Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

jayphoto.co.uk Launches At Last

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.

wpStats Update

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.

4

Bedraggled Cat

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.

Excuses, Excuses (2)

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.

Excuses, Excuses

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.