Happy New Year!

It goes to show just how much I update this site that 2009’s Happy New Year post is still showing on the front page as I type this

I don’t think I’ll bother publishing a list of resolutions this time around, suffice to say that it’s 30 days since I last smoked a cigarette, I never did start swimming regularly again but I do drink less, so that’s a qualified failure.  Still, 30 days and no smoking is pretty good so here’s to that being 395 days this time next year (although I haven’t smoked full-time for years and I’ve gone far longer without a cigarette before.  Ach, come on – positive thinking!)

Changing the subject, I’ve recently got around to going back over the content here categorising and tagging posts and generally tidying up.  This blog has moved hosts, changed URL and been restored from backup more than once and is in a bit of a mess.  There’s a fair amount of linkrot that needs sorting and plenty of typos and markup errors that need correcting.  My aim is to get it all sorted out so at least what is here looks OK and doesn’t make me look like too much of an amateur

Looking back now I will admit to wincing a little when reading some of the posts.  I suppose this is natural when you consider that the site’s been around for 7 years or so and over this period I’ve done a fair few things, grown older, changed.  Nevertheless I’m leaving it all here unless it’s actively misleading.

As for new content… well life’s pretty busy these days and doesn’t leave a lot of time for blogging.  My employer obviously doesn’t pay me to maintain a personal blog and my family takes up much of the rest of my time.  I’m not complaining, just observing.  I’d like to think that writing is something I’ll take up more seriously in the future, but for the time being I don’t expect to post much here other than the occasional how-to piece.

If you need or want to contact me, the best way is probably by email. Please note that unsolicited commercial email (spam) is not welcome; stuff like this ends up going directly to the bit bucket, so please don’t waste your time or my bandwidth.

In an effort to reduce the amount of spam I receive, I use javascript to generate the email address links in the list below. If your web browser doesn’t display these links, you’ll just have to type in the email address yourself, sorry.

Here it is: sam -at- sgp -dot- me -dot- uk.

I have a PGP key (download). Id: 40e74c48, fingerprint: 3fd9 91a2 f12b bfa2 ed31 2fa4 453c a714 40e7 4c48. If for some reason you’d rather not download it from this site, try a keyserver like pgp.mit.edu.

I’d just like to apologise briefly for lots of boring, faintly rant-like original-content-free political posts recently. I’ve got some new projects in the pipeline that might be a bit more interesting. Plus, I’m going to try and write something more intelligent about ID Cards soon, based upon a conversation I had last weekend with some old friends. But don’t hold your breath.

Hey, I just noticed that the earliest post still available here was posted two years ago today, so happy birthday to me! (There were a couple of earlier ones, but I had a spot of backup trouble with those…)

Well, I’ve been silent for a bit more than just August, really. This is due to a combination of reasons, not least of which is laziness.

But I’m still around, and planning to take up blogging a bit more soon. Settling in to a new city, job and home provides plenty of material I could be writing about, but also takes up quite a lot of time and mental energy.

So, here’s a brief note to ensure that there’s at least one post this August

I’ve belatedly noticed that Matthew Yglesias has picked up from where d^2 left off and continued with the Shorter Steven Den Beste posts. I wonder whether/how SDB will react this time around.

I met Nick Barlow today over lunchtime – I’d offered him a couple of books I had spare and he’d accepted. It was interesting to meet a fellow blogger however briefly – the first time I’ve ever actually met anyone in Real Life who I’ve become acquainted with via the net. He suggests that some kind of bloggers gathering might be a fun idea – sounds good to me. Just beware of any photobloggers lurking with their digital cameras should there be alcohol involved…

There are quite a few blogs I’m planning to add to my blogroll, but I’m holding off until I’m happy with the latest exciting installment of blosxom – the plugin support is just what I’ve been waiting for. I’m going to re-write the comments script and integrate it properly so you see neat little counts, and finally include trackbacks, and lots of other stuff – whoo! Perl is Great.

