Apathy Sketchpad

I’ve activated my new theme. Please feel free to discuss it in the forum.

So you know, I’m working on making my own theme for this blog, so there’s going to be a certain amount of ugliness at random until then. please bear with me. Shouldn’t be for too long at a time.

My website is going to be loaded onto a truck on Monday. It will be unable to communicate from this truck, and so from your point of view it will simply vanish at around 4AM and return sometime between 8AM and lunchtime. (All BST.)

I’m aware that most of my readers won’t be awake at that time, but if things do over-run, then you should be able to check up on progress at http://status.nearlyfreespeech.net/. Any time the site is down, in fact, that page should let you know why and for how long. It’s stored on a totally different server to this page, so unless they’re both down at once, it should always be there.

UPDATE: Back online now. I think I may have miscalculated the times from US time, or they might have done it at the wrong time, but either way we’re back.

A bit ago, Randall changed the design of xkcd.com and in doing so very inconsiderately broke my xkcd Wallpaper Randomiser. Well, now I’ve updated it, so if you used to use it then you can download the new version and use it once more.

As before, the source code is available, so you can see just how little has changed and just how easily you could have done this yourselves, you lazy bottoms.

The RSS feeds for this site are still a bit broken. I’ve even tried to strip the whole blog back to standard WordPress 2.2,and that seems not to have helped. The Atom feed is broken, and the RSS feed is broken.

But, the RSS2 feed works.

Please use http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/feed/rss2/ for all your syndication needs.

I am posting here to alert you to two shiny new websites. The first you may already be aware of.

Jump Leads is Ben Paddon’s new project. Well, I say “new”. Actually it’s about a year old now, but it’s just starting to really Go Places. He’s had the concept for a year or so, and he’s been writing it for about as long, but only recently has he found an artist to draw the actual comic. So the website will launch on the 6th. There are a few ‘episodes’ written, each of which will update one page at a time like a comic syndicated in a newspaper. These have been written variously by Ben, Euan and myself. I hear Friz is also officially on the list but hasn’t actually finished anything yet.

The second website is Channel Flip, which is Friz’ new project. (I have refrained from linking to Friz’ website since it appears to have turned into pornography, presumably after he let the domain lapse.) It describes itself as a satirical TV blog. It has updates from Friz, Paul, someone called Joey and myself. It updates rather more, and officially launches on last Friday.

As well as these, you can (hopefully) still cee me here and on RealVG. I just can’t stop blogging.

I’ve heard there’s a thing called “Web 2.0″ and apparently it involves a lot of clever design work. I don’t know or care what exactly it is about “Web 2.0″ that makes it better than, or even different to, the old thing (which presumably was “Web 1.x”), but either way it’s time I made my own WordPress skin for this site. So here is my design, which I’m rather pleased with: Read the rest of this entry »

For the record, I’ve set http://links.apathysketchpad.com to redirect to my Google Reader shared items page. This is mostly for my benefit — the regular URL is long and unsightly — but I thought I might as well let you know in case you want to visit that page without coming via this one, or give the link to someone without having to email them, or whatever.

I’ve added my captcha to the registration form, as most of the users registering were computers. Also, for the same reason, I’ve banned all @mail.ru email addresses, as those are only used by spambots (and Hellsheep). Registered uses still don’t need to complete the captcha when they log in or when they post a comment. They need only complete it once, during signup.

Lastly, I deleted all the users I thought might be computers, so if your account has vanished, sorry but that’s where it went, and feel free to recreate it.

I don’t expect you to care much but I feel it’s best to record these things.

Today I uploaded some little gadgets I did a bit ago. They’re handy for some people, not so much for others. If you use a lot of images, they’ll probably be useful to you. They need .NET, mind.