I was having issues sorting out the redirects on Cloudflare and have learnt a few things on the way so am documenting them here – because I will forget it all whilst in the pursuit of happier things.
Directory migration
I made a major change to the structure of a section of my site /shorts/ has reverted back to /short-articles/ as I am testing out a possible issue with this sites current lack of SERP visibility in Bing. As such I needed to revert the redirects from /short-articles/ to /shorts/ back again. Not usually an issue for my skills but I thought I'd make some notes.
Cloudflare hosting
This site is currently hosted on Cloudflare pages, auto deployed from its github repository. I can use the inbuilt redirect solution that Cloudflare provides but that has a very limited capacity so I have created a file named _redirects that Cloudflare recognises (as does Netlify) and uses for redirects. This is in my 11ty setup and has a passthrough so that it is output in the build exactly the same as I have written it.
This file can have up to 2,000 redirects if properly formatted. I have had issues with only being able to use 120 redirects but this was because I had built some of them incorrectly.
Deployment logs
One source of info that is really useful is the deployment log files. Find it here:
Cloudflare > Compute (Workers) > your site > View details
Now scroll down in the Build log and it will tell you all sorts of interesting things such as time and what happened. This includes parsing the redirects file.
10:41:26.990 Parsed 83 valid redirect rules.
The log helpfully tells you redirects that have not been implemented and also provides some optimisation suggestions such as the order of the redirects.
Notes on Cloudflare redirect rules best practices
Exclamation mark on the end of the rule
I think this was a leftover from Netlify's redirect rules
http://simoncox.com/* https://www.simoncox.com/:splat 301!
Valid status codes are 200, 301, 302 (default), 303, 307, or 308. Got 301!.
I did a find and replace and removed the exclamations marks.
There was another issue with this particular rule though!
Only relative URLs are allowed
I had some domain redirects in place, because you can't have enough domains, but Cloudflare doesn't like them as the source URL, they have to be a part of the directory structure, so I had to take them out.
https://www.tagsoup.net/* https://www.simoncox.com/:splat 301!
Only relative URLs are allowed. Skipping absolute URL https://www.tagsoup.net/*.
I am now forwarding those domains using an external method.
Redirect rule spaces and or tabs
Cloudflare is quite particular about the number of spaces - it looks for gaps in the redirect rule of 2 and 3 sets of spaces or tabs. If there are 4 or more sets of spaces and the rule will be ignored.
I have some URLs with colons in them, such as /blog/category:things, and have put these under section 2 as the colon is interpreted as a placeholder, or you can URL-encode the colon of course!
For performant reasons it is better to list static redirects before dynamic ones so that Cloudflare’s systems can run these more effectively:
Static rules - /home, /about, /contact
Rules with placeholders - /blog/:slug, /users/:id
Rules with splats - /old-site/*
I split these up using # comments in my redirect files.
Final thoughts about the Cloudflare redirect file rules
I originally thought I could switch the sites hosting between Cloudflare and Netlify hosting by just changing the DNS, a very handy and quick solution, but I am not going to have to keep two sets of redirect files if I want to do this as the rules are quite different between them.
Having learnt more about the Cloudflare redirect rules If am much happier running the rules from this file. Also, this started off as a shorticle but is long enough to be a full article.
I came across an odd bug in Apple OSX Messages and reported it to Apple a few months ago, but I am sure they have had other liquidy things to focus on at the moment.
I use Messages on my Mac OSX desktop quite a bit as I find typing on the keyboard more convenient when I am working on the Mac. It is also a bit easier than the iPhone keys. I do use the occasional emoticon - mainly with family messages.
To do a heart emoticon you can type <3 and the emoticon will appear in a tiny pop up and you can then tap the down arrow and Return/Enter key to paste it in the message.
However, this does not work at any time after you have three full stops in the message. After some testing I also discovered that other symbols that complete a sentence, such as a question or exclamation mark, or any combination of also cause prevent the emoticon from popping up.
On iOS the emoticons are right there and very handy and typing the short cut keys for emoticons does not bring up the emoticon at all – doesn't need to – so this is confined to the OSX desktop Messages only.
I do wonder if this will be fixed in the next version of OSX – 26 I believe it will be - the Liquid Glass effect look and feel. Only time will tell!
Oh yes, and I do use em dashes a lot as it is not a tell tail for AI content but good English when one digresses – and I do that a fair bit away from the keyboard too.
Just read Git Commit Messages by Angie Herrera who has started organising Git Commit Messages "in a way that keeps things organized and makes future me a bit happier and less stressed".
What a great idea!
I decided I am going to do the same – so I copied Angie's bullet points into a Note and then started thinking about it. Angie is a very accomplished Craft CMS developer, who I have been honoured to provide some SEO work, so the list makes perfect sense for a Craft build. However with 11ty builds I needed something a little more because I am now also making content changes in my 11ty builds.
So here is my extended version:
feat: anything feature related, even if deleting code or making changes to existing features
fix: fixing a bug or issue without new feature code
refactor: code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature but somehow improves the codebase (for me this is usually streamlining CSS)
cms: changes to the CMS (version updates or plugin updates, installs, or removals)
build: Changes that affect the build system or external dependencies, such as npm, DDEV setup, or Laravel Mix.
content: New content, images and typo fixes and corrections
seo: Changes optimising code or content for seo purposes
I upgraded the image plugin for 11ty on a small site which had an unintended chain of issues!
I noticed that the Source control had node elements in it, even though I have node_modules in my gitignore file. After some investigation and testing I realised that I must have deployed the site before adding the gitignore. Really should not have node_modules deployed to the repository even though it is private.
To remove the node_modules from the repository I moved the folder up a level and committed and synced the files. That removed the node_modules from the repository. I then moved the node_modules folder back into the local site and ran a build - all was ok.
I checked Netlify and the build had failed.
It turned out (i.e. head scratching and testing for a while) is wasn't my local Node but the Node version on Netlify that needed upgrading - of course it was.
With the node_modules in the build, Netlify had used the node_modules I had provided to create the build - which is a great feature but not what was needed. As soon as I had removed them Netlify used the default node_modules which failed to build because apparently node needed upgrading.
On the Netlify Site Configuration > Build & Deploy > Dependency management (scroll down) to find and configure the Netlify version of Node - it was 15 and I apparently needed 18, so set to 20. Bingo - built and deployed magnificently!
I hope this note helps someone but it is really for me the next time I get this issue on another site and don't realise I fixed it before.
I read a short post on Mastodon from Pierre Carrier saying that his blog had a newspaper mode - and it looks great! Pierre has his site on 11ty, as my site currently is, so I thought I would have a quick go at building a newspaper version of my content - the Simon Cox Evening News.
First off I didn't want to change any of the code for my site and this would be on one page only - not a toggle between site designs. 11ty automatically builds collections to gather content into groups so with testing I picked my Shorts collection of posts and built a small piece of html to reiterate over each story - that pulls in the heading, link and content etc.
This gave me a long page of content. What I wanted to do was have columns of content. CSS grid sprang to mind but of course it segments articles into blocks with spaces in the rows, so that would not work. A masonary type approach might work - but that runs in rows. So I went back to an old favourite that, in my opinion, does not get used enough on the web - columns. This is really old CSS and for various reasons designers appear not to like it - control of the flow being one of them.
The design and html for the page is standalone - it does not uses any of the CSS or templates from the rest of the site.
I had some issues:
Initially I set media breakpoints for the number of columns to give a responsive layout depending on viewport size. Pierre rightly asked why I had not set the column widths and he was spot on - that was a much better approach.
Image widths had to be set to width of 100% to fill the column correctly but some were smaller than the columns widths so Max-width 100% was used.
I was getting a lot of white space to the right meaning there was a lot of horizontal scrolling which was not great. I eventually tracked this down to the pre tag, that I was wrapping code in, needing white-space: pre-wrap; in the css.
I had used the Shorts collection to test and swapped that to my posts collection to do a second test. What I really wanted to do was both and I thought I would have to set up a new filter in 11ty to do that bet remembered I have already done this for the rss feed – so I was able to use the feed collection! 11ty does make this kind of thing easy!
Once I had the layout sorted I added some enhancements.
The images and links were in colour and I wanted an old newspaper feel. I added filter:grayscale(1) brightness(80%) contrast(150%); mix-blend-mode: hard-light; to the container making everything monochrome without touching the source content.
background - a seamless crumpled paper image.
post titles were set in Playfair Bold and the kerning tightened.
Things to do:
I was hoping to add some filters to make the images look like halftones but after a lot of experimentation it has eluded me. There are some lovely online codepens and blog posts on halftones for this but I could not get them to work without changing the posts underlying code. I may come back to this in the future.
I have added a couple of extra pages that filter the Articles and Short articles so it is a little bit easier to read. Not sure this will have a huge amount of traffic as it is more of an excercise! I am, of course, monitoring what happens from an SEO aspect - always testing!
A week ago I started having issues with my home network, a network that I had built up and improved over the years.
The first step in this was when we moved to this house and BT provided us with a couple of Powerline networking sockets. This allowed us to run a simple network between the router and the BT YouView box across our mains electric circuit. Usually this happens with wifi but because half of our house is over 200 years old that didn't work.
Powerline
I love the idea of Powerline. It utilises the mains cabling in your house to network across, saving the cost of installing dedicated ethernet cables. It isn't quite as good a dedicated ethernet cabling, and can be subject to interference, but you do get gigabyte speeds across it.
The Powerline adapters that BT provided were made in Kent by a small firm which closed down. I managed to buy three second hand ones on ebay and built up a network across the house for our workstations and a raid drive. It all worked fantastically well except for the wifi coverage, used by our phones which would switch to 4G without us realising. That caused issues with data allowances.
So in time I upgraded our Powerline network with 5 Devolo Magic 2 adapters. Each of these adapters also had wifi so I was able to mesh the whole house on the same wifi network. And all was good.
Except it wasn't.
Outages
In the evenings we would get outages on the network. I could see the led on the Devolo next to the TV turn red for a few seconds. If we were watching any streaming service on the TV it would then buffer. This also caused issues with the wifi network as that would also stop for no apparent reason - though the reason was the devolo's had lost connection with the router.
Split the wifi in two
Eventually I had to split the wifi network into two. I got a BT Wifi Disk and extended the wifi but that still only covered about two thirds of the house (it's not that big either!).
We lived with this set up for several years. I'd have to reboot the Devolo networks in the evening, using my iphone, and that stopped the buffering.
A week ago the devolo network stopped connecting altogether and I spent a couple of days trying to work out what the issue was. And failed.
Lightning killed the ethernet ports
We had replaced our router due to a lightning strike that knocked out the ethernet ports in the past. I thought that might have happened again and got the hub replaced again. BT suggested they send us another Wifi disk to extend the range. I thought we could only have one wifi Disk but you can have up to three!
Wifi to the rescue
Having added the extra Wifi disk we now have wifi across the whole house and a lot of the garden. This will make mowing while listening to Test Match Special possible.
I have removed all the Devolo Powerline adapters and we now run everything through wifi. I might be saving a bit on the electrical bill as well as the Devolos do run very hot. Internet searches have suggested that this may cause issues with them.
Summary
Powerline is great but the electrical circuits in our old house are a bit odd.
Wifi is a bit slower than Powerline, but a lot faster then Powerline that doesn't connect.
Devolo Magic Powerlines run hot. I do not recommend them.
Changing devices to a new wifi password is tiresome - lot of resetting. Try and avoid it.
That's odd I though - does Mousehole actually have cobbled streets? As lovely as it is with Stargazy pie, traditionally eaten on Tom Bawcock's Eve, and the last person to speak Cornish as their first language to live there, Dolly Pentreath, but I'm not sure it is known for its cobbled streets. Mousehole no longer has cobbled streets.
