My Blog — Category

Well, this is the first of some changes being made around here. I’ve tidied up some things, remade others. Hope you like.

Oh, and after months of deliberating as to what to call my blog, I’m just going to call it “Daniel’s View.” Why? Well, with “Daniel’s Blog,” it was my blog, but didn’t really reflect the content. It isn’t a site just about me, as is common about blogs with “blog” in the name. Plus I’m really uncreative when it comes to names.

If you have a MySpace profile, feel free to add me as a friend.

My blog has now been running for a whole year. In actual fact, this is not my first blog. I’ve had many incarnations of a blog in some form. They always, however, got caught out when the web host would go down, typically without warning. Fortunately my last host warned me before they went down, which let me go onto this webhost, which is kindly supported and run by Gian and Alastair. Cheers guys, without you my blog would probably be ready for deletion on some lost web server.

I started my blog on the 21st of April 2005 with this little post. The original idea was to have a personal blog, however I quickly realised my life is rather uninteresting, or more, why would someone want to read soley about me?

It has evolved a lot since then, undergoing three theme changes (I’ve got to cut back), and been caught in the flow of the web. There are 340 posts, ranging from what happened at university, to the New Zealand elections, through to simple tricks I’ve found on the internet (and my personal cries about the failings of Internet Explorer).

People have done various searches of people to reach my web site, “adam levine” is popular (check it here), “alison mau” is popular for some reason (recently dumped Prime TV journalist), “wendy petrie” picked up (One News presenter), and even “lee tamahori.” Playboy cards, UMD pornography, PSP, kissing, gay actors and Dynamo Go are all in there too.

Anyway, I’d like to thank everyone who has visited, still visits and even subscribes to this blog. As you can tell, it is much, much more that just about me. You may notice things may change a little, but that’s just how things go. Here’s hoping for another year of blogging!

I have turned the web feed into a FeedBurner feed. You don’t have to do anything (the URL is still the same in otherwords), everything will still chug along as normal.

If you have any problems, then please comment so I can try and fix them.

Now, if you were reading this blog last night, or whenever, you may (or may not have) noticed lots of fighting with FeedBurner. It’s just that the plugin that they say you should use with Feedburner wasn’t working. I haven’t a clue why. I fixed it by doing a bit of reading on the support forums and making this code:

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^FeedBurner.*
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOURBLOGNAME [R,L]

This is for the pretty URLs. How does it work? Well, you put it in your .htaccess file wherever WordPress has put its own Rewrite rules. The first line tells it the base URL (which is of course /), and the second tells it that it is on the condition that the User Agent (browser/reader/et al.) does not contain “FeedBurner.” Then the final line tells it where to go to (remember to change it to put to your blog URL). If it is FeedBurner, it basically ignores the rule so then FeedBurner actually gets to the content.

Make sure you set up your pinging!

I’ve just finished rolling out the updated theme. It should be nicer to those people that don’t have very good graphics cards. Opera didn’t have the performance hit that Firefox had with the fixed background images though. Almost tempts me to switch back to that. The fixed backgrounds didn’t really affect Internet Explorer, it doesn’t support them.

One thing that did get fixed for Internet Explorer users was that bug that I knew about when I rolled out this theme originally. It was where the first date box would render wildly wrong. Well, let me tell you how I fixed it. A comment. Yes. A comment. I put a comment right at the start of this content block, and it fixed the problem.

Also the software pages have been modified slightly so then I can add news updates directly on them. Visitors to the PSP MusicBox page may have seen some more technicalities as I tried to figure out how to get it working - it was working on my computer, but now it works fine on here.

Plus there was a little bit of a post rejig.