Started before Christmas, mothballed until last week, finally completed. jayphoto.co.uk, my attempt at a “professional” web front for my photography, is finished.

The site showcases all of the photos available as prints from my deviantART page, while hopefully avoiding some of the slightly less professional elements of the dA site and helping the visitor get through the selection checkout process with the least difficulty. Hopefully it will help me get some exposure and sell some art; my main motivation to get it done was the looming on the horizon of a couple of higher-profile photo jobs that I’ll be tackling in the coming weeks - details will be forthcoming.

Techie note: The Flash used on the main landing page is a heavily modifed version of the “Gallery Tween” sample application included with Flash 8. It reads in a randomly ordered list of image filenames from XML (generated by PHP from the site’s image database) and then displays them on the Stage, using a one-frame loop with ActionScript to shift them from side to side. If people are interested I’m happy to publish the code.

I was having a little play with referer data from wpStats earlier, while I should have been writing my essay, and stumbled upon the comedy gold mine that is “the things people type into Google that lead them to my site”. Among my logs I found people who came here while searching for information on SMS.ac, “fuck the world”, and images of “middle east cars” to name but three. So I spent a few minutes writing up a module for wpStats that would show the most popular web and image search terms of users coming to the site from Google.

It’s not bulletproof - I’ve used basic string functions rather than pattern matching with regexp (Note to self: learn regexp) - but it seems to work well enough. In the next few weeks I will try to find time to put together a release of wpStats that will include this along with various other enhancements as suggested to me over the last few months, along with a bit of a tidy-up. Consider this a call for suggestions - if you want your little tweak or widget included, let me know. Suggestions so far include a timezone setting to display times in your local zone and a rewriting of the bot-detection routines to use a table of patterns rather than an awkward list of string test functions. The comments in the code and general documentation also need a solid clean.

Anyway, no guarantees of when, but sometime soon with any luck. Failing that I’ll have lots of time over Easter to persue projects like this, so it should get done then if not before.

The snow has given way to rain, and the town looks like an illustration from a depression pamphlet. I went for a walk last night and ended up in a 2-hour circuit around the outskirts of town, which succeeded in clearing my head. For a few hours at least. I have been unsuccessful in establishing how fast walking pace is, but I’d imagine I put a few miles under my heels - so good exercise in any case.

My subconscious battle of procrastination against my Marketing essay culminated in my cleaning of the entire house this morning in preparation for the (brief) arrival of my folks later today, which was a bittersweet process if there ever was one. The house is now what might be described as clean (by those who don’t look too closely), but I’d bet my bollocks to a barn dance (to use the vernacular) that it won’t stay so for more than a day or two. Though Josh is going back to Geneva for Reading Week, so hope springs eternal. Nor, since a clean house is apparently not an expectation of my housemates, am I likely to be acknowledged for doing so (as if the place magically became clean again) - “well I didn’t ask you to do it” etc. Sigh.

Time to do some essay-writing. See? Yet again I find something to do besides that. Hoho.

So I ended up going in of course; the appeal of speeding through snow was just too much. Campus looked like some sort of Arctic apocalypse, with groups of running, screaming students heaving snow at each other and dozens of snowmen dwarfing the figures dashing around them. My guilt-fed attendance of lectures proved unnecessary, as I went to the first one then found the second was cancelled, so came home via Stoneleigh, where I stopped to take some photos. Once home I persuaded Andy to come out for a snowball fight which proved to be excellent exercise, then carved a snowman outside the front door until I had stopped exuding steam and got cold. From what I can see, the snow has now stopped, but tomorrow is set to be another stay-in-bed possibility, as the snow that managed to melt today will re-freeze as ice underneath new snow, making driving that bit more of a challenge.

So the Met Office, it seems, were right. I awoke this morning at the respectable hour of 10.30 to a thick covering of snow over the garden, the street, and just about everything else outside these walls. The snow is still falling; looks like we’re up to about 2 inches on the flat; the teenage single mothers are trudging through the street in their fake fur-topped jackets and spray-on jeans, scowling as they push their kids in their prams, and the Alsatian next door has choked to death in sheer ecstasy. I have a lecture at 1pm, and this might be the best excuse ever not to go. But I’m torn. A minute or two of manly scraping to unearth my car, and I could kick it into four-wheel-drive and spin off towards Campus, possibly having the most enjoyable drive of my life. Or death. Or I could stay here in the warm and skip some more lectures.

Ah, choices. I think I’ll give it a go. But not before breakfast. Ha!

This post was brought to you by the letter F for Frequency, as part of a campaign to get me posting more often. Trying to post more often and when the mood takes me, while staying true to the “say something when you say something” mission statement that started all this.