I do know the beautiful tourist trap of Clovelly has the iconic cobbled pathways through the village down to their harbour - but that's not even in Cornwall, it is in North Devon.
So whats going on? Why would a Cornish website - CornwallLive - tell untruths?
Well it was not CornwallLive that actually first published this story (11 July 2024), it appears to be the Daily Express.
Hmmm, that's an oddly familiar headline and name. When you compare the two stories it seems all Jeff has done is run Lauras text through chat GPT to change it just enough to stop any duplication algo's picking it up.
Laura's 3rd paragraph:
Jeff's 3rd Paragraph
Oh wait - Jeff also writes for DevonLive
This really looks like the cobbled streets aspect was made up to get traffic to the sites so they can sell advertising - and there is a lot on all those sites. The argument is that local news sites need advertising to be able to operate but stories like this are just rehashed and wrong - there is no local news left on local news sites – it's just all click bait.
It is exactly this type of reporting that has killed off local newspapers and why your high street has the same shops as my high street and any other high street. Always follow the money.
More of a reminder for myself next time Image need to do this!
Adding a collection tag to a post as a link
There are some lovely ways to automate sets of tags with a list page. Hoever I don't think these can have additional content to make them into a proper topic hub page so I am building them out manually.
For posts in my Articles and Shorts sections I have started adding tags to the modelling topic ones. After the author sign off with date, and update date if there is one, I have added links to the tag hub page.
I started with this 11ty code:
{% if tag == "Modelling" %}| <a href="/narrow-gauge-modelling">Modelling</a>{% endif %}
{% if tag == "Loxley" %}| <a href="/loxleybarton">Loxley Barton Falls</a>{% endif %}
But it wasn't showing up the tag links.
Turns out that because I have multiple tags on some in this form:
tags:
- Loxley
- Modelling
Turns out that 11ty concatentates them as a string, of course, so I need to cycle through that and pull out the tags that I need.
This gave me:
{% for tag in tags %}
{% if tag == "Modelling" %}| <a href="/narrow-gauge-modelling">Modelling</a>{% endif %}
{% if tag == "Loxley" %}| <a href="/loxleybarton">Loxley Barton Falls</a>{% endif %}
{%- endfor %}
Which works perfectly. I am sure there is a more robust method but for now, for me, this is working great!
I switched all my small projects over to Fathom Analytics in 2023 for various reasons but there was one page on my site where I kept the Google Analytics code - the 404 page.
I did this so that I could pull the data into a Looker Studio dashboard to provide me with errant URLs being visited on my site.
The above image shows a classic example of a URL that didn't exist on my site. Not sure how someone got this wrong but they have missed one letter, 'e' out of the URL thus breaking it! They have put:
And it had nine visits (probably the same person wondering why the link was going to my 404 page - so they may have fixed it.)
So the report is super useful to see what is going on under the hood.
Why do I want to see what is happening on my 404 page?
Well, broken URLs in my site can usually be found quite easily by running a crawler across the site and fixing anything that breaks but there is the odd occasion where someone linking to my site uses an old URL or creates a URL with a typo in it - essentially they have created a broken link to my site and I don't know who has done that and I can't ask them to fix it.
With the old URLs I have redirects in place to catch them but for new broken URLs I don't know they exist unless I can track the referrer. So that's what I have been doing.
Set up the Redirects
When I get a new broken link I can add a line to my redirects file to redirect that to the appropriate page if one exists. If it is not obvious where to send the traffic then I still let is resolve to the 404 page.
Creating this report in Fathom Analytics
I thought I should be able to create a similar report using Fathom Analytics so read the Creating and using events documentation and it looked like I could set an event up and track them there.
All I needed to do was change the checkout completed to 404. It worked but of course only told me that there was a 404 event. I needed more data from the script - I needed the URL. Javasripty people will be well ahead of me now and using the word 'just' a lot but despite using the fabulous 11ty for this site I really can't cope with much more than a sprinkle of javascript.
Fathom to the rescue
So I contacted Fathom Analytics, and told them what I was trying to do. The wonderful Paul Jarvis came back with the code I needed and even tested it out before sending it to me!
Here is the code I have ended up using - courtesy of Paul.
I read a couple of articles this week on cleaning up your 11ty config file, the initial one that I found from Robin Hoover and the second from Lene Saile in which Lene had added a 3rd method, adding another config file as a plugin which I then understood what I could do. Yes takes me a bit of time sometimes.
I created a new folder named _11ty in my source folder and in that added new .js files for each of the plugins, functions, filters and collections I needed, and in each added the code for them. This included the module.exports section but with slightly changed code.
Now this and a few other sites I have are running on 11ty I have been meaning to add a way of marking a post as a draft while I am writing it - just in case I need to publish a short while getting an article ready.
There are several complex explanations of how to do this out there including one from Remy Sharps from 2019 and the Quick Tip in the 11ty docs. I am sure they are all great
but I wanted something simple and easy to use and I didn't need to schedule anything - well not yet anyway.
I found this one on github from Peter Dehaan which explained how this works easily enough for me to comprehend and implement.
With the added src.11tydata.js file all I need to is add a draft: true to the front matter and the post will not be included in the build, including lists of posts, my mxl sitemap and my rss feed.
---
title: 11ty draft posts
description: Setting a post to draft in 11ty while writing
topic: web
draft: true
---
Update 2024/11/25
There has been un update in 11ty v3 with an easier method
I have recently changed the lastmod date in my xml site map to be accurate now that Google are wanting that. Part of what Google wanted was for the page to state the update date on it. I pulled this data from the posts front matter but because I had set an 11ty filter for the sitemap the output on the page was the full UTC:
Updated:2023-04-03T00:00:00.000
The resolution was to add .toDateString() to the front matter item, dateUpdated, in the template giving me:
Just deployed a site using the 11ty image plugin and it is working well. I did have some issues with set up - wanted the hi-res images in a separate folder outside of src and public folders and acheived that by setting an external source - would be nice if this were in the base set up:
let imageSrc = `hi-res-images/${src}`;
let metadata = await Image(imageSrc, {
widths: [180, 343, 647, 1200],
But then I was having issues where the image shown on full screen was the low res version - not good! Took me an age to work out the issue till I noticed some errant code in the source.
In Markdown please leave a space before and after the image shortcode - else it gets mixed up and bits of the picture element get wrapped in a p tag and become not a picture element!
This doesn't work:
Lorum ipsum dolar bla bla
% image "image.jpg", "alt text" %
Lorum ipsum dolar bla bla
But this does:
Lorum ipsum dolar bla bla
% image "image.jpg", "alt text" %
Lorum ipsum dolar bla bla
In February 2023 I discovered I had an issue with crawling a site after some changes. I like to fix things to make websites work properly so often go through several itterations of the code fixing things.
The same issue cropped up again in June 2023 so I thought I had better post a Short about it to remind myself rather than just moan about it on Mastodon! When running a crawler, such as Sitebulb, Screaming Frog or SEO PowerSuite, against a site on Netlify you could hit the prerender cache. The same happens when you test a page in Google Search Console but the real Google crawler is ok. To get the real results either wait 48 hours and crawl or change the crawler User Agent to something else, such as Safari, and rerun the crawl.
I have knocked up a 3D chassis for the Stanton Coach I am designing.
I am on about v 3 of the coach bodywork at the moment and after a lot of thought around the chassis and how to create it including from kraft board, etched parts (which I may yet still do) and the 3D print option whihch on reflection seems the simplest and obvious one! This is designed for a pair of bogies to be fitted with bolts as is common in 4mm scale 009 coach modelling.
I have a couple of 11ty built sites that are auto deployed out to Cloudflare Pages. I normally prefer Netlify for the hosting but I do like to keep some eggs in other baskets.
I updated a site yesterday and it kept failing the deploy to Cloudflare with the error stating that Node had to be at least version 14. I checked my local Node version and it was 19.3.0. So I changed my gitignore to allow the node files to be in the deploy in the hope that this would enable Cloudflare to build out the pages correctly.(Then I had issues with Git Authentication - another post another day on this perhaps but I had to restart my Mac to get the Auth to work.) That did not work.
Turns out you have to set the Environment Variables for Node to work. This seems a bit of a faf and must be new in Cloudflare since March - the last time I deployed this site. Not sure why they have complicated things.
Navigate to Pages > site > Settings > Environment Variables and set up a new variable named NODE_VERSION and I put the version I am using in there.
And the next deployment worked!
Update 2024-09-29
On reflection this may have only happened when Cloudflare increased their minimum version of Node. Even though I was using 19.3.0 Cloudflare appears not to be detecting the version you have used, even though that is in the package.json, and relies on you setting it in the Environment Variables. This certainly does allow easy customisation but could be automated.
INP means Interaction to Next Paint and will be part of the Core Web Vitals measurements from March 2024.
Will INP affect my rankings?
Probably not in most cases but it could be the tipping point between your page and another page being ranked higher in the Search Engine Results Pages so it should be considered as part of the sites usability.
Is there a viable alternative to Google Analytics?
Yes, Fathom Analytics is a more than capable alternative to Google Analytics and is from a small independent team in Canada.
Like most people who build websites I have been using Google Analytics for many years. The change to GA4 this year though is significant. Having used GA4 for over a year I can attest that it is OK - difficult to understand to begin with but that's because it uses a different data model that the outgoing Universal Google Analytics. GA4 is very customisable, which is great, and I have been able to put together several dashboards for SEO related data. However there is one big issue looming on the horizon.
How far back can I look at my Google Analytics data?
16 months is all you will be able to review making seasonal comparisons much more difficult. Google Universal Analytics will sunset on July 1st 2023 and currently the data will be available for 12 months and then it gets deleted, forever.
Seasonal comparisons are important but we have not really had a normal year since 2019 8so only being able to compare traffic data from last year doesn't hold any comfort for me.
I had heard about Fathom Analytics some years ago and liked the idea but it is not free like Google Analytics but it is inexpensive. The big factor for me though is that they have just launched the ability to pull your data from Google Analytics into Fathom.
This left me with a data gap though as I had switched my Analytics from GA Universal to GA4 in February but I was able to then import my GA4 data from February to today using the date feature! So I have combined all the available data and ported into Fathom!
<head>, <body> but no <neck>?
Where do I put the <meta name="trachea" > tag.
Madness.
I thought about this for a while and realised that there is a use case. Sometimes scripts in a head tag can break the head. If you have an advertising tag, your advertising team might inadvertently add a tag, such as iframe, that is only mean to be used in the body - and the way Google, and other crawlers, interpret the head mean that they stop reading head tags as soon as they come across a body tag. The assumption is that perhaps the body tag was missed and that is fair as the only tag that is actually required to be used in html is the title tag. This means that any head tags after the script are ignored. The best practice is to put all scripts last in the head but if we had a neck tag they could go in there.
myrm.club is a new way to display your model railway layouts so that people can find them quickly. I have created a page for each of my layouts and an overall page for Simon's Narrow Gauge Model Railway Layouts.
It is a model railway showcase so will not be updated very often and I will tend to go into more detail about builds here.
Last week we were hit by a sudden storm. We missed the sky clouding over, it was very quick and then there was an almighty flash and instand thunder that shook the whole house.
Our power went off before the thunderclap stoppped. It was a bit of a shock but the electricity came back on failry quickly and that sometimes causes issues. I checked the lightning app I have and could see a couple of hundred yards up the road. We had not been hit but were shook up! Then we realised we had no broadband. After checks I realised we had lost a base powerline unit so I ordered a new one.
It wasn't for another three days with patch wifi cover over the house that I worked out that the ethernet ports in the Router had also been fried. Hopefully, the new router will arrive this week but we realised how much we rely on internet services for our everyday life - even the radio stations we listen to come through the internet.
