Recovered

after a particularly nasty bout of the winter vomit flu, which has obviously spread from the West Midlands to the Welsh borders.

The few things I have read on the web recently have been posted to del.icio.us. I’ll try and carry on as normal from today.

Quietness

Things have been pretty quiet over here recently. I guess I have just been concentrating on other things.

First up, I have started to host the Impnet forums – a site for fans of Lincoln City Football Club. This has involved me redesigning the phpBB board and making a few changes to see if it can help increase participation. At the moment the site is stored at http://davebriggs.net/impnet but this will change to http://impnet.co.uk – the traditional domain for the site – just as soon as the registrar geeks have sorted it out.

Otherwise, Palimpsest has been pretty busy – see the Fetish Detectives thread for some amusement – and I have been helping one member set up a blog of their own to join Chilli and Rick. I don’t think the blog is for public consumption just yet so I won’t mention anything for now.

I’ve been playing with the new beta of version 2.0 of FeedDemon, which is excellent so far. The integration with Newsgator is very useful – meaning that blogs I read at work using NG on the web are marked as such at home on FD. Fab. I also got to have a copy of the NG plug-in for MS Outlook, which I had a little play with even though I don’t use Outlook for my email (for obvious reasons…). It seems to work pretty well and integrates nicely – a good choice if you must use Outlook. I haven’t been making any link blog posts recently because things have been pretty quiet since Xmas and the New Year. Maybe things will start picking up now. Having the FD/NG sync will help me sort the wheat from the chaff anyway.

Big Day Out 2

Much planning is being done over at Palimpsest for the second Big Day Out, which we have all been looking forward to after the success of last year’s.

It seems like a few new Palimpers will be coming along, which will be nice. So far, 11 have signed up, with 2 maybes.

Am staying over in the local Travel Lodge this time, so as to make an evening of it. As it isn’t until 24 May, I got a family room for £10, which I can share with amner. A fiver each! Excellent.

Back now

Well, I am back now and should be posting again more often.

Here’s a few things I have been playing around with recently, some of these things may never see the light of day.

  • I’m looking into trying to do for football discussion what Palimpsest did for books. Still not sure on the title. Stewart, who is helping me out, suggests Goal Mouths but my original idea was the slightly clumsier My Cultured Left Foot. Any thoughts would be appreciated. The site is hidden away here. It’s running on phpBB at the moment, as I doubt numbers will be great enough to warrant the investment into VBulletin, say.
  • I have installed a version of Drupal, which lifts various stylings and user accounts from a Vbulletin install. I had the idea as I wanted a CMS that could create some sort of directory of authors, with biographical information, bibliographies, appropriate links and whatnot. Am not entirely convinced just yet, as Drupal seems to be more of a blogging platform than anything else, but more playing might reveal a way in which it could be used. The work in progress is here. Drupal is being used in the interesting Open Source Theology project.
  • I received a job lot of Ubuntu CDs at the weekend. 32 and 64 bit ones, and some Mac ones too. If anyone would like one, email me your details and I will post it through.

Absence

Apologies for the disruption in service. Little’un has been in hospital for a while and all my spare time is spent with him and my better half.

Hopefully they will be home and normal service resumed later this week.

A Busy Weekend!

We have done loads this weekend. I was taken over with a real desire to get out into the fresh air, and fortunately we have tonnes of it around here. Here’s some photos of the places we went – more on my flickr page.

On Saturday, we visited Whittington Castle, which is remarkable for being run not by the National Trust or some large organisation, but a community trust set up by those who live nearby. A great project.

Whittington Castle

Whittington Castle

On Sunday we headed deeper into Wales. This is a small stream running between two buildings at William Morgan‘s birthplace at Tŷ Mawr, which is a National Trust site now.

Tŷ Mawr

Morgan was the chap responsible for writing the first Welsh language bible. The photo below shows the house where Morgan spent his formative years.

William Morgan's house at Tŷ Mawr