Reenigne blog

Sometimes I’ll be really proud of a blog post after having written it, but then when it comes time to actually post it I’ll cringe a bit to remember it (especially if there’s anything at all controversial in it). The feeling usually goes away (at least mostly) when I re-read the post and it isn’t as confrontational or embarrasing as I remembered it but sometimes I just have to grit my teeth and post anyway. There have been times when I have just pulled posts altogether though - either because I no longer agree with what I wrote or because I want to find a better form to put those thoughts in. Perhaps someday I’ll come back to those posts and see if they can be resurrected in some form or other.

I have a 70 day blog backlog (at time of writing, 44 at time of posting), meaning that even if I don’t write anything for 6 weeks you’ll still get a post every day before I run out. So far I have been operating this backlog as a FIFO queue which seems to work pretty well. The only problem is, though, that now if I write something it might be quite out-of-date by the time it’s posted. This discourages me from writing about current events. Perhaps I should let the backlog drain (by posting faster than I write if necessary) and then post as articles come into my head like most people do.

I think I finally figured out how to properly center images that are wider than the column (450 pixels). I couldn’t seem to get all four cases (image<=450 pixels, image>450 pixels)x(IE, FireFox) working correctly. I finally resorted to using a different image class for wide images, which looks like this:

img.centerwide {
	display: inline;
	margin-left: -287px;
	margin-right: -287px;
	position: relative;
	align: center;
	text-align: center;
	}

Of course, I’m sure this breaks every web design rule in the book and probably doesn’t work for some of the less popular browsers. Oh well, it’ll do for now until somebody complains. I really ought to learn about HTML and CSS properly.

I’ve incorporated all my old website pages (many of which were woefully out of date) into this blog, thus giving me an excuse to leave them out of date (nobody expects old blog posts to be kept up-to-date). There were 80 of them which is more than I would have guessed.

I have no idea when some of the pages were created, so I figured it out the best I could. Please ignore any temporal anomalies you might run into here. Some of the page dates I was able to figure out by looking at the timestamps of images that I created for the page but for a lot of them the only clue was the page’s timestamp. So a lot of the pages ended up on the 12th of July 2000, which is probably when I last changed the website’s background.

One nice thing about using Wordpress for everything is that now (or at least once I update the old pages to redirect to the corresponding blog pages) the entire site validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional! Woo-hoo standards compliance!

I might still go back and edit old posts from time to time. Hey, it’s my website - I can do what I like with it. I’ll try to remember to delete any comments that such edits render incorrect. So if you notice a broken link, spelling mistake, factual error or some other update which you think I should make to an old post, feel free to comment on the post in question.

My blog posts don’t just spring fully-formed from my mind - I tend to edit and rewrite most of my posts somewhat before posting them. I often do this by putting my cursor at the first point in the post that needs changing, and then rewriting all the way to the end. After several iterations of this, I sometimes end up with a bunch of bits of abandoned post after the end of the finished post. For example, at the end of my post from two days ago I almost deleted the following pile of “scrap”:

“don’t think anyone would be capable of covering up such a massive the Bush administration that the fires could not have brought down the towers, but it is interesting to read all the unanswered questions about that day.”

But instead I decided to write this post about it.

I want to avoid any more long periods of not writing in my blog from now on - in fact I hope to post every day. In order to achieve this I have taken a leaf from the book of Raymond Chen (possibly one of the most famous, influential and respected Microsoft bloggers). Raymond posts at 7am every weekday without fail and can do this so consistently (even when he is on holiday) because he has a backlog of posts which currently reaches into late December. So, while some friends were visiting for tea yesterday, I created a buffer of my own.

Now that I have a backlog, when I think of something to write I can jot down a few notes and gradually refine it into a fully-fledged post during the time it’s in the queue, instead of planning it and writing it - I longer have to make it into a fully polished post straight away. Maybe this kind of defies the point of blogging (which is supposed to be a raw, unpolished, up to the minute, stream of consciousness kind of thing) but it fits my perfectionist writing style better. I’m sure I’ll still make posts about my day-to-day life from time to time, but for the most part I’ll talk here about things which interest me and thoughts I’ve had.

In other news, things achieved today: hair is cut, car oil is replaced and media PC is (hopefully) fixed. I even went to work for a little bit.