I will be recreating our home mesh wifi slightly differently this time around and now have a spare base unit for the Lan - just in case! There was a second lightening up in the village and a lot of people getting replacement routers over the weekend!
The AI revolution really began in 2022 for the common person but 2023 is the year where it really took off. Whilst everyone is trying to get the most out of ChatGPT, already on v4 Google Released its own text prompt AI yesterday called Bard and it is fast. I was able to pull in information from live URLs unlike ChatGPT which has a LLM that is at least 2 years old.
It is, however, the Ai image space that has interested me the most and Midjourney v5 was released last week with a significant jump in quality to the point where it can be difficult to tell the creations are not real photos.
Whilst I say AI, it is not true Artificial Intelligence but we are getting closer to that.
The image below I generated using Midjourney – wasn't quite what I wanted even after several attempts but it is photographic and he has the right number of fingers! However if you look at the laptop there is no keyboard...
Google Search Console sends out automated emails for issues including the 'Page with redirect' as an issue. If that's expected behaviour – you have changed a page URL and added the redirect – then check your sitemap.xml. Hopefully that's automatically updated but GSC may have a cached version and still thinks the URL is present - hence the Error warning. To fix this resubmit the sitemap.xml in GSC to update their understanding of your sites URLs.
However, I have already included a Canonical in the frontmatter of some of my posts and there may be reasons why i'd want the canonical to be on a different url. So I added a conditional to state that if the frontmatter for canonical exists then use it else fall back to the standard page url version. And that gave me this: {% if canonical %}<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical }}">{% else %}<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.simoncox.com{{ page.url }}">{% endif %}
I don't have a games console but really wanted to play Cyberpunk 2077 when it came out and Google Released it on Stadia so I go the package. It included a Chromecast Ultra and a very nice hand controller. Sadly, as with many Google forays, they decided to Sunset Stadia and it closed down on the 18th Jan 2023. The controllers bluetooth was locked out but they have released instructions on how to enable it for use with any bluetooth device - happy gaming!
I realised that the sitemap.xml file was listing the 404 page - we really don't want that in there as the search engines don't want it. The 11ty sitemap.njk file had the answer in its frontmatter for any page you don't want in a collection, and that includes the All collection, I added this in the frontmatter of the 404 page:
eleventyExcludeFromCollections: true
And then any page I want to manually jeep out of the sitemap I can add sitemapIgnore: true to the frontmatter.
I have tried to add Webmentions to the site having read Max Böck's post on this and then Chris Bongers post - both very helpful and bewildering at the same time! Have found my natural limit again having got so far with 11ty!
No issues with coding the pages up as and when I need but if I am on the go somewhere making changes to the site will have to wait - except that I have now installed the Netlify CMS! It's very lightweight for a CMS and is based on the 11ty Collections so static page changes are a little more difficult but posts are ok - such as this one.
Update:
Netlify CMS was rebranded to Decap CMS and is now run Independently by a Netlify partner agency.
More info on Decap CMS.
Many many years ago I owned a Spectrum +3 computer. For some nostalgia the Spectrum +3 operating manual is online. My friend Nick and I programmed a D&D Character generator in Basic on these. Took us months to do and then we added and added to it. Did it just for our own games. I then developed a font for use on our dot matrix printers for the output too! We also created a weather generator for our games so we could factor that into the game campaigns. At the time D&D was sneered at as being childish so we never told anyone what we had built. How times have changed.
Minifying css for 11ty sites is quick and simple. Quick Tip #001—Inline minified CSS Using the CleanCSS plugin and moving the css file to _includes and then pulling the code into one line in the base.njk head.
A recent Mastodon post and blog post about writing less from Matt Gemmell made me think about the old short posts this site used to have. They were quick thoughts and links to remember for the future so I am starting them up again and I will be adding some of the old ones back onto the site.
I have been building a site using the fabulous Perch CMS but discovered that the default upload path for images is inside the perch directory which caused my a bit of concern. Most Perch based sites I have looked at have been happy to use this but to be extra safe I like to change the name of the Perch directory which is easy to do in the config.php file.
define(‘PERCH_LOGINPATH’, ‘/admin’);
However any uploaded files go into the resources directory which is actually inside the Perch directory - thus revealing what you have renamed it. That wasn’t really how I wanted it so I contacted the Perch chaps - very helpful - to see if I could set a path for the uploads outside of the Perch directory.
What they suggested was changing two of the line in the Perch config.php file to include the full path to the directory file and the directory from the root of the site:
I set this all up as instructed but was getting errors in the control panel - Perch was appending the perch directory - /admin in my example above - on the beginning of the URL for the upload directory giving a path of /admin/assets/img/content- not what was wanted at all!
So I raised the issue with the Perch team again and they gave me some (apparently) undocumented advice to change the two file path lines in config.php to:
I spent some of the weekend tidying up my photos in Aperture. I had realised that the the actual files are kept in Projects when you pull them into Aperture and I had a whole range of topics organised into folders with the projects inside them. THe problem with this is that some projects were based on individual trips and others as collections which meant that organisation of image files was not that strong.
What I decided to do was to organise the files by date and I created Projects based on years so I will fill each years project up with the photos I have taken that year. Then I would use Albums to create collections of images based on subjects. In Aperture Albums are simply collections rather than holding the files themselves and this was the important learning point. If I delete an album I don’t delete the images but if I delete a Project I DO delete the images. So the important thing was to store the images in one place and then use Albums to make collections.
What I then did was add albums with the same name as the projects I already had and then placed all the files in images in that project in the Album of the same name. Once I had completed that for all projects I then made Smart albums for each year which sorted the images into years and then I could move the images into their respective year Projects. Then I checked each of the old projects to ensure they were empty leaving me with a set of albums for each category I originally had.
25,000 files done. But I do have 8,000 of those that I need to sort into albums! Perhaps another weekend.
Just read a great article at 40horse.com on creating a custom ExpressionEngine2 Login Screen so decided to have a quick update to my own login screen. It is slightly frivolous as only I will ever see it hopefully but every little bit helps.
I edited the login.css found inside the main themes folder /default/css themes/
Simple, quick and easy way to add a bit of pizazz to a site. I have known about editing the login screen for a long time but was one of those things I had never tried so thanks to Josh Hopkins for the prompt!
Update October 2025
I did switch away from ExpressionEngine for this site – though io still use it for others and highly recommend it. I have a tendency to try out different systems on my own site and have used four different ones to date since ExpressionEngine.
Steve Jobs was many things to many people. To me he was one of a handful of people who have had a profound effect on my life.
My thoughts and reflections on the influence of Steve Jobs on me.
I woke this morning to the sad news that Steve Jobs had died last night. Naturally I learnt the news on an iPhone using information posted over the Internet (invented on a Next). I first started using Apple products in 1988 in a small PR company and my life changed from that point. One day 3 SE20's with duel disk drives were brought in, with no hard drives. A box when unwrapped was found to contain QuarkXPress 2.1 and I rapidly moved away from traditional paste-up layout to computer publishing. I could see the writing on the wall for the design industry and learnt as much as I could about Macs. I will point out at this point that I did computer studies for O level and got an terrible mark - it was at the time all punched tape and applied math which I was not good at. I wanted to use computers rather than make them and Steve Jobs realised that the key to selling a lot of hardware was to make them easy to use. Later that year the company got smaller and I was made redundant. My Gran bankrolled me a new SE30 and I was freelancing! Later I moved up to London to work because that was where it was all happening apparently. I got some work with an oil industry newspaper creating the pages in Pagemaker on a Mac Plus.
Then I got a job offer at a bank that I couldn't refuse. I think I was the first one in a world leading bank to use a Mac (an LC - colour at last!!!) and I was creating artwork for point of sale and mailing materials. I was able to expand the team over the next few years and eventually brought a total of 17 Macs into the company. I remember them all as I had to write water tight business cases for each one and fight IT and purchasing who were very sucky teeth anti Mac but I was armed with a white paper showing how artworkers on Macs, at the time, produced up to 30% more output than PCs running the same software simply because of the user interface. However they were dark days and Steve Jobs had been pushed out of Apple it's fortunes declined and its boxes became grey. That actually did the world a lot of good because he was able to try out new ideas with Next and Pixar.
Then something astonishing happened - Steve Jobs went back to Apple and turned the company around and started producing products that have pushed the world into a far better place. Turning yet another grey box computer into a thing of beauty and desirability. At home I still have my SE30, a Performa 5200, a Dalmatian iMac, an iMac G5 and current work beast that is the 27" iMac G5. My home is full of Apple gadgets that make my life much happier and that's a great thing. We have had a Newton, one of the very first iPods in the UK and plenty of the new models, but it's the iPhone that really took Apple and Steve Jobs to global levels and changed the playing field for everyone. Androids are outselling iPhones 2:1 as I write this but without the iPhone there would be no smart phones yet - not really - not the mass market we have today. After all the Nokia Communicator, very advanced for its time, wasn't a big hit. And that's the point. Steve Jobs knew how to make products that sell - make it as easy as possible to do something difficult and make it look wow. The whole world is benefiting from this lesson and UX is in a place that it would never have been without Steve Jobs. He had vision and a great team to help him realise that.
I never met Steve Jobs, but if I had I would have said - thank you.
There really is no reason to prevent links into your website other than to appease Compliance and Legal teams who are covering all options. Some sites have gone down due to high traffic loads when they have been listed on Boing Boing or Slashdot (not mine - not yet anyway) and that could be the reason why IT teams have got into flusters and the legal teams have tried to apply impossible T&Cs. I’m not talking content theft linking here - linking to images on your site or scraping content.
W3C recommendations for deep linking
According to the W3C Technical Architecture Group,
“any attempt to forbid the practice of deep linking is based on a misunderstanding of the technology, and threatens to undermine the functioning of the Web as a whole”.
That’s pretty serious - but no compliance/legal team is going to listen to that when their job is potentially on the line.
Loxley Barton Falls will be at Brighton Model World Exhibition this year. I have just had the invite paperwork through as a late invite (something about loosing my details!). I see that there are four other 009 layouts at the show which is not bad going for a general modelling exhibition.
Brighton Model World is on the 15th -17th February at the Brighton Centre on Brighton sea front. Apparently they have model ships, life size Daleks, radio controlled things and loads of other modelling stuff as well as railways so it should be entertaining thought the longest event I will have done. Having agreed to attend when invited last year I had not realised that it was the same weekend as the Small and Delightful's Narrow Gauge South West show in Shepton Mallet - a favourite exhibition of mine - though I have not been invited to exhibit yet... (ahem..)
I have had one of Nigel Lawton's Bachmann re-motoring kits for a long time now and one of my engines packed up recently so i set about my first bit of modelling for the first time in a few months. Why does everybody say that the winter is the time for lost of modelling? I never have any time!
Nigel's instructions are very straight forward though the soldering can get a little fiddley (for me anyway!) and in no time at all I had a replacement motor unit ready. then the problems started and to give Nigel his due he did say that removing the worm from the old motor is a potentially worrying aspect. I broke two jewellers screwdrivers getting the worm off. I do realise they were cheap ones and I now have an excuse to get some decent ones, and my thumb will heal eventually. The good thing is that I now have an old shaft which I can use as a drift the next time!
I used the full length of shaft tube provided but as I did not have any thread lock I used super glue which worked fine to start with but after a few problems with clearance in the loco body caused the motor shaft to separate from the worm shaft. I need to go find some thread lock as I can see this happening at the start of an exhibition! on this particular loco the worm is already badly chewed so I might start looking for a replacement chassis anyway as the gears on this one are a bit crunchy. If I do through this chassis away I can reuse the re-motoring kit in another one later!
