Posted by martin on
Sunday, 15 July 2007 at 16:35
I’d really completely given up posting anything on my old blog, but I’ve decided to start again. I never really liked many features of the Blogger blog, especially its appearance. I know you can adjust this a lot, so I came with an open mind as to whether I would be able to fix up Blogger to something I was happy with. However then I discovered that in order to access my Blogger blog I needed to have a Google Account. Now I am very nervous about the power of Google, and don’t particularly want to sign up for a Google Account, so this made up my mind that I would switch to a blog completely under my control.
This blog is hosted on the Student-Run Computing Facility, who kindly provide a server with pretty liberal usage policies for individuals and societies in Cambridge. It runs on Simplelog, an application written using the Ruby on Rails framework. A lot of the blogging software out there is written in PHP. Now most of the PHP code I have seen is pretty ugly; in addition it is far too easy to write insecure code in PHP. So I wanted to avoid PHP if possible. I have never worked with Ruby before, but it seems fairly well-designed. For the sake of history, I have copied and pasted the posts from my old blog but not the comments.
Tags blogger, blogging, google, php, rubyonrails, simplelog
Posted by martin on
Friday, 01 July 2005 at 21:09
Yes, I know the week isn’t over and it’s two days since I last posted but I shall post again for the last time before I go away, to Texas until 11th for training and then to Merida, Mexico for the IMO itself, during which time I shall adopt a different posting strategy (any time I get a computer, probably every 3 days or so).
About the question of post length, I have to say posts look far longer on the blog than when I am writing them - the text box I enter them in is much wider (perhaps this is to do with me using a wide screen laptop to post from). Does anyone know:
1. Is it a bug in the Blogger software that when I choose to display N days, it still displays N posts?
2. Surely there is a quicker way of making a new post than the four clicks I have to go through ATM from my front page?
3. Is there a Blogger bug-reporting page?
Anyway, I have managed to do a couple of things in that short space of time. Primarily the Leavers’ Service yesterday, followed by barbecue. Especially pleasing for me was getting the printed Yearbook, given all the work I put into producing it. I also was awarded the Lord Grey Award for Excellence, “the highest accolade we can give in the College” (Dr Mulryne, 2003 Prize Day Address). There was a severe shortage of coffee shop space on Botanic Avenue following this service. The idea that I might well never see many of these people again is a hard one to get round (I will be heading for Poland on results day).
–
Martin
Tags blogger, blogging, imo, methody, yearbook