Clagnut news

I’ve finally got around to redesigning clagnut.com.

In acknowlegement of CSS Reboot I have created Clagnut 2.0 beta in which I have started exploring APIs and thinking more about tagging.

Clagnut is featured as a Star Site in Practical Web Design magazine and @media 2006 is announced.

You may have noticed that Clagnut was down for most of last week. The culprits were referrer spam robots maxing out my database connections, resulting in my ISP putting my account on hold.

Well it’s the usual reason – so much stuff, so little time. There’s two projects, two books and then my arch nemesis pops up.

Thanks for your support. I don’t normally get political here at Clagnut, and even less often do I get angry and sweary, so I thought I’d show any new readers what I normally write about, by way of a top ten most visited posts this fortnight.

Seven months late, it’s Friday Biscuit time again. And welcome to the Amazon switcher.

Clagnut posts have been getting longer and less frequent of late, which means a bunch of sites are going noticed but unreported. So it was time to emulate the trend of a rolling list of links – hence the creation of blogmarks.

Until today, the listening right now bit and the last 50 listens page were generated with the help of BlogAmp, a neat little plug-in for WinAmp 2. The trouble was it only worked through JavaScript document.write statements; not exactly best practice. So I figured there…

I’m in Crete now, probably on a beach somewhere. This message has been posted by magic, without my going anywhere near a computer. And so will the following ten posts, scheduled to appear every now and then during the next fortnight. Well, I couldn’t leave you…

Inspired by some recent nefarious posts, I have reserved my name for all future comments. From now on all comments posted by ‘Rich’ will be from me. The system is far from foolproof, but for now I’m satisfied that one would have to put at least some effort in…

I’m off mountain biking for a week. In the meantime I’ve added an archive to Clagnut and made some fundamental changes to the RSS feed, discovering FeedDemon along the way.

Last night saw the Brighton & Hove Virtual Festival Web Awards 2003. A good time was had by all – the beer was free (initially) and the venue cosy. Regular readers will know that Clagnut was nominated for Best Personal Site. Well I didn’t win but thanks to…

The vote for clagnut link is up. Zeldman has stopped his third party links opening in a named window. And about time too. 37 Signals have designed a better Google.

I’ve been shortlisted for the Brighton & Hove Virtual Festival Web Awards 2003.

I’ve added ‘remember me’ to blog comments. I haven’t asked, it just does it; is that bad? Anyway, with PHP, it was ridiculously easy. Set the cookie with setcookie("author",$author, time()+2592000,"/") and retrieve it with $author=$_COOKIE["author"] . …

More Friday banter from the Biscuit: I should have just got a job on the bins. The pay’s better and I’d know some hard blokes. And I wouldn’t have to pretend That I know what rhetorical means.I could have been like Lou Barlow, But I’m more like Ken…

I’ve built a preview feature for blog comments, to make life easier since incorporating Textile into the commenting system. And talking of Textile, I’m struggling to fix a bug with its @ notation.

Clagnut now uses a slightly customised version of Dean Allen’s wonderful Textile. Textile provides speedier text input (without having to mark up the input into my CMS) and formats the text nicely, with proper “typographer’s quotes” and so on. There…

I’ve removed the referrers list until I work out how to filter out all the spam. The situation was manageable until this weekend, when I got bombarded with porn links. So if you have any filtering ideas, please leave a comment or get in touch directly.

Soon I’m going to change my RSS feed to v1.0. That way you’ll get the full content of each post, complete with HTML. Hopefully this will make the feed more useful, but that’s just my opinion, so consider this your consultation period. If you use the clagnut…

List of all the platforms tested for the reformulation of clagnut.

You are now looking at the new formulation of clagnut. The underlying HTML has swapped for more meaningful markup and the resulting style sheets completely rewritten. So far I’ve only tested on Mozilla and IE6 on Windows, so any further input from other platforms will be…

I make no excuse for this piece of flagrant trumpet blowing. Eric Meyer writes: How have I gone this long without encountering Clagnut ? It’s the kind of design that I can sort of vaguely see in my head when I sit down to do something, but when I do it, the end result…

Pepys’ Diary is a weblog with daily entries from Samuel Pepys’s diary, starting from 1st January 1660. I don’t know how well known Samuel Pepys is outside of Britain (anyone care to enlighten?), but every schoolkid here learns about him in History. As a…

At the moment, I’m attempting to completely rewrite the HTML and CSS beneath clagnut.

Over at metaGarbage, clagnut is one of Johan Svensson’s daily cups of tea. It’s always a proud moment when one is linked from folks’ homepages, but in this instance I’m even more chuffed given the select company clagnut has been placed with: Boing Boing,

I’ve added a page which lists the last 50 tunes I’ve played on WinAmp (an idea gratuitously lifted from What do I Know). It uses the BlogAmp plugin, which unfortunately requires JavaScript to view the list. However I managed to find a PHP version on the BlogAmp…

My brother, a graphic designer, decided that the colours I use on Cuzza.com needed to be a bit more curry-ey. So he kindly came up with some hot & spicy swatches based upon curry products, Indian cookery books and colour theory books. And made this a super page to display…

I’ve added a crude referrers page, showing the last fifty pages to send traffic to clagnut. Seems most of you get here from Google (not a big surprise really). Talking of such things, El Reg reports that Google has changed its page ranking algorithm, allegedly (although…

The way I’ve coded the Clagnut CSS shows up a bug in IE6 Win. All the left and right margins (actually padding) around my text are doubled in width for no apparent reason. In fact it’s not even that straightforward – the page isn’t rendered consistently…

I’ve finally got around to adding the obligatory About section. Sometimes these bits are the most interesting part of a personal site. Prepare to be disappointed.

Why the change in name? To add my voice to the groundswell of support for Davezilla, a popular (and very funny) blogger who has been crudely targeted by Toho, owners of Godzilla®. Initially, Dave was intending to remove his offending ‘little dragon guy’, but is…

Well, having implemented my own search engine for clagnut, I’ve just discovered (via Dean) that MySQL now has its own search engine built in: As of Version 3.23.23, MySQL has support for full-text indexing and searching. I suppose I should be pleased and excited that…

Site improvements: nice new weather icons, improved search ranking and a decent 404 page.

Search engine added!

A handy little article illustrating a simple search engine in PHP (guess what I’ll be doing with it). Weather feed added courtesy of Multimap, of course. Finally, navigation added too (needs fixing in Opera)!

Interesting article on how the London Underground presents a metaphor for information architecture. Nicely presented too. Get your clagnut fix. You can now sign up for the less than monthly clagnut newsletter. Summer has finally arrived so I’m off down the beach.

The first post.