James Salter

Blog off

I’ve had a blog for a couple of years or so, but recently there’s been precious little activity on it. This was partly due to laziness/time issues, but to a much greater extent I was being hampered by the blog software. When I started using Ublog Reload in 2004 it was pretty much as good as I needed. However, as the blogging world has developed, Ublog got left behind through lack of continued development.

It was missing key features such as pings, comment spam protection and a nice WYSIWYG editor. I ended up writing a whole bunch of code simply to keep it ticking along, but that wasn’t really what I wanted to spend my time doing. So the blog thing just got tedious and became more hassle than it was worth.

Now all (some) of that has changed: I’ve moved over to WordPress which has become one of the stalwarts in the content management world. It’s well supported, driven by a large community and has oodles of plugins available.

Excuse the mess while I move all the content over and get it properly setup. I think I’ve successfully pulled across all the old posts but I haven’t updated all the out-of-date hyperlinks. Unfortunately I can’t find an easy way of bringing over the comments, so think of this as a fresh start.

The really observant amongst you will have noticed the new domain too. That’s purely for technical reasons and the non-blog content will be remaining on jamessalter.me.uk for the foreseeable future.

Fingers crossed for a return to regular blogging!

Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

So, why start a blog? Well, I could lie and say I have a message for the world, but a big fat porkie pie might not be the best start. Honestly, I’ve only just cottoned on and found some blogging software.

Why start today? Well, aside from being Bonfire Night, it’s apparently the most dangerous day of the year and I guess I’d probably regret dying tonight without adding my first entry!

Anyway, there should be plenty of free fireworks to watch out of the window later this evening, as long as I make it that far

The neighbours have already let off goodness knows how many £k already, so things are looking up. That is, of course, as long as you’re not Stephen or Suzanne Roper.

If you’re having fireworks, don’t forget to check for hedgehogs and follow the Fireworks Code…