Hello.

If you've been here before you'll have noticed that I've changed things a bit; moved the furniture around, repainted the skirting boards, stripped the old wallpaper and removed the artex from the ceiling. Hope you like it.

I've gone for a much simpler, more stripped-back look-and-feel this time around. I'm not interested in having a cluttered blog, and I've got plans to add some extra things to this site in the not-too-distant future. The idea is to keep a nice clean aesthetic throughout the entire site, which is going to become much more of a showcase for my photography work than anything else.

Yes, I'll still post about Ubuntu and Launchpad here, but this site is primarily about me the photographer, not me the developer. If I feel that I have a lot to say here about the developer side of my life then I might think about setting up another blog to deal with it.

For those of you who want technical details about what's changed, well, there's not all that much. The site uses a lot more of the Frabjous codebase now than it used to - there was a lot of duplication of code in the grahambinns.com tree, so I've cleaned that up - and I've added a few things to Frabjous whilst I was working on the retheme and upgrade, which is nice and mutally beneficial.

Anyway, I'm aware that there will likely be bugs in the new version of the site that crop up over the next few days, so please do let me know if you come across any.

Then this site has finally been updated to be compatible with Django 1.0.2.

Let joy be unconfined.

Edit: Okay, almost everything worked. Fixed now.

... 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 blog keeps losing its categories. No, I don't know why. They're in the database, they just stop showing up in the feeds and the blog pages themselves. This is decidedly sucky.

And fuck knows why it throws HTTP 500s around after I add a post. That's just bizarre and irritating.

I need to give things a good kicking, so the site might disappear and reappear seemingly at random over the next couple of days. Which, well, you can cope with, frankly. 

And yes, it is that time in the morning.

Back from Dublin, having had a blast, natch. May post photos later if I find any that I really like (I've discovered that manually focussing in very low light is not easy, but if done right is worth the results).

The webserver's been up and down like a bride's nightgown whilst I've been away, so I'm working on transitioning from Servelocity to Bytemark (and not incidentally from Fedora 5 to Ubuntu 7.04). All I need to do now is get proxying set up properly for static files (I'm rapidly falling in love with Lighttpd but haven't yet got around to transitioning all my Apache-dependant stuff to using it). As a result you might see the site go missing for a wee while. You've been warned.