a mini photo success story.

Back in April I visited a friend who's cat had just had kittens. Luckily I managed to subdue the "oh my goodness cute, cute CUTENESS!" squeals long enough to take a few snapshots. A couple of the pictures turned out really well so I uploaded them to my own website.

For the past couple of months one of the pics has been creeping up google's image search rankings, then just before christmas the image made it's way on to the first page of the results. Cue an almost overwhelming number of views and smiles on my face.

I'm just thankful it's a decent photo that I like which has gained the popularity!



see kitten features' bigger picture here

Electric Company & Water Works

Today has been a utilitarian day. A sense of nothing actually achieved, no new challenges met, no new mountains climbed. (Clumb...?!)

Lots of research into affiliate schemes and generating deep links for bands and music albums with a view to monetizing the AltNation Guide. And plenty of line-by-line hand checking of code for any poorly optimised sections, trying to reduce the load on the server, optimise the pages and just speed the silly thing up a bit. Investigating Facebook Platform for the possibility of writing my own application there was an interesting distraction though.

There's also some nice (handy) new features waiting in the wings to be switched on as soon as I upgrade - full integration with the vBulletin forums and threads as well as improved filtering for viewing only the type of events you want and hiding the rest.

I did however receive delivery of a new camera to try and rekindle my snapshot enthusiasm. I got bored with it after five minutes.

The Home Office

Working from home is great. No commute, no boss looking over your shoulder, no dress code, no stress, no hassle. Most of the time that is.

Discipline can be awkward. Yesterday for example. The plan was to work straight through the day & night on optimising a couple of features for the AN Guide (geek: really couldn't justify loading 250K javascript on every New Thread page just on the occasional off chance it might be needed...).

It wasn't a big "pressure cooker" working day, the self set deadline of "before sleep" was vague enough to allow for plenty of pizza & half life zombie killing breaks, maybe even check New Posts every hour or so to keep the brain from stagnating. And yes, gosh darn it, friends could visit for a little while on the understanding I'd continue to work.

That's the plan explained. "Gatecrash Woolies' for a party" means that the next morning hosts an empty case of cider, full ash tray, red wine stains on the bed and a friend in hospital. The javascript works though. I think...

The Future's Bright, The Future's Purple

So after surprisingly few bugs found during the launch of the AN Guide (about two dozen, more than half cosmetic) I decided it was time to break stuff properly.

My intentions had been for a piece-by-piece roll out of additional options, starting with allowing everyone else to add their own gigs, shows, events, bands, whatevers but plans & intentions have never been favourites. Instead Christmas time was spent playing with new toys.

The new toys being the next version of the vBulletin software upon which the Guide is built. New versions are a mix of scary and exciting for third-party developers like myself. Scary because you're never sure just how much of your own code will break and need rewritten at speed to keep up. And exciting because there's always new possibilities revealed.

And in the spirit of Christmas, all my code works perfectly well on the new version, built in future-proofing I can feel kinda smug about (even if it is half down to the vB Devs!)

The exciting possibilities? Well it's tabs. Yes, the forum software is going to go all MySpace on you and have lots of funky social networking features on your profile page and that means tabs. It may not sound like much to you, but to me-trying to cram heaps of information all onto a single web page-tabs are cool. Well implemented & fast rendering tabs are shiny, shiny goodness.

In fact, too good to wait for. So I uploaded a couple of files from the new software and got it to work for me here & now. I even succombed to a request and uploaded a new purple grape style http://www.altnation.com/guide/aberdeen/?styleid=45

And on that smug note I shall gloss over all the stuff I broke while adding the tabs. No one will notice, I'm sure...