An online notebook
There are quite a few blogs popping up about the UK election on May 5. Many of them are used by news organisations to present more informal content. Here are a couple of links to the ones I look at.
Anyone read any others?
edit: Sitting as I do quite close to Democratic Services at the Council, there is a great deal of hustle and bustle to do with organising the election.
I reckon it will be a Labour victory with a majority of 60 odd seats.
From The Guardian:
A council has come up with a new way of disposing of abandoned cars – selling them on the internet.
Westminster city council has auctioned a Range Rover on the UK online marketplace, eBay, with the vehicle fetching £6,600. It is now offering a 1962 Rover P5 which was owned by European aristocrat Countess Renee de Vismes and which has been in a car park for six years following her death.“The countess’s son who lives in New York did not want the car so we have put it up for auction on eBay,” said a spokeswoman for the council.
She added: “We get a lot of cars left in car parks and we have now decided to see if internet auctioning is the best approach.
“We always try to track down the owners of these abandoned vehicles, but sometimes we are not successful.”
Around 200 cars are abandoned in London each day and the capital accounts for 40% of abandoned cars nationally.
Fascinating article in Saturday’s Guardian about the poet E.E. Cummings:
EE Cummings became one of America’s most popular poets. But as a struggling young writer and artist, he was supported by a wealthy friend and soon found himself drawn to his patron’s wife. Their tangled relationship was to end in tragedy, reveals biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
Palimpsest is the (mainly) books discussion site I founded with my friend Al Kitching a couple of years ago.
Essentially a phpBB forum, it now has around 30 regular members and over 15,000 posts. We don’t delete any, the forum acting as a repository for reviews and thoughts on books and things.
It costs a fair bit to run, however, and so we have decided to put into place a donation scheme, where members can contribute towards the running costs of the site. A recommendation of £5 per year was made. Fortunately, this has ben met with a great deal of enthusiasm, and it might mean that more can be done with the site.
One of the things I am interested in doing is converting the site to a new forum system. The one I am looking at is VBulletin – a paid service which costs $80 a year, which in real money is about £45-50. This includes all upgrades, of course. Part of the reason for this is that due to the popularity of phpBB, all sorts of ne’er-do-wells are targetting these sites and either spamming them or clogging up the sessions on the database so that no-one else can access the site. Using a more robust system, like VBulletin will mean that these problems will be no more.
What I have to do, and do right, will be importing the phpBB stuff into the new forum. I think people will be generally pretty upset if any of the previous posts got lost.
I also need to have a clear out of the server. There’s piles of crap in there which probably really doesn’t need to be.
Gah. So much to do, so little time…
For those who visit the site rather than subscribing, you will notice a change in style. This is down to the upgrade to WordPress 1.5 which I have finally got round to putting into place. Will have a look at the various available templates at some point in the future, but at the moment the standard will just have to do!
One of the interesting things that this version of the software can do is create pages that are separate from the blog itself, so an ‘about me’ page is possible, or a longer page of links.