Skin of Stars

I’m back in Oxford now and to be honest I’m glad. It was nice to be in Thanet, see old friends, that sort of thing but I’m eager to get on with learning. I didn’t really do much more than drink and watch TV in Thanet, being home makes me instantly lazy. I had three boy projects that I wanted to do in my month off…

1. Re-build the Manston Garden Club website. I knocked a really shaky one together a year or so ago and I was never impressed in the slightest with it. I always thought it looked like one of those ‘welcome to my webpage’ sites (google it). This project I did based on wordpress and its kinda ok now. If you like you can see it at manstongardenclub.co.uk

2. Re-skin and re-organise oonagi. It looks awful at the moment; cluttered, not very user friendly and lots of pointless pages. I have now done most of the design on a test site but I’m still some way from sorting it enough to go live. It will still be based on the e107 system with changes being almost entirely cosmetic. This should give the least jolt to the users who have already been through many changes on the site over the past seven years.

3. Develop Thanet Blog List Build a geographically specific collectively edited news site. Basically a reddit/digg/newsvine for Thanet, as well as being portable to other areas. This will probably be based on a system like Pligg but unfortunately I can’t get it to work on my current webhost (they are a little backwards on the technology side) and am going to have to buy more webspace elsewhere. I don’t have enough money till February so you’ll have to wait I’m afraid. The idea came out of some brainstorming for the new Blog List build. As there were so many new blogs popping up I thought that the current approach, just posting them as blog entries, was restrictive. My ‘vision’ was that everyone adds new blogs and every gets to vote on whether its and good or not This should help filter out the one-post-wonders as well as letting the average reader quickly find the authoritative blogs. Even better, I wanted the user to have the possibility of having their own account where they can have feeds from their favourites, a little like netvibes, thus saving time from visiting all blogs as well as being able to see at a glance whether there are any new posts. Alas, I couldn’t really get it together and quite frankly its not my project any more anyway. I think its current new design is pretty cool and it wouldn’t be difficult to get a latest entry feed page on it with all the blogs listed.

So I managed about one and a half out of three projects. Thats not a very good ratio in my eyes. Lots of thoughts, lots of talk but not enough action. At least I’m more productive here in Oxford so hopefully we’ll see some more results shortly.

My recent general lack of internet has severely severed what I am able to do on my Christmas projects. Our house in Manston sits outside the Thanet wired broadband catchment area. Of course there is always a workaround. For us the answer is wireless broadband beamed in through a toaster styled receiver attached to the side of the house from up near the Uni campus. We were with a company called SoBroadband from Rainham but alas they went into some kind of liquidifidation and was subsequently taken over by VFast from Ashford. They all seem very nice so we don’t really mind that their temporary transmitter (put up for Christmas) keeps being blown down by the high winds we’ve been having of late.
projects, broadband, sobroadband, vfast, manston

Christmas was turned out well considering. It was my first without my father and his brother, both having died earlier in 2006, assuming I’ve not mentioned it before. We went down to that side of the family in Dorset and frankly it was generally pretty good fun. My cousins are all come of drinking age and so it was a good fun starting from almost as soon as I arrived. Just got to get them to move off the lager onto some good ales.
christmas, family, dorset

Friday the 29th of December was showtime at the Lido, Margate. Evil Elvis were playing with support from Black Static Transmission rinsing out a Christmas set in the last Plan9 show of the year. ‘This is almost like Christmas with the family’ I explained to my friend Danny as I talked him into coming. ‘Your not sure that you really want to go but you know your going to have awesome fun when you get there’. He succumb, but frankly I think he was lured by the Elvis, a now almost annual event of \m/Rock\m/ and Roll. I played in the 2000/2001 NYE show and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the first. Anyway, loads of others made the same pilgrimage and a very cool night was had by all with lots of drinking and dancing. Even Danny had came out grinning, if not a little worse for wear which meant we had to get out the taxi a little early (if thats not the mark of a good night, I don’t know what is?!)
evilelvis, blackstatictransmission, plan9, lido, margate