Dreich Day

Today has been dreich. Sleary rain, and no sign of the sun. These days I have been so tired at work, it feels obvious that a break is long overdue. Therefore I have not felt too guilty to have a bit of a lazy day. My wife has been reading a £5 Asda copy of Harry Potter, and I have been pottering about on my website.

I have tidied up all the pages, giving them proper names, inserted proper tags for the images, watched a couple of vodcasts on using RapidWeaver. I used Cyberduck to tidy up the redundant files that have been uploaded to my webhost in the past, but never deleted. Accordingly the old website now only exists as a home page, the links beyond no longer link up to anything. A little more tinkering with the google search boxes, which don't seem to be doing anything useful, but as they are based on the google webcrawl index, and I'm making pretty major changes to the website on a continuous basis, the content probably is just not picked up yet. Anyway I'll wait see if it catches up with the content. The search facility is not essential, but it would be nice to get it working.

Then had a bit of a look round the web, and blogs on RapidWeaver, and tried out the various Your Head plug ins for RapidWeaver. These are
accordion
blocks
carousel
collage
columns

the easiest way to get the hang of them, simply seems to be downloading them and using as demo versions. I have left some tryout pages on the site, though I'll doubtless delete them in due course. The pricing does not seem unreasonable, so I registered three of them, with a 15% off offer. Though I must confess to finding the website pretty confusing, you pass pages, never to see them again. I probably would have bought all five as a bundle with 15% off, if I had found the page when I was looking for it.

They seem really good, and actually add necessary functionality to RapidWeaver, which is actually quite constrained once you get beyond the existing page templates.

I could quite happily spend days playing around with RapidWeaver, gradually expanding this website.


At work, my little branch is gradually filling up with staff again, and I will shortly return to not running things. I did rather enjoy running things, but was becoming aware that I lacked the experience to tackle all the work I would have liked to. I guess that there is simply no alternative to gaining experience, but hopefully I will continue to gain useful experience over the next year or two. Getting the team staffed up will also let us get moving on doing stuff, rather than just spinning plates, which will also be most welcome.

This week I have been listening to In Debt To ... by Napoleon IIIrd. Checking the blogs, he was reportedly a bit of a prat at someone's party! How small the world is these days. It is an odd album, with its pauses, and odd musical interludes, it is more like a landscape that you find yourself in, than a traditional set of songs. To date my favourite tracks are Guys in Bands and Kate's Song, the former sounds like something off Eno's Here Come the Warm Jets. The latter has shades of Lou Reed in mellow mood. Anyway worth checking out, and approaching with an open mind. Currently only available on download, but folk are already searching for it on Amazon, so it seems to be gaining quite some momentum.

In a rather slack way, I have been thinking about consumerism, and what post consumer thinking would be like. I suppose that post consumer thinking, would celebrate the world around us, our everyday creativity, what we grow, our pleasure in each other, undue focus on spending money, blinds us to so much that is worthwhile.