Just a quickie here today.

Thanks to some creative wordpress plugin…ing, http://www.demajen.co.uk will now display much better on your iPhone screens (and Android/Blackberry/Palm Pre too).

You’ll (hopefully) get just the posts, and none of the fancy banners and backgrounds that eat up your precious download allowances; and it also means the site should load super fast, even over archaic EDGE connections.

Win!

PS. I haven’t tested it fully yet, but it should be working fine straight out of the gate, so we’ll see. If it is screwed, drop me a line and I’ll fix what I can.

So I received four emails from Blogger today. Four identical emails, in fact. All explaining that towards the end of this month, Blogger would no longer be supporting custom ftp-based blog-updating. Since I’ve used that particular service of theirs for nigh on three years, I finally decided that this would be the impetus I needed to change my blogging habits, and do a bit of website maintenance, as I have neglected both for some time now.

So, initially, I have installed a wordpress blog. I have several blogs bookmarked, and almost all of them seem to use wordpress. I tried it once before, a couple of years ago, and I found it unwieldy to say the least. However, this version that I have installed today seems smooth and robust and very professional, which is an edge I am almost certainly going to need soon as I try and break into the publishing industry.

I need to change links and stuff on the main page of http://www.demajen.co.uk but by the time anybody reads this, that should already be done and dusted.

I have a blog coming up about Mass Effect 2, which I got last week and completed yesterday. That doesn’t sound like very long, but I have played it for 35 hours. One could say I got absorbed. But more on that soon.

Also coming soon is a bit about Final Fantasy XIII‘s official soundtrack, as well as a new piece of art for February (which I will quite possibly display WIPs of on here to see how WordPress deals with that.)

Keep on rockin’ \m/(-__-)\m/

It has come to my attention that I have been utterly rubbish at updating my blog. There are several reasons for this, chief amongst them being that I am lazy. Really, really lazy.

And, also, not a huge amount has gone on since October 17th, when I last blogged.

Well okay, stuff has happened, but it was all school/work-related, and let’s be honest, it would be pretty unprofessional of me to blog too much about working in a school. Child-protection and all that jazz.

So instead I shall start 2010’s blogging by going through things that are important to me: namely books, music, games and art.

Reading

Back when I was doing my Masters in Creative Writing, I often commented that I didn’t read anywhere near enough. Looking at my bedside table now, I have a pile of books that will go some way to rectifying this for 2010.

I’ve got through a couple of the shorter works already, but currently the list of Books To Read stands at:

• Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (Read, in anticipation of the upcoming film release.)
• Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters (Read, because I like sequels.)
• Percy Jackson and the Titan’s Curse (Because I got a boxed set of the first 3. Bite me.)
• The Stone of Tears (Sequel to Wizard’s First Rule, which I enjoyed greatly.)
• Blood of the Fold (Third in the Sword of Truth series.)
• The Left Hand of God (Which was half price and looked interesting.)
• Extraordinary Engines (A steampunk anthology.)
• The Difference Engine (One of the defining steampunk novels.)
• Assassin’s Creed: Renaissance (Book of the game. Sometimes these are good.)
• Wormwood (Second hand, 20p buy. Fantasy alternate history.)
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Because I’m not a fan of the original.)
• The Ghost King (Which I got before Christmas but haven’t touched yet.)

And those are the ones just on my table or at hand. I’m 2/3 of the way through “The Titan’s Curse”, which I am enjoying greatly. Yeah I know that the Percy Jackson books are really for young adults rather than almost-29 year olds, but I’ve always been a Greek mythology buff, and I have a thing about urban fantasy fiction (since, y’know, I write it!) even if it is supposedly for ‘kids’. I’m a big fucking kid and proud of it, alreet?

I actually started “The Stone of Tears” before Christmas but, like pretty much all of Terry Goodkind’s books it seems, it’s about 900 pages long, and I need to invest some serious time in it, which — because I like to read books in one or two sittings — I don’t currently have. I’ll get there. Already it is shaping up to be an interesting follow-up to “Wizard’s First Rule”.

These should last me a good while: probably till the end of February and into March if I decide to read the two Goodkind books back to back as I suspect I might. Saying that, however, there are OTHER THINGS that may ensure this stack of books last even longer.

And those are… In the next part!

In the words of CLAPTRAP, “Ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Now, normally I don’t rave about other peoples’ websites. I’m not the kind of guy who says, “Yeah, man, I love *this* site or *that* site!” but I am a tad behind on the blogging, and I actually DID wish to discuss my love of the random stuff that comes up on the internet, so I decided to combine these things into a blog.

