grahambinns.com

... then the DNS records have propagated correctly and your RSS feed reader is now slurping from the new grahambinns.com server, which is just hunky dory as far as I'm concerned.

I've been working on this version of things for a while. Besides a re-skin - which taught me a lot about how I should be designing my templates and CSS, so it should be a bit easier next time - I've also tidied up the codebase a bit and added some new features. Most of them are under the hood, but here are some of them for those of you that care:

• Each piece of content on the site has its own license. For example, all my photos are CC-BY-NC-SA, as is all the content here so far. But when I start adding stories here (and it will happen within the next few months, I hope) I'll be able to license them as I see fit.
• I can now make posts using markdown syntax. This might not seem like a big deal but over the years I've come to loathe sites that simply turn linebreaks into <br />s (yes, Wordpress, I'm looking at you. You still do it, even with valid HTML posts). On this site I used to use TinyMCE as a WYSWIG HTML editor, which worked fine but was pretty horrendous to load on a slow connection. Now I just use markdown and let Django's markup app do all the work. Fantastic.
• You can now post comments using markdown syntax. No more trying to post a link and having Django eat it!
• I can now post to the blog by email. I thought about using gpg signatures to validate my emails but realised that it was too complicated (we do it in the Launchpad email interface and one look at that code a while back persuaded me to not do it unless I had to). Instead I've gone for generating single-use authentication tokens, which suits me fine and should hopefully - along with an obscure incoming address - stop spammers from doing nasty things.
• The site now supports pingbacks, though at the moment it can only receive them until I iron out some issues with the pingback sending code.

There are a lot more things that I've fixed, added, tweaked and polished, but none that are particularly interesting.

So here, finally, are the vital statistics of the new site:

• Server: Bytemark virtual server running Ubuntu 8.04.
• Django 0.97-pre (to be upgraded to 1.0 stable when it comes out in September).
• PostgreSQL 8.3 (the migration to which fixed so many problems it's unreal).
• Apache with mod_python for serving the Django stuff.
• Lighttpd for serving the static files.

The trouble I find with projects, particularly daily projects, is that they're bloody hard to keep doing sometimes. Mur Lafferty has had the problem with The News From Poughkeepsie. JR Blackwell, who's doing a 365 days photography project has also encountered it. And now I'm really hitting a wall with my own daily project, 360-odd days of 2008. So far I've posted up to day 156 (June 5th) and I'm struggling to get round to doing day 157 or anything thereafter (for reference, today is day 162).

I have my reasons, to an extent, for not being able to get much done at the moment. For a start, I'm not able to go very far at present, which limits the things of which I can take photos. On top of that I'm not, unlike JR Blackwell or Rebbeka Gudleifsdottir or a dozen other photographers on Flickr, particularly photogenic and I'm not terribly fond of self portraits. I do have some ideas for shots in which I could serve as the subject but having the time to execute them is another matter entirely. Oh, and there's always the matter of what to say when someone sees you taking a self portrait and asks "what are you doing?"

And let's not even talk about writing. Well, okay, let's. But only insofar as to say I'm not doing any at the moment and haven't been for a while. And of course, when you're off the wagon for too long it makes it harder to get back on. Much, much harder. So even now, when I have the time to write, I find myself doing something else entirely whilst thinking "I should be writing."

All of which means I am made of FAIL.

Still, a night's sleep and who knows? I might get up in the morning, full of the joys of... er... Summer, and sit down and write 1000 words before breakfast and then, after breakfast, go out and take some photos.

In an infinite universe anything is possible.

I'm posting this to remind all you good people about FreakAngels, a weekly web comic written by King Ellis and drawn by Paul Duffield. It's updated every Friday at noon UK time (UTC +1, if you need to know). This week's episode is #15.

That'll be all. Go back to your existences.

In a recent blog post, Neil Gaiman discusses the topic of second drafts:

The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes. The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do.

The whole post is interesting (and he says more than the above snippet on the subject of second drafts). Also, it includes dancing bees; never a bad thing.

Mur Lafferty writes:

I am thrilled to announce that I have signed a contract to release Playing For Keeps with Swarm Press! Swarm is an imprint of Permuted, the small horror press, and is launching this summer with three superhero titles, PFK being one. (For podcast fans, Matthew Wayne Selznick's Brave Men Run is another title coming out from Swarm.)

This is fantastic news for Mur and for everyone that's followed PFK via I Should Be Writing since its inception.

Congratulations Mur! I'd raise a glass of gin in your honour, except I can't stand the stuff, frankly. Oh well. There's a bottle of single malt somewhere that'll do as a substitute.