My pizza layout, Withywindle Mill, has won the competition it was built for - the GDNGRS Pizza layout competition! It was a late decision to have a competition at this years ExpoNG so we kept it to members only. On the day there were five layouts but I know of five others that were underway but not finished in time - hopefully we will see them all one day. We needed an impartial judge for the competition so we asked Carl Arendt who runs the very popular Micro/Small layouts for model railroads website who kindly agreed.
The layouts and Carl's commentary on the Pizza layouts are on the November 15th breaking news section of his website where you can see some of the images we sent to Carl for judging.
I was asked last year to exhibit Loxley Barton Falls at the 2007 Norbury & South London Transport Club's exhibition on the 10th and 11th November. I was put in a small alcove next to the gents (quite handy) but this wasn't far off the entrance so nobody missed the layout. I forget how many more families go to general shows than the more specialist narrow gauge shows and it was a bit noisy!
On the first day I had four tentative invites for other exhibitions next year only one of which I have been to before so the layout might get seen a bit more in 2008.
Both my locos with Bachman chassis decided to play dead so I ran the weekend with my new Crochat railcar and a mix of my Stenning Corris 0-4-2 Huges and the little Japanese L class loco which ran superbly! I even built up a rudimentary operating sequence over 5 - 8 minutes of running which I might make a little more complex for its next outing - if I can move some badly placed magnets!
Loxley Barton Falls features in the modelling section of Narrow Gauge World edition 53 September /October 2007 - there is a big grin on my face right now. The photos have come out much better than I dared hope and Cliff has done some close crops - so the hi resolution images were worth sending!
Apparently this has been out since mid August - I only just realised my subscription had finished earlier this year so was not aware of it being published till today...
Amberley was great fun. I shared a table with Robin Winter who was showing Wee Donegal. Behind us was Richard Glover, also from the Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Society with his new small layout Sand Point and also his own Pizza Starbottom Lane so we had a good laugh as always when members are exhibiting together. Plenty to do on the Pizza before the competition and ExpoNG.
Withywindle Mill is progressing though perhaps not quite as quick as I would like as the exhibition at Amberley is next month - 6 weeks away. As you can see from the image I have built some landscape - I used a technique called FRocks which uses upholstery foam ripped up and covered in diluted filler. More on the technique can be found at Mario Rapinett's FRocks site.
Hedging is foam and rubberised horsehair. At the moment it looks very dark as I have only under coated everything - I always do this in black and build the colours up on top.
I am building a new layout and have decided to name it Withywindle Mill. We are having an internal competition within the GDNGRS this year to build a pizza layout (more on that later) but I have added extra pressure to myself as I intend to display it at the Amberley Railway Gala on the 14th and 15th of July.
My pizza layout is 500mm square with one loop of hand built track. In the middle is a watermill and a stream runs through from one side to the other. A set of sluice gates keep the stream backed up for powering the mill when required and an undershot watermill powers the mill itself. Working in such a confined space means that the scenic details must be top quality to keep the attention of viewers but it does also mean that a layout can be built fairly rapidly - we shall see!
After doing quite a bit of research I have decided that the mill will be based on a fuller mill for textile manufacture which will allow me to give it some history and texture rather than just being a water mill. I intend to power the wheel but lets see how far I get with that! It should not be difficult but I need a really slow motor and a set of gears.
Operationally it's not that exciting with one continuous circle of track and no points but it does allow engines to have a good run in while the operator is busily chatting to people - which is what exhibiting a partly about.
I will put some photos up of progress, as I did with Loxley Barton. in due course.
Recently I purchased an unusual HOe locomotive from Japan. This stunning little locomotive has outside frames and a working couping rod and comes either as a kit or ready to run having been put together from the kit by a 70 year old craftsman in Japan. It is a HOe scale 9mm gauge.
Japanese L Type industrial locomotive, HOe scale 9mm gauge at the H Back shed
Here I have the loco running on Henk Wurst’s German logging layout ’H Bach‘ and it looks right at home.
Japanese L Type industrial locomotive, HOe scale 9mm gauge outside the H Back logging plant
Currently I have no plans to run this on Loxley Barton as it is too modern, probably...
I spent the weekend up at the NEC with the GDNGRS exhibiting Richard Glovers Pagham Harbour. Apart from the nightmare that is getting the car into the hall to take the exhibit away on Sunday we had a great time. I really enjoy operating Pagham - it has a great sequence to follow that is really flexible. Plus the track work is so well made that you can run trains at really slow speeds. It always attracts a good crowd and has been the inspiration behind many other layouts.
The NEC was packed but there was plenty of room - Hall 1 being an enormous space that even the showpiece full size locomotive seemed a little lost. We were in a section with a lot of Dutch men and a lot of very good narrow gauge models! Overall a very good high quality show.
Hopefully we will be back there next year with a different layout.
Narrow gauge layout line up at Warley 2006 - Bryn Goch, Pagham Harbour, H Bach, Castle Rock (town module) and La Trinité sur Mer
Line up - Bryn Goch, Pagham Harbour, H Bach, Castle Rock (town module) and La Trinité sur Mer. Behind us was Chapel Pill and Somewhere in Belgium.
Well yesterday was a very long day. Terry and I spent the first hour and a half holding the doors open to the hall and greeting people. There was a continuous queue for the first 45 minutes, even with four people selling tickets and no delays in queue movement, and the hall filled up really quickly. Unlike other shows when visitors look around for an hour or two maximum, a lot of people spend all day at ExpoNG as there is a lot to see and a lot of people to talk to - so the atmosphere is very special. I did not appreciate that last year as I was exhibiting and didn't really get to spend much time visiting the other layouts and traders. 2006 though was very different as I am now a member of the Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Railway Society who organise and run Expo Narrow Gauge (ExpoNG). We arrived early evening at the hall and set up the tables and did a lot of routine chores. Saturday it was still dark when we were out putting up the direction signs and we arrived just as the first exhibitors turned up. The next few hours saw moments of frantic preparations interspersed with moments of old friends meeting up.
This year each visiting layout had a nickel silver badge to take away - I did the artwork for that and got them etched - and I was very pleased with my first time etching artwork efforts (now to try a few chassis ideas!) and I had some good feedback on the design as well. We also had proper Society polo shirts with the GDNGRS badge on so that everyone could find us easily – great idea that.
Pete Wilson’s Willesden Junction won the best of show award and it is a really huge and different layout so it deserved it. It has had two outings so far and I have not touched the controls once yet! The first was in France, I was unable to go, and at ExpoNG I was too busy – the Essex boys and Pete spent all day shunting great long WW1 trains around the marshalling yard.
I did manage to spend a bit of time this year looking around the show and it cost me a small fortune in bits and bobs I never knew I might need!
Overall the day was a great success with only a few minor teething problems and there were many beaming faces to be seen. We ended the day with a slap up meal at a hotel and started planning next year’s event.
Well it's ExpoNG 2006 tomorrow which reminds me that this time last year I had taken some time off work and was busily finishing things off - a lot of things on the layout! A lot has happened in the time since winning the competition. Firstly and most importantly I was approached by the Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Society to consider becoming a member and in November I attended my first meeting and I am very glad I did.
I really do feel that I am walking amongst giants at the Society meetings and I have learnt so much from the other members and it is great to be able to give a little bit back. If you live in the London area and would like to consider becoming a member drop me an email or pop over to the gdngrs.com website and fill in the contact form - any age at any level of modeling ability are welcome - just bring your passion for narrow gauge!.
So this year I won't be displaying anything - I have a railcar under construction but I have not had time to complete it for the ExpoNG Railcar Rumble competition - but I will be hard at work helping to make the show a success tonight in set up and tomorrow during the show.
I will be going round taking photographs of all the exhibits, and hopefully a few informal ones as well, for the websites and the society newsletter. If you see me please do stop me and have a chat!
I had a great time at the show. Loxley Barton was in one of the small rooms with the Loose Chipping's 4mm Standard Gauge layout and a trade-stand. We had a good regular flow of people throughout the weekend though Sunday was reasonably quite compared to Saturday. The food laid on for the exhibitors was very good - Sundays roast beef and vegetables was very welcome! The layout stuttered to a start on both days but by the end of the day was running extremely well - though I realise I still have plenty to do to get things to run as well as they should. Paula helped me out on Saturday and Richard Glover on Sunday which meant I was able to wander around the show to view and chat.
John and Jane Jacobs Nettlecoombe won the best of show as voted for by the public, no surprises there as it is always popular! I was informed that the tally of votes Loxley Barton received put it in 4th place which I have to say is very encouraging!
I might be getting an invite from the Norbury MRC for their Nov 2007 show, they took my details and that's it until then as I have no other exhibitions invites to to fulfil - and my feet are glad of it right now!
I have a few chores to attend to to ensure the layout is running well including putting on some Railzip for the first time - hopefully it will cut down the amount that I need to clean the track during the day. I also need to change some couplings and sort out one particular loco that was playing up at Amberley. There are a couple of other 009 narrow gauge layouts at the exhibition so if you are in the vacinity of Croydon this weekend please do pop by and say hello!
So there it is with the driver and curtain in the doorway you cannot see that the cab is completley full of motor! The eagle eyed will notice that I have removed the provided coupling and replaced it with a Greenwich coupling at the correct height. Apparently these kits were designed long before the Greenwich society decided on a standard coupling height.
I spent some time over the weekend getting my old SimAir compressor out of storage, been meaning to do this for quite a while, and rescuing my airbrushes from the loft. I spilt a little oil from the compressor and it absolutley reeked and I got told off. Having tested everythingto make sure it was OK I mixed up some acrylics to the shade of green I wanted for the Ruston and thinned it with cellulose thinners, dropped it into the airbrush with a pipette and spent the next hour spraying and masking out. It was great fun.
A bit of hand brushing for details and the intial wethering on the loco was followed by painting the driver. I covered the lot in clear acrylic spray varnish which is hard enough to prevent the knocks chipping the paint but it is glossy so I need to run a quick matt varnish over it but I will probably wait until I have finished the weathering.
Yesterday I completed the Meridian Models MM3 kit of a Ruston Hornsby 27-32. I have not painted it yet as you can see in the photo but what a great little kit. A bit tricky in parts - soldering the roof on was tricky and getting the engine cover exactly square tested my patience! The one thing that stands out on this locomotive is the short wheelbase. It could probably go around a 10mm radius curve. The most difficult part in construction was cutting the chassis down to size and I used a cutting disk in the end.
There is a fair bit of white metal in the engine housing so I may not need to add any extra weight. I did not even contemplate putting DCC in this, not because of the diminutive size but because the Trix chassis looked to difficult to modify, though I have not actually run it yet so don't know if it even works!
I see Dave Brewer and Pete Wilson (Meridian Models) most Fridays at the Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Railway Society meetings and will be asking then what the 27-32 in the name of the kit means exactly - could be year of design, horsepower, works design number or chest size of driver - I have no idea!
Loxley Barton Falls had its first (and only so far) invite to attend another exhibition during ExpoNG2005 from Gerry Cork of Amberley Working Museum, to their Railway Gala weekend June 8th and 9th 2006. So the past couple of weeks have been a complete panic as I got the layout ready!
The first thing I wanted to complete was a stand - at ExpoNG it was too low for proper viewing on the table top. I designed a box for it to stand on - there will be a separate article about this later on. The box completed I decided to turn my attention to the couplings. I had used Bemo type couplings for the ExpoNG competition as they were quick to put on althoughI wanted to use Greenwich couplings as they were meant to be much better and it was their show! After winning the Cubic Challenge and having met the members I actually joined the GDNGRS and of course I had no excuse not to use the Societies own couplings so built a enough sets to convert all the rolling stock I was planning to use at Amberley.