I am a big fan of the lolcatz internet phenom. Sites such as http://icanhascheezburger.com/ rank highly on my Giggleometer*. This and http://www.weebls-stuff.com/ were a mainstay of my week until a couple of weeks ago when Amanda linked me a rather hilarious animated .GIF file of a manatee slapping into a glass wall. (http://img.moonbuggy.org/manatee-bumps-into-glass/)

You see, moonbuggy.org has a Random Image button. I dunno about you, but if I see any link with the word RANDOM in, I have to push it a few times, just to see how random it actually is. Randomising between 10 or so images is not really all that random. In fact, it’s a bit dull. But moonbuggy pleasantly surprised me, not only with the fact that it seems to have bajillions** of images, but that some of them made me almost wet myself with laughter too.

To this end, and to showcase the rather large number of random images I’ve collected over the years, I’ve decided to open up the FUNNIES directory of my website. It’s not a fancy-pants gallery or anything. It’s a basic server directory. Clink on one of the links, open up the image. 99% of them are pretty self-explanatory from the image titles. Not all of them are Safe For Work so don’t open them while your boss is hovering around.

You can find the lot at http://www.demajen.co.uk/funnies

Hope you get as much of a giggle from them as I have ^_^

~Jon

* not a real device. Requires two AA batteries.
** not a real number. Probably.

Ladies and Gents, loyal readers, August is upon us already! To say this year is going fast is an understatement. I put the speed down to me measuring time as intervals between appointments with various NHS-related people trying to “fix” my back.

So what have I been up to recently? Well, a variety of things really.

1) I’ve had some fits of guilt and nostalgia and have taken it upon myself to try and get in touch with friends from years gone by, see how everyone is, and get up-to-date contact info for everyone on the off chance that they want me to visit. Some of these people I haven’t heard from since I left college 10 years ago, so its really good to know that some of them are doing well, and I must confess to taking a guilty pleasure in knowing that some of them are as undecided about their futures at 27 as I am.

2) I’ve been reading books. Mainly re-reading Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books, in completely the wrong order. I’ve also been dipping into the world of Graphic Novels, working my way the the Watchmen in preparation for the movie release, as well as catching up on Slaíne.

3) I’ve been continuing to work on a particular painting. I’ve kinda got into a bit of a rut with it. Turns out it was a bit TOO ambitious for my current skills (and attention span), but it IS progressing slowly.

4) I’ve also done some writing, albeit not a lot. I’m currently working on a big fight scene towards the end of the novel and, unfortunately, its not going well. I’m finding it difficult to visualise the scene. I blame this on the painkillers which I’m currently taking too many of to block out the big spikes of pain that are happening (fortunately) infrequently.

5) I’ve been playing too much FFXI. As you might have gathered if you actually check my main site, a lot of the blogs/updates recently have been FFXI-related and thus not written about on this here Life Blog. Toddle over to the FFXI blog for updates on that.

That’s about it for now. Not the most exciting of updates, but I did feel I was bending my new year’s resolution a bit by counting the FFXI blogs as part of my “one blog per week” thing. Updates to this blog, and my website, will continue. Have a gander at the updated art gallery if nothing else. Some newish pieces in there from this year that most people haven’t seen. ^_^

~Jon

So yeah, I reset the blog layout back to a faster, default template, changed it to blog.html instead of index.html, and linked it through from the new index.php main page. Hopefully this won’t throw everyone too much, not that I imagine many people visit or read this anyways. \o/

~J

Work on the latest version of the website is progressing. Something was badly wrong with the blogger version of the site, so I plan on reverting this to a simple blog page, stripping all templating, and doing a new main page. While I don’t have the technical knowhow to import blog posts into a normal webpage, I will at least include links to the latest blog posts on the main http://www.demajen.co.uk page. It’s an opportunity for me to get back into the web-development scene, as blogger, while convenient, is also a bit too unsatisfying from a coding point of view. I’m going to have a go at learning PHP and XML, so I’ll see what I can come up with in the near future.

~J

I’ve been wanting to redesign the site (http://www.demajen.co.uk for those of you reading the imported blog on Facebook) for a while, mainly due to the fact that it’s been over a year since I last did it, and the background/artwork was getting a bit out of date.

Sadly it’s taken me a good two weeks to come up with any ideas. I tried a variety of things but fell back on the fact that if I made it too complicated, I’d never update it. Thus instead I spent a good portion of the time trying to figure out a way to skin the blogger aspect of the site, and I’ll build everything else round that.

The basic template is now up, but there’s a few things to work on:

1) The Archive/Previous Post links don’t show up well enough on the background.
2) The main post area may also get a background of some kind.
3) The borders that run down the page suddenly stop for some reason.
4) The image map menu on the banner may get some rollover images so they glow and give a bit more jazz/interactive feeling.
5) Missing a footer/copyright notice.
6) Page background is screwed at higher resolutions than 1440×900.
7) IE and Safari cut off the page at, oddly, the exact same place the borders stop running down the sides.
Content isn’t centered on IE.

But other than that (>_>), it doesn’t look too bad at all.

~J