I just noticed an incoming link to my site coming from a blog post over at johnvey.com.  In the post the author discusses how he came upon moniker of “Purveyor of Fine Words”. The post appears to have come about after a discussion with a mystical C.M.

One of the points he makes in his post is regarding the prevalent use of self-deprecating monikers that blog authors use and  cites my use of Randomised Nonsense:

Well, I chose the tagline ‘purveyor of fine words’ as a response to the typical self-deprecating blog name that is so common these days — ones that mix and match words like ‘rambling’, ‘thoughts’, ‘random’, ‘drivel’, ‘brain farts’. I subscribe to one blog that is titled, “Continuing Intermittent Incoherency“, which sounds like the author picked up some kind of Mad-Lib for blog names for inspiration. “Randomised nonsense” and “The Solipsistic Sayings of a Random Infidel” also seem to have been derived from the same template.

This has got me thinking about whether I should change my blogs moniker.  I started using Randomised Nonsense back in 2000/1. At the time I was really posting about anything and everything and really was random and mostly nonsense to readers other than myself.

However, in recent times I have tried to make my postings more logical and with a purpose, although they do still cover a wide range of topics such as local events, photography, programming and bell ringing.  I feel that a change of moniker is called for and, having read the article on Johnvey.com I can see that I will have to think about this carefully.  It needs to be something positive and inspirational, something to capture the self improvement that I am aiming to achieve.

I went to check my gringod.com email and got greeted by some crappy spam advertising website.  Seems I managed to forget to renew my domain name registration.

Half an hour later, some desperate hunting for a back door into my hosting companies email system and I finally managed to figure out how to renew my registration (all my account details were in my gringod.com imap mail account!!!).

To cut a long story short, the fact you can read this means that the registration worked and gringod.com is now back online.  Maybe it’s time I shifted all my emails over to GMail and set a reminder in Google Calendar to renew the domain name next year

I’d like to apologise to everyone that has tried to download files from this site recent and ended up getting a corrupted file. This has now been fixed.

I had no idea it was broken until a couple of people comment on one of my posts. It could have been broken just a day, or possibly much long - even as long ago as when I switched over to PHP5.

If you have downloaded a corrupt file please try again, and if it still isn’t working please let me know… I can test everything on the site and so rely on visitors to let me know when they find something that is broken.

Its nice to use a hosting service that keeps its customers informed.  Yesterday, just as I was about to leave work I noticed that my blog was offline. I hunted high and low last night but could I find the problem? Could I hell!

I’ve finally found the solution.  It seems that my hosting company silently upgraded both the PHP4 and PHP5 (although I only found a notice about the PHP5 upgrade.  Else where on teh intawebs I found the the latest version of PHP5 has got short PHP tag disabled, therefor <? ... ?> is not allowed, instead you have to use the long format <? ... ?>.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with using the long format, infact I prefer it. However, my hosting company (in its infinite wisdom) has decided to not show errors in the browser, instead I have to go to my hosting control panel, and the errors that are logged by PHP is simply:

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in [filename] on line 6

Why, oh why, can’t the error be something like “PHP Parse error: short tags disabled”.  That would have caused a lot less frustration on my part and for everyone that reads my blog.  Now I have to go through the rest of my site and try to find where else short tag have been used for PHP…. argghhhh!!!!

Its appears that my downloads are broken at this moment in time. Whilst it will appear that the download works, all you will get in the download is the following text:

<br />
<b>Warning</b>: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in <b>/usr/home/gringod2/public_html/tracker/download/HTTPDownload.php</b> on line <b>236</b><br />

This is due to a change that my webhost has made to its servers. I have already complained and hopefully things will be back up and working shortly. In the meantime please hang in there and if you desperately need a file you can email and I’ll whizz it over to you. My email address is aidy[at]gringod.com.

Once again I have had to remove a page from my website. This time it seems that a certain person thinks I have a grudge against them and the fact that my page came up as the third hit on Google was detrimental to their professional status. The page itself was simply reporting an event as I witnessed it and I have no personal control over the way in which Google sorts search results.

To show that I have no personal vendetta against this person I have remove the page, although the Google result will still show up and there will still be a cached version on Google and probably a copy in the web archive… that is beyond my control.

Should the person in question like to offer a thank you for my efforts to remove the post and should they wish to sit down and discuss their technical abilities I would be more than willing to (for a beer). But from this point on I consider the matter of my former post over and the hatchet buried.

I’ve been checking the Google Analytics reports for www.gringod.com/fold and noticed that there have been a couple of referals from protopage.com.

Protopage is another AJAXed start page like Fold. Although from an initial play Protopage seems to be more advanced than Fold in several respects:

• Works with IE (I tested with IE 7 beta)
• Style themes
• More configurable backgrounds
• More standard widgets
• Multiple pages
• Docked panels
• Expand panels by dragging

One of the first things I tested was whether or not it is possible to use my Foldlets within Protopage, and I’m please to say that they seem to run just fine, although I am thinking of adding a parameter to the search foldlet to allow you to configure how many search results are returned.

Because you can run Protopage in IE, it is posible to set it as an active background for your desktop (in MS Windows) so you can have your AJAXed start page as your actual desktop. I wouldn’t advise this if you have lots of panels as it is likely to be a bit of a memory hog.

However, for all its advantages over Fold, Protopage seems to be lacking something in its feel. So for the time being I think I’ll stick with Fold as it is still in beta and is likely to be improving in the not too distant future.

I’ve released version 2 of my FAlbum AJAX lightbox hack. My previous hack required users to select a photo and then select an image size to show in the lightbox. Now, in version 2, simply selecting an image will show that image in the lightbox in the medium image size.

One of the limitations of this hack is that users can no longer view further information about the picture… but I think thats a fair price to pay. All I want is for users to be able to see a bigger version of the thumbnails, which is exactly what this hack gives. The option is still in the FAlbum admin panel to enable and disable the lightbox (although I haven’t actually tested it with this new version).

As with the previous release I have provided both the modified files and the complete FAlbum source. They are available on my downloads page.

Once again, I should point out that this hack is not fully tested with all versions of Wordpress, I don’t provide any sort of warranty, and this hack will not work with any future version of FAlbum (unless I upgrade FAlbum and decided to keep the lightbox).

I’ve created another Foldlet. This one animates the synotic charts which are provided on the Metcheck.com website. Currently the images are reduced down to 300×200 as I didn’t want them taking up the whole of the Fold page but at some time I may make it configurable.

To add this Foldlet to your Fold page simply add a new HTML Container and set its source code to be the following:

<iframe src="http://www.gringod.com/fold/metcheck.html" width="300" height="200" frameborder="0"></iframe>

I’ve finally finished my initial release of a search Foldlet for Fold. To use the Foldlet, add a HTML container to Fold and set the source as the following:

<iframe src="http://www.gringod.com/fold/search.php" width="400" height="200" frameborder="0"></iframe>

For more information about Fold (the Web 2.0 homepage) visit Fold.com, the developers blog is at foldblog.blogspot.com and for the beta of fold head over to beta.fold.com.

Note that Fold does require Firefox or compatible browser. I know that sucks for a web 2.0 web app but thats life.

For another Foldlet have a look at http://foldblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/first-foldlet.html.