Ark's Ark

A friend asked me a couple of days ago why some people have avatars in my comment sections, and some folks don’t. A fine question!

This site uses Gravatars, globally recognised avatars. These are avatar pictures tied to the email address you enter in the comment box, and a great many sites use them now. By setting up your gravatar, your picture will follow you around the internet with no effort at all!

You can set up your free gravatar over at Gravatar.com.

Just a brief update. I’m moving house tomorrow, and still have some packing to finish!

From my logs, I can see that a lot of folks have been having trouble with the reCaptcha device I was using to prevent spam. Losing valid comments makes me sad, so I’ve decided to deactivate that for now, and try a spam filter instead. We’ll see how that works out.

While I pack, I’ll see if I can come up with something to say about the western leader’s response to the NIE that doesn’t involve strings of expletives.

A little later… I had a sudden flash of inspiration! Brought on by Atrios’ constant invocation of the King of Spain. I’m a genius, I tell you!

Thursday morning: The removal men will be here in an hour. Time to dismantle my PC. Cable gets installed at my new place tomorrow. See you on the flip side!

I’ve had a couple of emails about the site looking a bit strange since I switched to the new theme.

The sidebars on the right are *supposed* to be next to eachother. In certain circumstances Internet Explorer likes to stack them instead. Harmless enough, though it can make the page rather longer than it needs to be. IE also has the text input box for the comment recaptcha device slightly shifted over. Don’t worry, it might look a bit disturbing, but it still works! These days, it’s rather difficult to get a complex site to look identical in all search engines. Well, unless you’re a php wizard, which I am most certainly not.

Anyhows, the long and short of it is that this site works best in Firefox, though I do try to keep it neat looking in all browsers. It’s also the browser I use myself mostly, as it has the exceptionally useful firebug plugin, which makes debugging web pages massively more simple than it used to be.

Harpo asked in comments:

What is your avatar supposed to be? I can make out some ears!

It’s Barney! George W Bush’s long-suffering Scottish Terrier. Hate the dog-owner, love the dog.

Karl Rove once stated that “Barney is a lump”. Applying usual method of deciphering anything Rove says, we can assume that Barney is in fact a lovable ball of energy. And five times better a human-being than Rove or his master will ever be.

I’m trying out a new theme. It has a lot more features than Tarski, and has an extra column, which is quite handy. I’m not sure if it doesn’t seem a little cluttered though.

What do you think? If this one doesn’t work out I can go back to the old one.

It seems strange to me, but far more people read this blog through RSS feeds than on the blog itself. Probably because folks stay subscribed during my extended periods of inactivity! Hello, feed-readers, I love you!

I’ve just made some changes so that the feed link here on the page redirects to feedburner. My new feed offers some interesting features over the old one, so if you’re a subscriber, you might want to delete your old entry, head on over, and resubscribe. The old one will carry on working fine though, if you want to stick with that.