I also decided that I would need a handheld controller so that I could operate and talk to people at the same time. Leaving it to the last minute I rang Kent Panel Controls and ordered an minimum feedback Fine Control Exhibition standard hand held controller and the parts to build a transformer. The hand controller was built and arrived by post on Wednesday - so a big thanks to KPC for the really fast turnaround!
I had a look at the wiring under the layout and cannot understand how it actually worked at ExpoNG! So I stripped most of it out and rewired it all including a new lead and plug for the controller and then build the transformer - which was much easier that I thought it would be. However I did drop my electric jigsaw in my leg when I was putting it away and had to go to hospital for 4 stitches... Fortunately it was unplugged at the time! Te really bad news was that I lost three hours Thursday night which meant making up time the night before the exhibition! The wiring was all finished off Friday night and everything tested perfectly. The speeds I was getting on the controller were comparable to DCC tests I have done – very impressive. At least one visitor to the exhibition asked how I got such slow running without the use of the black arts…
We arrived at Amberley on Saturday morning and the weather was glorious. We had a table next to Annie Winter’s Lazy cottage; Andrew Neal’s book stall on the other side (that was expensive for me!!) and Meridian models were behind us with Dave Brewer spending most of his time with his clockwork train set!
Most of the time the layout performed perfectly but did require a really good clean every few hours because of smoke, soot and fumes from the nearby full size exhibits.
The atmosphere was great and I will be back at Amberley next year – if not with the layout then certainly as a visitor.
Loxley Barton Falls at Amberley 2006
Wuhooo! Just won a pair of tickets for Paula and I to go see Muse at the Shepherds Bush Empire next Wednesday, 28th June 2006! Its a special small gig with only a few lucky winners going - going to be fantastic because the new album, Black Holes and Revelations, does not come out till the 3rd of July. The show is going to be filmed by MTV and broadcast by XFM!
Update!
Wow what a gig. One of the best I have ever seen. The Shepherds Bush Empire is a small venue - not what you need for Muse really - my ultimate Muse concert must be them on a satellite/space station playing to the world - their sound is big enough for that!
So we got our wristbands and tickets and adjourned to a very nice bistro around the corner and over the road where we ate good pizza and drank good wine while watching the queue go right down the road and around the next corner. This was at about 5:30. We left the bistro at 7:30 having had our fill and watched the que shrink to nothing and preceded into the venue where we picked a spot at the back where Paula could see everything and I went to the lav. Upon me return, only a couple of mins later, Paula had made friends with two people standing next to us - who were great - so hi to Jim and Karen from Bury St Edmunds.
I thought Muse were going to concentrate on their new album but no! Every other track was a Muse classic interspersed with the new albums tracks - this may not be what you get on the tour as the band were trying things out but it worked really well on the night. The whole of the crowd at the front were going for it - and I had a look round at the back and Jim and I were right behind the Back Mosh Pit as Paula and Karen went for it big time - good girls! And the trespassers onto our elevated step did not last long (long story).
And I have come up with a theory useful for newbie Muse fans (there will be loads): If Chris , the bass player, is bopping his head big and proud, then the track you are listening to is a Muse classic - that's the criteria.
So the new material. It's very good - possibly more mainstream than the core fans are used to but it should bring more fame. Recent comparisons to Radiohead are wrong (probably from journo's that think Franz Ferdinand are great and are the new Queen - you are sooooo very very wrong...) and I still believe there is no one quite like Muse at the moment.
Purchase the album when it comes out but if you ever get the chance to see them somewhere big then sell the family silver and get yourself there because this is one band you must see once in your life!
If anyone has a set list please let me know what was played as I did not know the new songs.
Last night on the very quite train home (during England’s match) my train was passed by the Brighton Express. As it passed at only a couple of miles per hour faster then we were going I noticed some very prominent T-Mobile stickers in on the windows and doors proclaiming the train had an onboard WIFI service.
I had read about this last year, WIMAX it is called and its free! Very nice for those lucky commuters!
So I peered into the carriage trying to see if any one was using it, or had the novelty worn off after a year? And the first thing I see behind one of the proud T-Mobile WIMAX stickers is... a woman knitting!
Is someone stealing your content? You probably don't know. I just read a piece over on Learning Movable Type that sparked this post off.
If you publish RSS feeds then I expect someone will have used those feeds to fill their auto generated site to build ad revenue. So how can you check? I use Copyscapes offering thought there may be others out there. You can input URLs from your site into their engine and it gives you a list of sites that have plagiarised your content. If you don't use RSS feeds then you probably will be alright - unless someone really has cut and pasted you words.
As I said if you do use RSS then you are bound to have found that the ad hustlers have generated something somewhere and its annoying - why? Because search engines penalise your site if you have duplicate content. I may well stop doing an RSS feed in the next version of this site - MT3.3 has just been released so I might have a look at the designs I have been bouncing around over this year.
(lest see if someone plagiarises this post!)
Dashes vs Underscores is an ongoing debate about whether it is better to use a dash, or hyphen, in file name or to use an underscore instead. Over the past few years I have always used the underscore both at work and in home projects. This was for two reasons - the first being that underscores make the file name easier to read and secondly it means that I can use hyphenated words correctly in file names.
Example:
my_day_out_with_co-pilot_paula.jpg
my-day-out-with-co-pilot-paula.jpg
I think that the first is far more readable than the second from a grammatical sense it is correct.
However there seems to be a great deal of talk in the SEO communities, and especially from Matt Cutts of Google, that hyphens, dashes are better than underscores in file names hence the Dashes vs Underscores debate.
Matts argument is that Google reads underscores as part of the word and that the dash is seen as a separator. This would mean that “co-pilot” is read and co and pilot by Google and co_pilot is read as a single word “co-pilot”. Hang on though this is back to front - the wrong way around! This would mean that all my hyphenated words in file names should have underscores to allow Google to correctly read them.
Hence the best file name for the jpeg file above should thefore be:
my-day-out-with-co_pilot-paula.jpg
which is just semantically silly.
The reasoning given found in a post on webmasterworld behind this is that it was to allow techies like us to search for HTTP_USER_AGENT and not have to sort through millions of results containing “HTTP”, “user”, and “agent.” But why would they not use quotes to get the correct term?
So I did some searching on this term in Google and these are my results:
Dashes vs Underscores searches on Google
Search term – Number of results
HTTP_USER_AGENT – 1,440,000
HTTP-USER-AGENT – 3,240,000
"HTTP-USER-AGENT" – 3,220,000
HTTP USER AGENT – 138,000,000
"HTTP USER AGENT" – 3,220,000
co_pilot – 1,230
co-pilot – 7,740,000
"co-pilot" – 4,070,000
co pilot – 95,200,000
"co pilot" – 4,070,000
Interesting reading I think. With the first search term HTTP USER AGENT numbers 4 has the most results as it is just the three words but 3 and 5 are the same suggesting that Matt Cutts(and reiterated again recently) is correct in saying that hyphens are seen as spaces. 8 and 10 would also confirm that this is a fact but if the hyphen is the same as a space then 7 would be the same as 9. So adding the dash without the parenthesis does do something.
So am I going to change all my file names to use a dash? No. Like Shawn Hall I have had very favourable results using underscores and especially from Google. What Matt Cutts is saying might be technically correct but grammatically it is the wrong solution. Other search engines will resolve this correctly and perhaps Google will soon follow.
My Easter 2006 project was a 2 ton iron coal wagon kit by A Knights Work which I purchased a couple of months ago to test my soldering skills - or lack of them. It's all brass and does not fit together particularily well (the wagon floor seemed very undersized) but after a lot of trial and error, filing an filling I was able to make a decent enough wagon out of it. I added coal and Greenwich couplings and a very rusty paint job and now just need to add some lettering and it's done. A good holidays work - though my soldering needs a lot more practice!
Just dug up an old 009 Society leaflet I picked up from Imrex 90 - 16 years ago! I had intended to join the society at the time but life got in the way as usual and I didn't sign up for another 11 years. The society is still going strong so if you have an interest in narrow gauge railway modeling please do join - and its worldwide. Current details can be found at the 009 society website www.009society.com -click on the Join the 009 Society menu item.
Meanwhile here is scan of the old 1990 leaflet.
(Please note this is for historical interest purposes only - this is not the current leaflet and is way out of date - the addresses, prices etc are all out of date, so if you would like an up to date form please visit the 009 Society website - do not use thess images to join!)
Expo Narrow Gauge is on the 29th October this year and I certainly will be going along. Hopefully I will get a proper look at the layouts on show as I only spent a quick 20 minutes going round the hall in 2005 and didn't get a chance to really chat to anyone.
I was given the Scaloox starter pack for Christmas and I decided to have a go at building the water tower and coaling stage which was a good simple project to test out this new building form.
Scaloox is a modular building system with stonework courses that you glue together in whatever combination you wish. There are several different shapes of piece to work with and the shapes have been specially worked out to give maximum flexibility.
The Scaloox pieces are cast in moulds and quite brittle so you have to handle them gently. Advice from others suggests that they are not happy with too much moisture either and I found this out when building the tower as I had a bit of a disaster snapping one course of stone work off and then I had to cut out the remainder and start that course again. However the experience meant that I was more careful and now know the tolerances better.
I scratch built my own water tank to go on the top from plasticard.
Update
Scaloox is no longer being manufactured which is a big pity but I am sure there are good reasons for stopping production - perhaps there was no market for it.
The 2006 January edition of the Railway Modeller has a two page spread of the ExpoNG including a very good picture of Loxley Barton Falls and a small mention in the text. Available at most good newsagents.
Narrow Gauge World January and February Edition has a picture as well as a piece about the competition. I have not received my copy yet but was able to get a quick glimpse on Saturday. Available at larger newsagents.
The 009 News, magazine of the 009 Society also has a picture of Loxley Barton Falls at the ExpoNG in Swanley. This is only available to Members of the Society.
This year I have been eating a lot more Japanese food - mainly because I really like it but also because its good quality food. Itsu who have a takeaway stall outside my office provide me with excellent miso soup and what they call a lunch roll nearly every working day.
The lunch roll is a tube of rice with different ingredients rolled up inside. Mostly I have ginger chicken - very spicy!
Since last week though I have purchased the Bean and Hijiki lunch roll and very satisfying it is. I was interested to know what hijiki is and looked it up on the web today and hijiki is a black seaweed finely sliced but I also to my horror read that hijiki contains inorganic arsenic that is known to add to the risk of people developing cancer.
I have also pinged off a question to Itsu about the use of hijiki in their lunch rolls using the Itsu question form. Hopefully I will get a concise answer back as to the risks of eating Itsu's hijiki.
Update!
I got a quick email response from Glenn at Itsu :
Simon,
Thanks for your e-mail. Please rest assured we would not be serving
food with potential health dangerous. I know the FSA site well,
particularly the page you mention. The FSA tested five brands of
Hijiki, these are listed and include Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Tazaki
Foods etc. Based on reading this article, we took caution to have our
Hijiki brand independently tested. Results come back safe for human
consumption.
The product requires washing and cooking. The results shown on the site
do not take this into account either. Itsu washes, rinses several times
and steams it's hijiki to further ensure it's safety.
It is completely safe to eat, in fact I eat it all the time. The
flavour is delicious.
I hope this re-assures you?
Yes it does reassure me! I can continue to choose the Bean and Hijiki lunch roll for my lunch without any worries!
I realised this morning that the Gallery images did not contain any of the final model as it went to ExpoNG 2005 yesterday. So this morning I did a quick photo shoot.
The image above is my favourite as it really captures the dark forbidding new industrial era of the Victorian age - just the atmosphere I was trying to capture with the model. It almost has a late Dickensian feel about it.
I genuinely cannot believe this - I won! I did not think I had a chance and when I saw the other layouts I just put the competition out of my mind as the others were so good. Looks like Loxley Barton Falls struck the right chord with the judges.