In the meantime, here’s a bit of linkage:

• Nick Barlow has a interesting blog called What You Can Get Away With
• Peter Cuthbertson looks like a fine fellow to have an argument with
• Bobbie linked to me, so in a show of incestuousness here’s a return link (he also just posted a post similar to this one).
• Another interesting blog I’ve recently been reading is Rogue Semiotics

Earlier this week I was feeling a bit frustrated about one thing and another, and decided that some of these frustrations might have made an interesting post. On reflection, I decided not to write the post, primarily because I blog under my real name (although I don’t make my surname explicit, it should be easy enough to find from the data available on this site, plus there’s plenty here to identify me to anyone who actually knows me).

I made a conscious decision not to conceal my identity when I started this weblog. It was quite a tempting idea, but ultimately I felt that it might encourage me to be a little more thoughtful when it came to writing stuff to put here if I knew that it would be associated with me directly. Not that I ever envisiage writing anything that at the time I’d feel uncomfortable about being associated with – the reason I decided against posting my frustrations this week were pragmatic rather than anything else. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be associated with them, more that I felt that the consequences of making them public might be detrimental to me.

But it got me thinking about the whole issue of blogging anonymously/pseudonymously. I reckon that this must be an issue which has met with some discussion across the blogosphere at times, and I’m sure that I’ve come accross such debates in the past. Fortunately it is, and a quick google brings up a debate from last summer between people like Instapundit, Steven Den Beste and Demosthenes. This particular debate focuses mostly on those who are pseudonymous and comment upon political issues; another blogger, moxie, points out that anonymity/pseudonymity is something that might be useful if you intend to comment more on your everyday life, rather than on the affairs of the Great and the Good and what we should think and do about them.

I found it quite gratifying to plonk “anonymous blogging” into google and get such an interesting selection of posts on the first page. I have to admit that I didn’t delve any further, there were something like 18,000 results for the search. I did wonder though what the results would have been like if I’d been searching on a topic which hadn’t attracted the attention of relatively high profile bloggers. I suppose I could have refined the search string a bit more, and perhaps spent some time searching wthin my results; it’s difficult to tell without some serious effort into researching the issue. I can’t help but think that standard web searches are a difficult way to bring up old blog posts though. It will be interesting to see what Google do now that they have acquired Blogger – will we see some kind of equivalent to google groups, a web gateway to searching the archives of everyone signed up for a blogger blog? Will there be an equivalent of X-No-Archive? Does anyone care?

This is interesting because of the problems of finding stuff in the blogosphere. Googling is always going to bring up the large, high traffic blogs like Instapundit, and unless you are particularly interested in a subject that’s what you’re going to see. If you want to know what a specific blogger has said on a subject, for the most part you are left with the almost impossible task of picking your way through their archives, unless they offer a search facility for them. For most of us, blogging is currently an ephemeral source of debate and information. Once posts drop from your front page, they’re difficult to find again once you’ve been writing stuff for a while. Given the steadily increasing numbers of blogs and the sheer amount of information and comment that this implies, is this ever going to be something about which anything can be done?

Possibly. The concept of the semantic web seems to offer some hope of solving this sort of problem. It’s something that I’m barely aware of right now, but it looks interesting, and the networking of blogs and similar sites with technologies like trackback, rss and rdf look like steps towards a web where finding related information might become easier. I’m going to continue looking and maybe write a bit more about this. In the meantime, any pointers to good, entry-level discussion of this type of thing are more than welcome.

UPDATE: The title now centres in IE6, but I haven’t fixed the transparency yet.

I’ve just noticed that the title section doesn’t render too well in IE6. Doesn’t like the transparent png, and it’s not in the centre. I’ll have to fix that. In the meantime, if everyone could go and download Mozilla I’d be grateful

On that note: I’ve now looked at this page in Mozilla 1.0.1, Konqueror, IE6 and Netscape 6.2. IE6 is the only one experiencing problems, but if you use another browser and things don’t look right please let me know. I’m sort of assuming that Safari will be OK since it uses the KHTML rendering engine from Konqueror (I think).