blogs

My Poor Neglected Blog

Was it really in 2017 that I last posted on here? I guess it must have been.

Since then I’ve been boating several times with two week long holidays to Llangollen and a round trip round the West Midlands and Birmingham – which is actually a lot nicer than it sounds.

I’ve also done two trips to Maine – for Thanksgiving in 2017 and Christmas last year. Both of those trips have given me good blog header banner photos. The first one is of Three Mile Pond, near China Maine

This second one was taken down near Dresden Mills, Maine

I’ve been working on various bits for Canalplan AC – basically adding support for importing and displaying of Canal and River Trust Stoppages. I’ve also been working on moving the Canalplan site off Google Maps after we got a rather large bill for serving map tiles.

I’ve also been working on my Canalplan Plugin for WordPress which needed quite a bit of work doing on it to keep up with the changes to the WordPress Editor.

I’ve also just been keeping the server ticking over -upgrading php and Apache to newer versions, and moving things over to HTTP/2 where we can.

In a couple of weeks I’m off on our traditional early in the year pub crawl round Market Drayton where a bunch of us from all over the country get together and have a good day catching up with each other and drinking beer in various pubs, before using the boat as a floating bedroom

Living in the shed

I’ve not been doing much coding on the Weblogs recently – I’m just too tired. I’ve been on call (3:30am to 9am during the week) alternate weeks for the past year and basically I’ve run out of energy. The alternate weeks was a “short term” requirement after a member of the team at work quit last October, however the management then dithered and the post seemed to vanish so we’ve been a person down on the team for just over a year and there seems to be no real prospect of the person ever being replaced in any meaningful, useful way in the near future, and indeed I found out today that another member of staff has resigned leaving me as the sole UK DBA for the company… Oh Joy and Happiness (NOT!)

I’m hoping that a long break over in Maine will give me chance to recharge my batteries : apart from Thanksgiving we’ve not really got anything planned so hopefully its going to be a relaxing time … well apart from getting involved in planning my step-daughter’s wedding.

As we’ve got cat/house sitters for the duration we are away we tidying up the house a bit – I’ve finally tidied up the book case in the living room by throwing away what looks like a small skip full of old Yellow Pages and Argos catalogues etc. and shuffling a few things around. The computer cupboard sitting in the corner is over powering and we keep having great plans about moving it up stairs… well moving the contents upstairs and into one of the two bedroom cupboards – the one in our bedroom has a power line in it (I know it has because the plumbers cut throught it when they were installing the central heating) and we can easily run a network cable up through where the pipes come down to the radiator (I might even move the coax cable for the TV in our bedroom and use the same route).

Whilst all of this has been going on I’ve noticed that our neighbour seems to go out to his shed late at night and again in the morning. The other day he was in the back garden in his dressing gown… so all I can guess is that he is sleeping in the shed… seems a bit odd but if it cuts down his foul language as he shouts abuse at his kids it can only be a good thing.

Andrew Denny has a post on his blog GrannyButtons about blogs and links.

Basically he’d commented in his blog about a post on another blog about a new Marina development. As you’d expect he had included links to the original blog entry in his blog.

The writer of that blog seemed to take offence at Andrews interpretation of the blog entry and posted a new blog entry going off in a bit of a huff about Andrew’s interpretation.

Rather than link back to Andrew’s blog entry this person simply referred to Andrew as “a pretend boater who only spend a few days a year on the Cut”. This person also doesn’t allow comments on his blog entries.

Now I’ve always believed that blogs should be dynamic. Posting a blog entry with no links from it and blocking comments and trackbacks is rather like publishing a column in a newspaper and never publishing any feedback. By adding links and trackbacks to a blog entry it adds context to the entry – for example you can easily, in one click, go and read Andrews original article which made me sit down and write this blog entry.

Of course linking and trackbacks on blogs do more than just add context to that entry, they also help raise the profile of the blogs/websites concerned as search engine spiders will follow the links. This second fact is the whole drive behind the spamming of blogs and abuse of trackbacks – if you have a popular, well ranked site, then getting links off your site to a site selling dodgy drugs will help the spammers.