I really enjoyed today especially the great camaraderie of the other Cubic Challenge layouts -
Chris O'Donoghue, David Woodstock, Annie Winter and her family, Michael Campbell (last years Shoe Box winner), Fried Lagerweij (runner up) and David Calderwood (who I did not get to speak to as he was tucked away in another part of the show).
Loxley Barton Falls will be in Narrow Gauge World, a fine publication and I won a years subscription, 009 News and we have been asked to exhibit at the Amberley Gala next summer. Gosh!
Perhaps, just maybe Paula will let me build something a little bit bigger now...!
Only 8 and a half hours before the public get to see Loxley Barton Falls. It's 2am and I am not frantically getting everything ready having spent the evening finishing the layout, adding figures and finishing off the rolling stock. This is my first ever showing at an exhibition and ExpoNG is the premier narrow gauge model railway exhibition in Europe - so no pressure there then. Having seen the standard of work at last years ExpoNG competition I resigned myself months ago to the knowledge that there was no way Loxley Barton Falls could win the competition - this is the first layout I have ever made in 009 and there are soooo many mistakes! Hopefully it will be an enjoyable event. Hopefully no kids poke fingers into the layout and destroy everything (oh look a train - poke - snap. My eternal nightmare...)
Hopefully I won't get befriended by weirdos who want to tell me about how the particular variant of Walschart valve gear was not invented in the time period of the layout (sod off weirdy...).
Locomotive No. 07 is a Parkside Dundas kit built by me in the early 1990's. This is kit DL01 Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway Hunslet 2-6-2 Tank Loco No.14 which was rescued from Sierra Leone. I have modelled the kit as a freelance Hunslet and this is a very good runner.
Today I filled in the waterfall and stream. I had already added the base water using a Woodland Scenics 'Realistic Water product and on top of that I added strands of Deluxe Products' Scenic Fibre glued in place for the main drop of the waterfall and where the stream runs around rocks. Once the glue holding the scenic fibre had set I heated up the Deluxe Products' Scenic Water thermoplastic water product and poured it down the waterfall and along the stream using a brush to position the flow. Once this had set I added Woodland Scenics' Water Effects to build up the white water parts of the stream and falls.
I also used these techniques to add a several flows of water from the leaking lock gates.
Locomotive No. 6 is partially constructed with the chassis complete and most of the body work in place. This is a Golden Arrow Productions Kit NL2 - Southwold Railway 2-4-0T / 2-4-2T. I have constructed this as a 2-4-0T running on a chopped Grafar chassis - possibly a 2-6-0.
It's a great looking locomotive and was one of the 'lost' locomotives I recently found having been in storage for many years. I am not sure if this is a runner yet - could be - but I will be checking the clearances around Loxley Barton as it may well get round the bridge curve and that would be great!
This weekend I have finished painting the lock gates. There is a base coat of black followed by dry brush burnt umber and then a light grey with a hint of burnt umber. The metal parts were picked out with a little rust detail and then the lock gates were finally super glued into place. I have not attached the hand rails for the top of the gates yet and I will either leave them off or cut them down a bit.
After I have finished adding the water into the stream I intend to add the effect of water spraying out of the gates as if they did not quite fit perfectly. I got some great shots of the way this works from a walk along the two path of the Wey navigation earlier this year.
Classic Roco 060 diesel dark green with black roof. This engine was purchased in 1985 at a small model shop in Faversham. This was the first engine to test the Loxley Barton Falls track and it only just made the sharp curve. No.5 is a very reliable engine and an excellent runner.
Locomotive number 04 is a GEM Baldwin kit on a Grafar chassis.
I started to build this before I had finished Locomotive No. 03, about 1980 but it was never finished. this engine was rediscovered during a clear out in 2005 although I had known it was somewhere because many of the detailing pieces were in my bits box. This engine, like its sister No.3 will not fit on the tight curve running into Loxley Barton Falls and so will remain unfinished until another project arises.
Loxley Barton Falls is a 009 gauge railway layout built for the Cubic Challenge competition held at the 2005 ExpoNG Narrow Gauge Railway Exhibition in Swanley, Kent, UK on October 29th. The rules state that the layout must fit into an imaginary 500mm cube - no part, other than lighting and controllers, is allowed outside of this area.
The photos that follow were taken during the the development of the Loxley Barton Falls layout. Construction started in April 2005.
Locomotive number 03 is a GEM Baldwin kit on a Grafar chassis.
I built this in about 1980 and it runs well but the pony truck is a little troublesome over some point work. I added a copper strip over the motor to look like a firebox - needs to be a different colour.
These days the Baldwin outline look a little utilitarian to me so this will not be run often.
Not one to shirk a challenge I purchased this Langley kit of a Ffestiniog Double Fairlie. In the end I could not build the running gear and a friend (Michael Halliwell) put it together for me. This used to run very well but has not moved for some years. Needs a good overhaul, a repaint and some new parts.
I think this is a Gem Kit. I bought it in the Portmadoc Station of the Ffestiniog Railway in about 1976 (they don't sell any kits these days - pity). The chassis is an Arnold 040 and has not run for years. Needs some tender loving care and a rebuild.
In October 2004 I visited the EXPONG exhibition in Swanley held by the Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Railway Society (GDNGRS). The show is purely for narrow gauge model railways of all gauges and there were some excellent layouts there, many I had not seen before. Tucked away in a separate room down the corridor from the main exhibition was the entries for a challenge that the GDNGRS has set. This was the shoe box Challenge where an operating layout had to fit inside of a shoe/boot box and very creative the entries were as well.
As I do not have enough space at home to build a full layout this seemed like an excellent challenge for 2005 so as soon as I got home I started to plot in my head what I would like to do. Several months later the GDNGRS released a statement that the 2005 competition would be slightly different. It is called the Cubic Challenge and the layout must fit into a 500mm cubic space. That's not very big but bigger than most shoe boxes!
In March 2005 I started in earnest to build a new 009 gauge entry for the Cubic Challenge Competition and I am diarising the progress here.
There were reports on the Register and Wired over a year ago suggesting that Google were thinking about taking blogs out of the search results because they were cluttering up the commercial results. No doubt they were under a great deal of pressure from commercial entities who suddenly found that they had a bucket load more competitors to race against to get a top listing - potentially costing them a lot more expenditure with Search Engine Optimisation.
Frankly if I was running a commercial site that relied so heavily on on-line search results to bring in traffic I would have been very annoyed at the way blog results have taken over the search results.
As a web user I am delighted that the playing field has been evened out and that I can find information on subjects without having a commercial edge on it. I hate having to wade through loads of results for sales when I am trying to find some information on product. It even worse when you are trying to find out some information about a place - normally you got pages full of hotels, B&Bs; and cottages.
But blogging has changed the landscape and as it has matured from simplistic 'I feel rough today' diary entries to interesting articles, eye witness writings, political analysis and heavyweight pieces so the search engine results have become more useful.
However things might be about to change again. Moveable Type and Google have got together as major blog players, Google own Blogger, with Yahoo and MSN to throw up the rel="nofollow" attribute. this is brilliant work by the industry to combat comment spam on blog sites and Moveable Type have already produced a rel-nofollow plug-in for their software.
If every one installs it it should kill comment spam off quite quickly. However at the same time it will mean that comments themselves will be reduced on all blogs because an incentive, or you could say a reward, for adding to a thread of comments has been to get a link to your site. If you take the topic further and write about it on your own blog you may well use a trackback - which will also fall foul of the nofollow rel.
This means that this whole network of links between blogs that give them such high rankings will start to crumble and the page rankings and search engine positioning will drop and the commercial sites will start to gain ground again. In some ways this is not good news for the search engines either as they may see their placed adverts revenue drop as the blog 'chaff' dissipates.
It will be interesting to see what develops over the next few months.
I have just added the MT plug in to my site and so I don't expect anyone to bother to comment here any more!
Update!
Actually what I would like in the MT Plug-in is to add the rel="nofollow" to urls in the comment but not for the commentors url. This will mean that the commenter gets credit for their contribution.
Yes this field could still get spammed but I use moderation tools such as MTBlacklist to spot and block naughty URLs.
Reports are coming in that the Darkness played a superb sold-out show at the Bowery Ballroom in the USA. Justin Hawkins ripped off his shirt and threw in into the crowd and the delighted crowd responded by throwing their underwear on stage! judging by what New York ladies are wearing this season, Sex and the City lets us know all, Justin will not have run out of G Strings for his guitar!
We missed the first band entirely having sat in the pub for too long, but arrived just after the Webb Brothers had started their set - and we are sooooo glad we didn't miss it because it was the highlight of the night by a long long way. I thought I had not heard of the Webb Brothers before but they played one song that I have certainly heard on Xfm. Their set was wild and varied with three of the guys singing in harmony - shades of the Beachboys but so very different. Several songs reminded me of early Floyd - and that’s a massive complement from me. Their slow songs were extraordinarily tight and built into crescendos that reminded me of the Muse. This is a band that have massive potential and could go a long long way. They have an album out on 22nd September preceding it with a single on the 8th. We will buy both.
And so on to OKGO. Big crowd that loved everything they did, but for us there was only one song that shone - Get Over It - and we did, quickly. Sadly we think they are a one song band, despite friends in the business who think they are 'well good'. Paula wanted to go home halfway through the set but I managed to persuade her to stay and if it wasn't for that we would have missed Get Over It which was the highlight. It got better but we didn't stay for the encores.
The highlight of the evening: several songs by the Webb Brothers though which one to choose I couldn't say…!!!
Apologies to OKGO for not becoming fans!
The next gig we are going to is The Darkness at Folkstone Leas Cliff Hall in October - with the Webb Brothers supporting. Very very exited about that!
I have had a really really sore throat since tuesday and it really hurts and I has kept me away from work. It's feels practically raw - every time I swallow I am racked in pain.
I can just about speak but it even hurts to do that.
Looking great for the bank holiday, probably rain as well. :(
Just finished this quite outstanding first novel from Richard K. Morgan. Very Cyberpunk although it is set well into the future. Humans are defined as a digital conscious and that is kept in a cortical stack which can be implanted into the neck in a human body - a 'sleeve'. This allows travel to distant colonised planets by sending the digitised information via a needlecast transmission. The original colonists on each planet had to fly by space but once they are there they can get back to earth in moments but ending up in a different 'sleeve'.
The main action happens on Earth and is essentially a detective story but in a very noir fashion. Takeshi Kovacs, an Envoy, is the main character and he is hired by Bancroft to find out who killed him. Bancroft is still alive because he is rich enough to hold several cloned versions of his body and also back up his cortical stack every 48 hours - things that ordinary people can't afford. There is a nice religious twist to this in that the Catholics (the only remaining religion) are not allowed to resleeve and therefore when they are killed they die.
Excellent plot and action. Would make a good film but the sleeving would make it difficult for dweebs to follow what was going on and who was actually who!
When I first bought the domain name simoncox.com I did a search around the web looking for any references to me, I sure you have all done it, and I discovered a lot of other Simon Cox's. To check how many of you there are in the UK check out the Your Not Me website. For me there are currently 382 in the UK alone and Google brings up 5,340 references.
A list of Simon Cox's from in April 2003
I have decided to list a few references to the others around the world. If you are a Simon Cox and have a web page Let me know!
Well now! Private Ryan has had to do a major U Turn on the parking policy as the towns retailers are losing money, closing up and moving out because of the farcical Parking restrictions. Ryan and his 'Dream Team' (they must have been asleep to think the scheme up in the first place) wanted shoppers to use public transport to get into the town centre and so restricted local parking, thereby upsetting the residents, and increasing council run car park prices.
So are the people switching modes of transport? No. They have switched shopping locations instead as its more convenient for them.
