Dear Someone

I just updated the home page of my site. For no particular reason. I just didn’t like some of the words on it.

I’m not sure why I’m bothering to post this.

I didn’t finish all the things I wanted to do but the concert reviews have started again and I’ve started tidying things up.

Hopefully there will be some Real Stuff to download within the next few days.

And the bullet points in my last post totally lacked bullets. Something wrong with the WordPress editor but I don’t know what. I shall investigate.

So, things have been quiet on the writing front. But things have been happening. In a quiet sort of way.

• I submitted a story proposal last week. I can’t say anything about it yet, but if anything happens I’ll report it here.
• I’ve been entering several writing competitions. Only for fun (and practice), not for real publication or prizes or anything like that. But it does mean I have been writing things (and people have been reading them). I’m planning to put the entries up on my web site (as it’s unlikely I’ll ever seriously submit any of them for publication.
• The web site itself has been completely untouched since December. I’m tidying it up a bit at the moment and there should be a couple of concert reviews going up in the next few days. So that will feel like progress.
• I am completely unmotivated to write any more of Heroes. It’s not abandoned; it’s just on hold for the forseeable future.

Well, that’s about all. Hardly worth reporting, except I wanted to keep up the blogging momentum. Something more concrete coming next time…

Who knew that blogs had to have names? I didn’t, until I was installing WordPress and it asked me for a blog title. I hadn’t put any thought into it at all, and the installation was stalled until I entered something, so I used the first title that popped into my head — and it so happened that I was listening to the album Dear Someone by Rachel and Lillias at the time.

Rachel plays the harp and sings (in English and Gaelic). Lillias Kinsman-Blake plays the flute. And the album sounds like… exactly what you would expect an album with harp, flute and voice to sound like. Only better. It’s absolutely beautiful. My favourite new album of the year, so far.

So now you know. (Not that anybody had asked.) Anyway, I think it fits.

I’ve just discovered WordPress’s spell checker. That’s useful.

Except for some odd reason it doesn’t recognise the word ‘with’. Weird.

I’m going to change the quote on the home page every time I make a site update. I.e. now. (Don’t bother looking for what I’ve updated… it’s so minor you’ll never find it.)

The quotes aren’t relevant to anything in particular. They are just things I have gathered over the years. But they all hold some meaning for me.

For reference, the old quote was:

“The Spirit that guides you, follow it through.
To the Spirit inside you, always be true.”
–Tony Clarkin, The Spirit.

From one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite song writers.

I just had a comment on one of my posts that consisted of nothing but a link back to another blog. Obviously spam, but I was curious enough to follow the link and see what was there…

Bad idea! Before the page even loaded my virus scanner was throwing up multiple alerts.

The good news is that I have a good virus scanner (Avira, highly recommended). The other good news is that I have comment moderation on, so none of my readers can see anything until I allow it through.

But still, that was my first experience of evil comment spam. I can’t really see the point, but I suppose it amuses some people of small intellect. A bit like smashing bus shelters.

Technical stuff:

This blog uses WordPress version 2.6. I picked it basically at random because I couldn’t be bothered evaluating loads of blogging software, and wordPress seemed to be popular and reliable.

WordPress installation is so easy, it’s almost embarrassing. Telnet to your sever, wget the WordPress distribution file, un-tar it, edit four lines in a configuration file, set some permissions, run an installation script, and it’s done. It took about ten minutes.

Well, it took ten minutes the second time I tried it. The first time, I unzipped the file to my Windows computer and edited the configuration file there before ftp-ing to the server. Bad idea! PHP files seem to be sensitive to the difference between DOS and Unix line endings, and once you save a file in Windows it will never work on a Unix server. After spending a whole night struggling to “fix” the broken files, I gave up and deleted the whole installation.

Attempt number two, installing directly to the server, worked much more smoothly. Though trying to remember enough vi to edit the configuration file was a challenge.

Anyway, I’m extremely happy with WordPress. It’s easy to use, easy to administer, and looks pretty nice, too. And as far as I can see, it’s writing fully-compliant XHTML. I’m just using the standard out-of-the-box theme because it looks fine and I can’t see the point in changing it.

I would recommend WordPress to anyone thinking of starting their own blog.