Another Lost Month, and Unpublished Posts

OK, so not content with the last post celebrating the fact that I missed a whole month, I then went on and missed February, too. These months just go by so fast.

Anyway, a couple of things. I noticed that I have a few posts sitting in draft form but that are more-or-less complete, so you may shortly see some slightly-non-timely things.

And I’m thinking I might have another go at blogging about the books I read. I appear not to have done that regularly since 2009 (these years go by so fast…) I might not give every book its own post, but put a few into a summary. As I’ve only read three so far this year (one of them was Stephen King’s 1300-page behemoth It, so I don’t feel too bad about the count) I’ll start with those.

This might just encourage me to post regularly, if not frequently.

Meanwhile, here’s a picture of Arthur’s Seat to keep things visual.

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Strange Blog Behaviour

For some reason WordPress decided to repost the two posts that currently appear immediately below this one. I have no idea why. They have in common that they are both of the “Link” format (“Format” here is a WordPress concept denoting types of post).

The mildly annoying thing is that I haven’t posted here yet this year, and now I seem to have started the year with two reposts. I could, of course, delete them, but then the above paragraph would be wrong.

Anyway, this is the true first post of the year, even if it was triggered by an aberration.

Hello. Happy New Year.

Trying out Drivel

I'm trying out an offline blogging client that runs on Linux (these things are not that easy to come by). It's called Drivel, and it seems to work OK, as long as you tell it that your WordPress installation is actually Movable Type.

Oh, and it looks like it only supports one category per post, and no native tags. Not very impressive, really.

Since I tend to draft in jEdit, I’ve often thought that what I need is a blogging plugin for that, and been surprised that it doesn’t exist. One of these days I’ll have to write it…

(ETA: tags added later via the web interface. Far from satisfactory, really.)

(E further TA: damn, it looks like this theme isn’t showing native WordPress tags, anyway.)

Messing around with the blog

I'm trying out a different theme on here for a while, along with a Wordpress Plugin called QuickPost .

Both the plugin and the theme are supposed to make WordPress be usable a bit like Tumblr. There are a number of flaws, though. The theme (Tumble-Hybrid by Tribe) is perhaps a bit too simple. I’m all for a clean, simple look, but this might have gone too far.

And the plugin doesn’t allow for a preview before posting (as well as not working properly with Flickr, though presumably that will be fixed in due course).

Edit: No, that won’t do at all. One or other of them disabled comments and lost the title (even though “Allow Comments” is ticked, and the title appears, in the main editor.

I suppose the thinking is that, for something quick and dirty you don’t want comments or titles, but I do. Even Tumblr has titles, if not comments.

Edit 2: Well, a bit of CSS hacking sorted that out. But posting photos isn’t working at all as I would expect. That may be to do with the fact that I’ve never really dealt with posting images before, though, rather than the plugin or theme.

... And a Happy New Year to All My Reader

Well, clearly no blogging happens over the Christmas and New Year period in the Devilgate household. In fact I didn't even switch the computer on.

So we start the year without having done a review of the last one, and without even having posted all of last year’s Book Notes. I have nine (nine!) written or partially written, but unposted, mini book reviews, that I’ll try to put up over the next few days. Perhaps I should slap them all together into one, but that would really be too big, and would make it harder to find things in future. So Book Notes 2006 entries will keep on appearing for a while yet.

And since I’ve made myself a New Year’s resolution to write every day, I hope to be making considerably more posts in general than last year. We’ll see.

I hope everyone had a fine Christmas or other winter festival, and an equally good start to the New Year.

My "Big England" piece is up at Temperama

The lovely Dave Hill has posted my piece in his Big England series.

Such is Dave’s posting frequency that it has already rolled off his front page. But such is his site’s popularity that it went straight in at number 10 on a Google search for my name; and it has now risen to number 3, I see.

Ironically, since I close the piece by being cruel and dismissive about cricket, yesterday’s news made cricket interesting. Who ever thought that I would know the name of a cricket umpire?

Dave himself has some thoughts inspired by the matter in The Guardian‘s Comment is Free blog.

But pop over and read my ‘This Is England‘. Oh yes, and: you need to scroll down to my comment to get a correction to the intro.

On Countries, Nationhood, and Being Invited to Write a Guest Spot

Dave Hill is a novelist, Guardian writer and prolific blogger. He is running a series of guest pieces on his blog. They're on the theme of "What I Like About England (or not, as the case may be)." He was inspired to do this mainly by all the flag-waving furore during the World Cup (with maybe some influence from Andy Murray's attire at Wimbledon).

I’m pleased to say that he has asked me to contribute. I’ll post here, of course, when my piece is up. In the meantime I’ve been thrashing out some of what I might say in the comments thread of one of the earlier pieces.

Dave’s overall title for this project is ‘Big England’. You can see all the pieces to date here

WordPress, this blog, and the Google cache

I doubt that anybody noticed, but my last entry has been missing a bit — in fact, missing most of itself — for a week or more. I don’t know how it happened. I did make a minor edit to it a few days after initially posting it, and I can only suppose that either I or WordPress somehow messed something up.

Unfortunately I had already deleted the draft from my PDA where I composed it. Fortunately there is a behemoth in California that looks after the careless blogger. A bit of obscure Google-diving and my post is back.

Thanks, Google. In future I’ll keep everything in text files.