Ryan and his cronies are destroying Croydon and turning it into a slum which may suit him but not us.
Is it me or have everyone gone mad about the SARS outbreak. More people are killed each year by common cold than SARS (at the moment). Or do we have a situation on our hands just like the classic TV series Survivors that ran between 1975 and 1977?
Paula has had a bad throat for a couple of days and one or two of my work colleagues are looking peaky…
Very disappointed today to open Google UK to find no St George's Day banner. Google excelled themselves last year with a special banner and we must not forget that St George is the patron Saint of many places - not just England - Barcelona, Russia, and others - let me know!
Google have a logo already so why have they not used it today - I suspect the St Patrick's day logo has been used every year since they started specialty logos. England apparently is not allowed to celebrate our Patron Saints. St George's day its seems to be regarded as xenophobic and racist - the same with flying the cross of St George's flag - England's flag. Why am I not allowed to have pride in my country? Why in London does the Mayor spend a fortune on St Patrick's day festival and not a jot for the 23rd April?
Update
On reflection in 2025 this post made me sound like a bit like a flag waver - I'm not, and I'm not going to let my national flag mean anything other then help and support for all people.
If you have followed a search link to this site you will have noticed a lack of consistency in the styles used. That is because I am moving the cms over to Moveable Type and have yet to do the housekeeping to convert all the old pages plus a few stand alone pages need building and the css needs properly structuring, organising and finishing off.
It feels like moving house - things need throwing out but I am not 100% sure yet which bits I actually need!
Despite the lack of entries here we have been doing a lot to the garden over the winter.
Moved several of the plants around at the back. Recently bought two huge pots to go either side of the doors. Paula has planted one up with the acer that was in the blue pot next to the Machiai and some variegated ivy. Everything’s coming out into bud so expect some pictures along with posts from us soon.
We have been away, walking for a couple of days in the New Forest staying overnight at the The Mailman's Arms in the High St at Lyndhurst in Hampshire. We had a fantastic time visiting many local places and sampling the local brews. Excellent!
On Friday we drove down to Beaulieu and walked to Bucklers Hard along the Beaulieu river had a pint and watched the river traffic go by. We then walked back to Beaulieu and had a cream tea. We then drove to Calshot where the Schneider Trophy Air Race was held in 1931. The water out to the Isle of White was full of yachts and inshire the sailborders and more dramatically the kite surfers were literally flying in the strong winds. On to Lyndhurst and the Pub. More later!
Arrive Waterside Hotel Bath, where you will be welcomed and receive program details and badges.
6.30 for 7.00 pm. Buffet Reception and Get-together in the hotel’s Willow Suite. Cash bar available.
WEDNESDAY 25TH JUNE 2003 “Take your pick in Bath.”
Stroll into Bath centre along the waterside path for a day in the city.
For the energetic there will be a walking tour of the historic city led by a “Mayor’s Guide”.
All day sightseeing by bus for everyone. Hop on and off as you please at the famous sights.
MAKE YOUR OWN CHOICE OF VISITS AND DINING ARRANGEMENTS.
(No meals arranged for this day) There are plenty of good pubs and restaurants in the City for you to choose from. If you wish to dine at the hotel, you must make your own reservations.
THURSDAY 26TH JUNE 2003 “Bristol and Wells”
9am. Coach leaves hotel for Bristol Maritime Heritage Centre where we will have a guided tour of the SS “Great Britain” the first Ocean going iron hulled liner and we hope, the “Matthew” a replica of a 15th century vessel in which John Cabot sailed and discovered Newfoundland in 1497.
Coach then leaves for the famous town of Wells, stopping en-route for a pub lunch at the Kings Arms (reputed to be haunted) in Litton, a small village in the Mendip hills.
Arriving at Wells there will be a visit to the Cathedral and the Bishops Palace. There will be time to explore this charming old town where William Penn preached from an upstairs room in a local pub.
Back to Bath by about 5pm. You will be on your own for dinner.
FRIDAY 27TH JUNE 2003 “Stourhead”
9 am Coach leaves hotel to drive through the countryside to “Stourhead” an 18th century mansion with beautiful Palladian gardens,now owned by the National Trust. Choose your own lunch at the restaurant or the pub in the grounds. We expect to leave about 2.30pm for Bath where you will have free time for last-minute shopping etc..
Friday Evening, Farewell dinner in the Hotel function room at 7.15 pm. As before, there will be a cash bar available.
SATURDAY MORNING Check out, and farewell until 2005.
Please send your completed Event Booking Form, together with payment , to Bill Pittock by March
31st. 2003. We have to firm up the bookings with cash deposits at least 2 months in advance.
With grateful thanks, Ken and Barbara, Chris and Janet.
There is so much to see in and around Bath and we hope we have found something to suit everyone.
To begin, on Wednesday, join us for a 1 ¼ mile walking tour with the Mayor’s Corp of Honorary Guides. In groups of 15 or so, we will be taken to see the medieval centre of Bath and the famous 18th Century city. Highly recommended, these tours are said to be “Chatty, gossip-filled joy - essential for your understanding of the Georgian Scene”
Follow that with a City Tour by open topped bus. Staying on the bus for the whole ¾ hour ride, will take us all around the city and to the hilltops for some panoramic views. The City Tour Guides will tell us about the history of the city, it’s buildings and some of the famous people who lived here. Get on and off the bus as you please, at any of the 16 stops en route, as often as you wish. Your ticket will also give you concessions at some of the sights and museums.
Eating places are many and varied in Bath, so you should find something to suit your taste.
On Thursday we will go by coach to Bristol’s Great Western Dock to visit the “ SS Great Britain” in the place where she was built in 1843. Long distance voyages made in wooded sailing ships were hazardous to say the least. Sea travel took a great leap forward when Isambard Kingdom Brunell designed this iron and steam masterpiece. Now undergoing a £10m development, the ship is being restored. Hopefully the replica sailing ship “ Matthew “ will be in dock nearby for us to see.
The coach will then take us through the Mendip Hills to The Kings Arms in the village of Litton, for a generous pub lunch. (Bring doggy bags). Litton was mentioned in the Doomsday Book in1084, and the pub is thought to be one of the oldest buildings in the village. Charles II is reputed to have hidden in the inn, and it is said to have 2 ghosts, a noblewoman and an unknown gentleman.
We go on to the delightful city of Wells, England’s smallest city. Granted it’s Charter in 1201 by King John, Wells has a famous Cathedral with a C14th mechanical clock. Nearby is Vicar’s Close, also built in the C14th, Europe’s oldest complete street. The Bishop’s Palace and Gardens, home to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, is open to the public and is a moated house which contains the wells after which the city is named.
Back at the hotel at about 5pm you will make your own arrangements for dinner and the evening.
On Friday morning our coach driver will take us, via one or two picturesque Cotswold villages to our destination, Stourhead. Built in early 1720’s the lovely house was home to the Hoare family, owners of Britain’s only surviving independent Bank. The contents of the magnificent interior were once family possessions, and include an outstanding library of 5000 books, 482 paintings as well as the lovely furniture.The Garden, created in the C18th is a masterpiece of landscaping and a model for the growing English Landscape style. A self contained and timeless paradise.
We should be back in Bath by 3pm so that you may have time to shop, continue to sightsee, or simply crash out until dinner time.
I know that some of you intend to hire a car for your visit especially if staying longer that the reunion. We are looking into the various ways of travelling to Bath for those of you needing public transport. Costs and timetables for the summer are not yet available, but we will send details as soon as we can.
Finally got my start date through for my part time Master of Arts Degree in Media Management. I start at the end of April and by 2005 I should be a white haired wizened guru, or abject failure drop out - that will not happen!
I have installed MoveableType personal Publishing System onto the site as the current Content Management System has gone into a development hiatus. I would rather go with a system built by professionals, nominated for a 2003 Webby Award and has some amazing features!
Oh oh. Heard a report on the radio today that Croydon is raising Council Tax by 27.5% - the second highest in the country. So I had a good root around the Council website and sure enough found a document.
We notice that there is no referendum on our level of council tax this year. We also remember the councillors telling us during the parking protests that there was not a £14m deficit. So why do they need this extra money? Are our local amenities going to be 27.5% better this year - I suspect not.
The grant for the council from central government is apparently less and more is going to towns in the North - so we suffer. But this was bound to happen so why is the council spending not reduced 27.5% so that our tax remains the same.
It is with deep regret that I have to announce the sudden death of my cousin Sarah. She died in hospital last week and was only in her mid forties. We shall miss her deeply.
The council have promised residents that there will be lots more parking bays put into the streets. Please let us know if you see any new parking bays - or indeed any parking bays disappearing because of lowered pavements or bays converted to disabled only.
I have noticed in Temple Road that they have spray marked the kerb to move one of the restriction sign post about 5 ft further into Temple road. Naturally this will mean the double yellow lines moving a further 5ft into the road as well making the single yellow line gap to the first parking bay not quite big enough to park in. So although we have not lost a designated Parking Space one less car can be parked in Temple Road after 5pm.
For those of the family looking for news on this years Pittock Reunion, I will be putting a new section up on the site shortly especially for this years event in June.
Hopefully Mum and Dad will provide some copy for me to use although the newsletter they sent out a couple of weeks ago may provide some good material.
We have not had any snow or ice yet and only a very little frost. The garden is getting ready for a cold Jan and Feb.
I have moved a few delicate plants under cover and Paula has been planting some evergreen clematis up near the elder.
The Mind Your Own Business has grown very well during the latter part of 2002 and the Acer over the waterfall put some new shoots out so that has rooted well.
The Central Zone restrictions are now in force and we immediately noticed a rise in the number of cars - most without permits - parking in our street. This is people in the Central zone being displaced.
It really is not fair on any of us.
This will hit Croydon’s restaurants and so people will tend to go out for meals in other places.
We have already noticed a brand new bistro bar in Purley high street - a short walk from Councillors Ryan’s house…
Hopefully this year will bring lots of happiness to everyone. We started off in good style by attending Mike and Nancy’s 1950’s News Years Eve cocktail party which was great fun - thanks you very much Mike and Nancy!
I still think there was some girlie shenanigans with the charades but they did beat us boys square and fair.
At tonight's council meeting there was an emergency debate to pass a motion to individually consult with every central zone resident whether they were for or against the changes to the CPZ. Sadly the councillors towed the party line and voted against the motion 36 - 27. The Fairfield councillor Pat Knight voted against residents getting a choice in the matter.
The arguments in the Council chamber for the motion were well structured and compelling. Meanwhile Councillor Ryan's statement spent a great deal of time accusing the residents against his plans of being inflammatory and politically motivated (both untrue) and very little in the way of a decent argument.
Despite there being over 1200 objections to 4 approvals from Central zone residents Ryan has decided that residents don't know what they really want and that in 6 months he guarantees (that is what he said) that the residents will have changed their minds about the plans. Well, we will see if he saves his skin.
Just sent an e-mail to Christian on the XFM breakfast show who is looking for unusual advertising spots. He read it out on air so I am expecting a 20ft XFM advertising hoarding to turn up in the next few days to put over the garden pond.
Won't do anything for the garden but it might make the neighbors change to XFM and get the greatest show on earth up to the 13th most listened to breakfast radio show in London. Hurrah
A huge number of residents turned out for the Croydon Council Traffic Management Cabinet Meeting tonight. Our lobbying has had a major impact on the Council's plans. Such was the effect that the first motions that were passed in the meeting allowed council members whose wards are affected by the plan, and the member of parliament and GLA representative who represent the area to speak at the meeting. This is unprecedented as was the venue - this committee have not met in the main council chamber for the past 5 years. The public gallery was packed with concerned residents, as was an overflow room, with audio provided. The BBC have been filming for most of the day and you may see some of us on the news tomorrow. The biggest shock of the night was the amendment sheet handed to us as we filed in for the meeting. Amended recommendations had already been added last week but even more concessions were added today before the meeting. But they included one point that was not a concession.
