deKay’s Blog

Browsershots runs your supplied URL through a metric plethora of browsers, on assorted platforms, and then provides you with screengrabs on how it looks! They seem to have a bank of virtual machines doing the real actual work, and you are placed in a queue, but it’s certainly easier than installing all the OSes and browsers yourself.

I was surprised to see that this very blog not only broke on some systems, but actually killed the browser. Now that’s power!

That’s right. If you can’t get to a computer, you can now read my blog from your mobile without it making a mess all over the screen! Hurrah, eh?

After almost two years with the previous theme, I thought it was time for a bit of a change. Is this better? Worse?

Some questions I’ve not been asked, but I think are on your lips anyway. I’ve been looking at the search terms people have been using to find my blog, and the same things are cropping up most days.

Q: Hey deKay - what’s this “destroy my gems” thing all about?

A: I have no idea. Well, I have some idea. You’re talking about this, right?

Well, there was some discussion about the Amiga puzzle game “Gem-X” (specifically, its crap box-art) over on rllmuk. And it sprang up from there.

Q: What’s this fascination with 80s kids TV “hero”, Gary Wilmott?

A: There’s no fascination. I just mentioned him on this blog once. Now I’m a top hit for him on Google.

Q: You must be well ace at “Eye Of Judgement” on the PS3, right?

A: No. I’ve never played it. I put a video on here a while ago, from Sony, showing how you can play it. For some reason, I now get visits every day from people searching “how to play Eye of Judgement” and other similar things.

I don’t even have a PS3!

Ok, so it isn’t that amazing.  And it’s not really a phenomenon.  Or even a ring.  But “The blog” is too terse and pretty non-descriptive.

I’ve been noticing an odd thing recently.  I subscribe to a fair few blogs (by subscribe, I mean I have their RSS feeds plugged into Google Reader) and over the last few weeks I’ve found that seemingly unconnected blogs have the same people comment on them.

Of course, I’m a link between these blogs, but I can’t see that being the reason. No, the reason is that there are only a handful of people who comment on blogs, and between them, they read every site in existence. That’s the only conceivable explanation.

It has now been a week since The Great Day Of Moving, when I ditched Blogger for Wordpress on this very blog. How’s it been?

Actually, pretty good. There’s a few things I miss, a few things I’ve gained, but (most importantly), I haven’t regretted it. I’m now considering shifting my Gaming Diary over to Wordpress too, but that’s going to be a bigger task, and one that I’m tempted to avoid until a few things are ironed out. Anyway, here’s my list of what’s better on each of the two systems: Read the rest of this entry »

To Wordpress.  Hurrah!  Maybe.  Things seemed to go rather too smoothly, with only my old RSS feed vanishing in the process (I was going to put Wordpress’s feed at the same URL as the old Blogger one, but WP doesn’t seem to let you do that).

So here it is.  Amazing.

For a while now, I’ve been considering moving away from Blogger and transferring my blog to Wordpress. As it stands, I have a Blogger account using a customised “old-style” Blogger template (no widgets and gadgets and fancy stuff) which uploads via SFTP to my site. Thing is, I’m now finding the lack of a few things such as “next” and “prev” page links, tag clouds, and so on a bit of a limitation these days.

I’ve installed Wordpress and tried to import everything from Blogger, but because it’s an FTP blog, and it’s an “old style” template, WP says no. So I need to change my template to a “standard” Blogger template - which is a one-way change. Once you’ve done it, you can’t go back.

Then there’s the issue of images and permalinks. I’m not too worried about images (most are locally hosted or are on Flickr, so there shouldn’t be a problem), but permalinks will change.

Oh yes, and there’s the issue that it seems that WP will only import 999 Blogger posts. My Gaming Diary (which I also want to transfer over at some point) has some 2100 posts. On top of that, there’s the RSS feed URL which may change. Hmm.

And, of course, I’m going to have to heavily modify a WP template if I want it to integrate into my site in the same way my current blog does. And WP templates are more cumbersome than Blogger ones, and that took long enough.

Decisions, decisions!

When I published a post to my gaming diary, Blogger suddenly went all Deutsche on me. Ist gut, ja?

Well, I finally upgraded to Blogger Beta today, which will affect parts of this site. In fact, I hope it won’t affect parts of the site, as Blogger seemed to suggest it would be OK. I’m slightly concerned about my custom template breaking things though.

My main reason for jumping to the beta was I wanted to use tags for my posts. Actually, Blogger calls them “labels”, probably due to having already defined “tags” as things you stick in your template code. Either way, I’m hoping to be able to sort out my Gaming Diary a bit with them, and it’ll also help arrange this blog too.

Aside from that addition, most of the changes seem to be mainly cosmetic alterations to the Blogger dashboard. I haven’t tried logging in with my phone yet though, so I hope that’ll still work…