I’ve been wondering a bit recently about what to do with my blog. I’ve been finding that there are quite a lot of demands on my time at the moment and it’s getting increasingly difficult for me to find the time to come up with good quality content that can keep my readers informed and entertained. I’d also like to use what free time I have to do things that don’t involve sitting over a computer — perhaps getting back into playing the piano again, for example, or improving my social life, or getting some much needed exercise.
Unfortunately this means that I haven’t had as much time for my personal code projects outside of work as I would have liked. I was hoping to spend some more time on my Comment Timeout plugin and perhaps have a go at writing an improved comment administration interface for WordPress, but I simply haven’t managed to find the time. I’ve also not been able to get anywhere near as far with Ruby on Rails as I’d have liked either. I stopped editing Wikipedia a few weeks ago for this reason, and I’ve been wondering too whether I should be cutting back on how much time I spend on my blog.
I’m also a bit concerned in case I’m getting too personal with what I’m writing. I’m very much the kind of person who hates being at the centre of attention, and I don’t like being too personal, especially when anyone and everyone can read what I have to say. Besides, as Jakob Nielsen points out, the chances are that what you write in your blog today can end up being read by your future boss in ten years’ time. Scary.
Nonetheless, I’ll probably continue blogging for the foreseeable future, though how regularly remains to be seen. I don’t want to end up feeling that I have to post something every week, or that I have to reply to every comment that everybody leaves here, though now that people are starting to leave comments and my Technorati rank is into five figures, I’m aware that there is more pressure in that respect. But in the meantime, if I get a bit slow off the mark responding to comments, or my posting frequency becomes a bit sporadic, don’t worry: I am still around — the fact of the matter is that I just can’t afford to spare a great deal of time on it at the moment.
I may eventually move my website away from blog format altogether, and towards something a bit more structured. Some things that I’ve written would be better off as static articles rather than as blog posts — for example, it might be good to consolidate my entries on ergonomic keyboards into one article outlining what I think of the concept and giving some links to helpful resources. I think it would also help to stand me out from the crowd a bit: now that everyone is blogging, having a personal website that isn’t in blog format does tend to have that kind of effect, and if you can make it look like it doesn’t have a content management system behind the scenes without compromising your sense of design, so much the better.
The next MiniBar meetup in London is on 20th April at the Truman Brewery, Corbet Place. I’ve been to it twice now and it’s a great time to meet up with web developers, Internet professionals, investors and general hangers-on, and geek out to loud music. April’s event looks set to be particularly popular because the featured presentation will be by Canonical — that’s Mark Shuttleworth’s company (of Ubuntu/space tourist fame). I am, of course, planning to be there.
Attendance is free, but you need to register for it if you want to go. Seems it’s filling up pretty quickly this time round, so you need to sign up sooner rather than later, as it’s limited to 150 people.
The latest version of Comment Timeout is now available for immediate download. This fixes several bugs:
1. The plugin no longer raises a warning when installed on a server where allow_call_time_pass_reference is turned off in your php.ini file.
2. It is now possible to disallow hyperlinks in comments entirely, by setting the maximum number of hyperlinks to zero.
3. Hyperlinks that contain line breaks are now counted correctly.
One important note: If you are upgrading from an earlier version, and had set it to allow unlimited hyperlinks in your comments, it will now reject all comments containing any hyperlinks at all. To fix this, go to the options page and uncheck the box that says “Reject all comments containing more than 0 hyperlinks” — or alternatively, you can change the zero to some larger number of your choice.
A couple of weeks ago I was treated to two new monitors — 20 inch wide screen flat Dell offerings, each with a resolution of 1680×1050 pixels. These replaced a couple of excruciatingly old CRT behemoths that were occupying three quarters of my desk.
The new monitors can rotate on their stands, so you can have them in either a portrait or a landscape orientation. After a little bit of experimentation, I’ve plumped for having both of them upright.
This arrangement really comes into its own for coding: you can see ninety lines of code on one screenful without compromising clarity. This is quite helpful when you encounter a gargantuan 1,600-line function with loops and if statements a dozen levels deep, written by someone who has never read Martin Fowler’s excellent book on Refactoring.
The only thing is that having them vertical slows down the graphics card a bit for some reason — but since I’m not playing video games or watching DVDs at work, that doesn’t really matter. It’s also a bit odd when the machine boots up because the Windows splash screen appears on its side.
Some people like to have three or more monitors, but I’m not one of them. While two monitors are definitely much better than one, I find that a monitor arrangement that is too wide can be a bit uncomfortable when you’re constantly having to move your head through an angle of about 45° to get from one end of the screen to another. With my previous setup of two 21 inch CRT monitors, my applications all tended to congregate on the left hand screen, and when I had the new monitors in landscape orientation it felt even more awkward. However, with them both upright, it’s probably the best monitor arrangement I’ve ever had, since it provides an optimum ratio of screen real estate to required head movement to make the most of it.
RSS feed
Comment on this » 
Posted at 20:44 in Miscellany 