The amended recommendations will apparently add over 500 parking spaces in the CPZ (we will be watching and counting). The ridiculous hours and Sunday rules have been dropped in all zones but central.
The very sour point is that the central zone will be restricted from 7am to midnight 7 days a week. This will cause huge hardship to those residents: who is going to be shopping at 7am on a Sunday? This measure will cause an overflow knock-on effect into the surrounding zones and also raises huge concerns over residents' safety when they have to walk a long way from their car to home in the worst crime area of the borough.
We are still opposing this issue - 1.2 on the recommendations - as is our local MP Geraint Davies, GLA Representative Andrew Pelling and local councillors.
A good debate ensued only spoilt by a councillor harping on about party politics and the World Summit which was very out of touch with local priorities and the issues at hand.
The chair, Councillor Ryan, has promised, yes promised, the extra bays and that the situation will be reviewed after a short time. We will keep the pressure on until residents are treated fairly.
More from us later when we have looked into the full implications of the amendments.
People power works - never underestimate your constituents.
After the residents and businesses of Croydon successfully fought the first proposals to change the parking restrictions, Croydon Council are now trying to push through dramatic changes to the existing zoned parking arrangements for Central Zone as follows:
Existing hours for the Croydon CPC
9am - 5pm Monday to Saturday
Proposed hours for the Croydon CPC
7am to midnight, 7 days a week, 365 days a year!!
This not only affects Central, but will affect the bordering zones with displacement parking.
How this affects my local road
In the road I live in, which did not have or need parking bays when I moved in in 1992, residents park on the single yellow line when they get home from work and there is enough room for all. This draconian measure means that there will be a bun fight fight for spaces especially at weekends. The parking spaces were put in the road to protect residents from shoppers using the road to park in but that has never happened and appears to be a lie and this measure seems to be simply for creating revenue for the council to fill holes, not potholes ut budget holes.
Please think how this will affect not only your own parking but for your visitors and customers. ALL the residents we have spoken to think this is outrageous.
The official way to object is by writing to:
Order Making Section,
Parking and Technical Services,
1st Floor, Davis House,
Robert Street,
Croydon, CR0 1QQ
Quote Reference to be advised
Please be aware that signing a petition is NOT enough - a petition counts as one objection only, even if everyone in Croydon signs it, whereas each letter received by the council counts as one objection each - so please write in by the 9th October 2002!!!
There appears to be many people getting petitions together and delivering flyers in their street - if you are one of these people or know who one is please get in contact with us. We want to get everyone co-ordinated against this.
(This site has NO political affiliations whatsoever. It has been built by very concerned residents of Croydon. If you want to help out please get in touch.)
Croydon council have decided to put up the cost of residents permits and, rather more importantly to extend the parking restriction times from 9am-5pm to 7am-7pm inclusive of Sundays.
Allegedly this is in line with the Mayors public transport initiative. My arse. Its simply a way to get more money from the residents.
Update
Oh so many updates - a whole movement happened because of this. Croydon Residents Against Parking Plans was set up and was very active.
I have got my act together at last and started shifting content to a dedicated web space. Previously it has been kept in three different locations.
If the look is familiar then you are working on a certain lizardy project - thing is this version IS css and has a cms system behind it. Please dont ask how long it took and how much it's cost. You won't like it!
Had a bit of an exciting weekend. Went to our friends FB and Lou's for Lou's birthday party in the very large, very old barn to the side of their cottage. A most excellent party eschewed.
We rescued some poor lass from the clutches of the loo floor. Long story and she won't remember - unfortunately for her we do. :)
We went to Coolings Garden Centre at Knockholt in Kent last Friday. They are truly worth a visit for the quality and diversity of the plants (and the scrummy cake in the tea shop!).
We were thrilled to find a small leaved bamboo with unusually coloured canes, changing from yellow to green to red as they age. It's perfect for the empty spot in the middle of the newly painted black fence and proves that sometimes it's worth hunting around and waiting for the right thing. Also found was some Japanese blood grass, three of which have been planted around the new bamboo, finally completing that spot in the garden which has been 'on hold' since last year.
The acidanthera bulbs planted in March and May are coming through now and we're hoping for a good show of fragrant flowers later this summer. The brodiaea bulbs planted in March are all up but no sign of flower spikes - hope I didn't plant them too deep.
The saxifrage has been worth every penny, still flowering from April!! The thyme has also started flowering this month, along with the spirea, vinca minor, ophiopogon nigrescens (black grass), and even the tiny corsican mint. The phygelius has been flowering since last month and looks very healthy - even the one we moved.
Despite all this flowering, we can already see that the raised bed at the back needs some flower action during April and May, so I'm already planning for next year. We have some new ideas for the design, but they're going to have to wait until later in the year.......it's all hush hush until then.
Our friends Simon and Minnie got married at Oaks Farm.
Simon was properly dressed in frock coat and cravat along with the ushers including me. Minnie, her bridesmaid and her mum wore the traditional Japanese kimono and obi.
It the first wedding I have been to where the Registrar was the first to cry! A fantastic day and we wish them every happiness for the future.
Oaks Farm is right in the middle of Croydon but is surrounded by golf courses and is in a valley. We couldn't believe how quiet and tranquil it was.
I made a small trellis, from bamboo that I had pruned out of the garden last month, which I have dug in with the first clematis up against the fence. We wanted to paint the fence before we had any established plants in alongside it. I have put a large stone over its roots to keep them cool during summer as this will help the plant establish.
The one nearer the house, with the bamboo trellis is Royalty - rather appropriate that it is planted today of all days. Concord flew over us as I was planting it, on its way to do the royal fly past at Buckingham Palace.
The other clematis, Mrs Bateman, has gone in under the elder tree and we hope to train it along the fence from the top of the stream. I have my doubts that it will survive there as next to it is a creeper that we are training on the trellis part of the fence. We will see what happens.
We have painted the eastern boundary fence black. We tried to get some more of the black fence paint that we had already used but the local DTY Superstores no longer stock it - how annoying! We looked up the Cuprinol website and found that they still make it and it is also available in 5ltr cans which is great - we had 2.5 litres before. The website has a shopping cart so we though we would buy it over the net - pressed the 'buy' button on the 5ltr Black paint and went through to the shopping cart only to discover that you cannot buy it or any of their products online, but they helpfully suggest that you print your order out and take it to the local DIY superstore. Idiots!
They did have a help line phone number which we rang and got the name of a local stockist - you can only get the black fence paint wholesale at trade shops now if you are looking.
I have upgraded the Gallery software and started to change its appearance to match the rest of the site. Enhancements include a slide show facility within each album so you can site back and enjoy the show!
Lots of sites use short catchy 'action' terms to entice people into further sections of thier sites. The dreaded 'click here' is the all time classic but 'more', 'read more' and other variations also abound.
The alternative is to highlight the actual text that the link comes from - though it is not always clear that there is a link there or that you should follow a link for more info.
It is even worse for screen reader software when confronted by a list of links all saying 'click here' without any explanation of what's on the end of the link.
I have developed, following a suggestion from my work colleague Celia (who got miffed because I didn't mention her in the first draft of this piece! :P ), a simple technique that I hope will allow more usability and accessibility.
The following code visually highlights the word 'more' in the sentence but actually all of it is the link, which is apparent when you mouse over it. Screen readers, such as Jaws, pick the whole link up.
A couple of Mac sites have complicated tables forming Mac like windows for showing stories. I wanted to try and do this in css alone and reduce the number of graphics as well.
Over the past few years I have become more and more engrossed with Cascading Style Sheets and the benefits they offer to the web. This year I have stepped up that interest with an eventual aim of changing all the sites that I run over to css. My mantra now is that the only time I use tables in my code is when I need to display a table of content!
This does mean that the layouts are going to get simpler and while I am at it I intend to make the sites fully accessible and make them Bobby and 508 complient. No small task.
As part of this secion of the site I will be including little snippets of real life css code that I have used, strategy for css and cms driven sites and anything else that is relevant. Links to useful css and accessabilty sites will appear in the menu.
I have seen a couple of examples of css roll over buttons on the web but they changed a simple square block of colour and I wanted something more stylish - more like what you do with graphical javascript rollovers.
I decide the way to do it was to use an image as the background and change it in the style for a:hover and a:visited.
First of all I made 4 graphics. The first was a 15px square transparent gif and the other three were coloured buttons also 15px square.
I then coded a link and included the transparent_15.gif before the links text:
This is a link to another page.
This is the link to the demo page
Notice I have added both a title tag for the link and an alt tag for the image to help with Accessability.
The orange button appears as the link style background and the transparent gif ensures the text is moved to the right the correct amount. When you mouse over the link the a:hover style comes into play which changes the background to the green button. When you have visited the link and come back the a:visited style shows the green button with tick as a background. You could also add images for a:active if you wished. You could do this without the transparent gif by adding 15px left padding but we can use this technique for links in the middle of a paragraph of text.
Pete, Paula's brother and I went down to Leith hill near Dorking on Sunday morning for a five mile walk. It was very misty on the way down - which made the scenery going into Coldharbour all the more dramatic.
The walk up to Leith Hill Tower was hard going for a few minutes but is do-able by all but the very unfit. We had a very welcome cup of tea, cake and fudge at the tea concession in the tower. On route we saw fantastic views of cottages, ponds with swans, waterfalls, rabbits and heard dozens of different birds. One outstanding point is the cricket pitch half way up - highest in Southern England - with the most amazing view.
The local pub - the Plough - in Coldharbour is excellent but got very packed not long after we arrived. The food looked excellent and the range of beers was very good. Recommended for anyone with a couple of spare hours (+ pub lunch).
The up side of being unwell is that I have spent this week delving into CSS. What a minefeild! I have used CSS for a longtime now but never for the page layout. The home page now uses my first public stab at it.
I still have to break the home page down into php elements so that the rest of the site can be rebuilt quickly. I may even run parts of the shared code within the CMS so that I can do remote code changes to the whole site quickly... Hmm.
And I have had a brilliant idea about style sheets and a local random varient to drive them - more later! (What?)
I just realised that there is a bug with IE5Mac. Poo. Have to work on that later - only me that looks at the site on a Mac anyway.
Just checked my hotmail account - which I only have so that I can use MSN Messenger because certain friends use it rather than ICQ.
MSN are now expiring unused hotmail accounts after 30 days. What a pain! They claim its to save disk space. Hmmm. More likley to ensure that the e-mail addresses they are selling to third parties are good ones - thereby bringing in more income. I have had loads of spam in my hotmail account and yet have never used the address anywhere...
MSN Hotmail account expiration policy
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Unfortunately, this information cannot be recovered.* As a valued Hotmail member, we want to make sure you know that subscribing to MSN Extra Storage exempts you from this account expiration policy. It's the smartest way to prevent the loss of all the important information in your MSN Hotmail account.
Paula suprised me with a holiday in Japan for my birthday. We went on the 6th April and arrived back on the 18th and it was awesome. We are putting together a gallery of images that we took while there which will be available very soon.
Mum, dad, Conor, Lou and Steve are up for the day visiting - if you have been looking at the web cam you may have seen us! Dad is snoozing in the sun at the moment and I will have a post lunch nap myself in a moment. :)
OK Big changes to this page in July 2007! We now have a timelapse webcam picture for you.
This is achieved by loading up the last 50 images onto the server and then showing you a flash slide show of them in reverse sequence. I have used the Monoslideshow flash system to create the slide show and I can highly recommend it as the xml is easy to put together and the possible customisation is extensive - so important on the web to day to make sure every site looks different!
