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Graham Binns — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 23:46:18 -0000

Back home from holiday, having spent a week bobbing about in a boat on the Broads. I'm glad to have a normal bed, which doesn't sway from side to side when people drive past, and a toilet that doesn't seem to want to spit its contents back at me all the time.

On the other hand, I'm relaxed, refreshed, reinvigorated and ready to go. So if you want to recharge your flagging batteries, spend some time on the Broads. Apart from the whole waste management thing I'd recommend it to anyone.

... and tomorrow I really need to upload some photos, otherwise I fear I may have to abandon the Three Hundred and Sixty-odd Days project.

Categories: flickr holidays photography three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

If you're seeing this...

Graham Binns — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:19:42 -0000

... then the DNS records have propagated correctly and your RSS feed reader is now slurping from the new grahambinns.com server, which is just hunky dory as far as I'm concerned.

I've been working on this version of things for a while. Besides a re-skin - which taught me a lot about how I should be designing my templates and CSS, so it should be a bit easier next time - I've also tidied up the codebase a bit and added some new features. Most of them are under the hood, but here are some of them for those of you that care:

Each piece of content on the site has its own license. For example, all my photos are CC-BY-NC-SA, as is all the content here so far. But when I start adding stories here (and it will happen within the next few months, I hope) I'll be able to license them as I see fit.
I can now make posts using markdown syntax. This might not seem like a big deal but over the years I've come to loathe sites that simply turn linebreaks into <br />s (yes, Wordpress, I'm looking at you. You still do it, even with valid HTML posts). On this site I used to use TinyMCE as a WYSWIG HTML editor, which worked fine but was pretty horrendous to load on a slow connection. Now I just use markdown and let Django's markup app do all the work. Fantastic.
You can now post comments using markdown syntax. No more trying to post a link and having Django eat it!
I can now post to the blog by email. I thought about using gpg signatures to validate my emails but realised that it was too complicated (we do it in the Launchpad email interface and one look at that code a while back persuaded me to not do it unless I had to). Instead I've gone for generating single-use authentication tokens, which suits me fine and should hopefully - along with an obscure incoming address - stop spammers from doing nasty things.
The site now supports pingbacks, though at the moment it can only receive them until I iron out some issues with the pingback sending code.

There are a lot more things that I've fixed, added, tweaked and polished, but none that are particularly interesting.

So here, finally, are the vital statistics of the new site: