New server!
I have a new server! YAY! Hopefully this means that my site will be considerably faster than it used to be. We shall see.
Things might go up and down and be all wonky for a while as I tweak my new MT installation and implement the templates that I started working on last March. :P
Happy New Year everyone! :)
(As a completely unrelated aside, because I'm curious: Why have people started announcing new blog posts on Twitter?)
Chinese Cheesecake
Matt is up in arms about Technorati not loving on him like it should. Fair enough. Someone suggested he try searching for references to his blog using the Google Blog Search engine.
Out of curiosity, I decided to do this, too. What do you know? My cheesecake has been linked to on a Chinese blog.
And you know what? It looks hella good.
Surely not!
I have been remiss, readers mine. I have been neglecting this blog of mine as I've focused on my personal life. Anyone who's spent any sort of considerable amount of time online will agree: RL comes first.
But RL has sorted itself out, it seems. The climax?
James has quit his job.
Yes, you heard it right. On Friday, he tendered his resignation. Am I pleased about this?
There are no words. :)
Technorati
Woohoo. Matt has been quoted in an article about why Technorati sucks. If that means anything to you, you should go read it. :)
I own the BBC
So you may remember that there was some discussion a few months back about local city blogs and the nationality of certain contributors. Is it cool for a London blog to employ non-British bloggers?
In my (and many others') defence, I offered up some statistics and came to the conclusion that with 5% of the population of London born in non-British EU countries and 22% born outside of the EU, well, it's not unrepresentative having a few foreigners do some blogging for London. I mean, we're talking over a quarter of London being non-British, here.
That whole debate has been dead and buried for months now, but looking through my news reader this morning, I was tickled to read the headline "25% of Londoners are born abroad".
Yes. That's what I said. Last November.
Threaded comments
I'd really like to implement threaded comments on my MT installation. I've found a plugin (MT Threaded Comments) on the MT Plugins site, but of course it's for a previous version of MT. It seems someone has tracked back to it, saying they've implemented these threaded comments on MT 3.0 but of course that person's site seems to have gone poof.
I am left with three options:
- Pick through the patch, trying to figure out where to make the changes in the new version of code that I have not written and with which I am not familiar
- Sigh and admit that I'm not going to get threaded comments on my site
- Try and write my own plugin - something I've yet to do
Anyone have any advice? Also, if this site starts acting flaky, well, you can probably take a guess as to why that's happening.
USA Today
I was quoted in today's USA Today about blogging and the terrorist attacks. It's a little more than halfway down the page.
edit: my picture is on page four of the real paper!
MIT Blog Survey
You should take this. It's sort of fun.
London Metblog
As many of you know, I am a contributor to the London Metblog. I'm not a very good contributor, if I'm honest. As much as I enjoy blogging on my personal blog, being interesting to more than just my small group of friends is not my biggest strength. But I contribute nonetheless, if not as regularly as I should.
Apparently there's a new London blog out there, and at least one blogger has taken notice.
Much to my surprise, I was actually mentioned in his brief post, when he drew attention to the fact that I am, indeed, American:
However, at least one of the contributors is an American, which seems to fly in the face of what they are attempting.
While it's always nifty to get a mention in someone else's blog, I'm not sure I agree with what's being said. In the spirit of 'Not all Americans live in America' (a source of recent frustration for me), you can obviously follow that up with 'Not all Londoners were born in the UK'. (Or even 'Not all Londoners were born in London', but we're not going to go there because I don't have the patience to look up the statistics.)
So, I've done a little research (in that anal way of mine), and poked around National Statistics Online. I found data about London from the 2001 census there, and after a bit of aggregation, came up with some figures.
| UK born | EU born | Non-EU born | |
|---|---|---|---|
| City of London | 5,217 | 560 | 1,408 |
| Inner London | 1,833,663 | 190,272 | 742,179 |
| Outer London | 3,395,524 | 186,776 | 823,677 |
| Total | 5,234,404 | 377,608 | 1,567,264 |
If you add all of this up, the total population of London represented by these statistics is 7,179,276. This means that 5% of the population of London is EU born and a whopping 22% is non-EU born.
Which further means that over ¼ of the population of London was born outside of the UK!
I guess I'm trying to say that I don't think having an American blogger on a London blog is so bad. At least, I don't think it should be a mark against the blog. In fact, it might even be misrepresenting London to not have a couple non-British bloggers.
Just a thought.
Edit 12 Nov 04: For the record, I was a bit pissed off when I wrote this and subsequently commented on it. It was a bad day. I mentioned that the London Metblog wasn't particularly well-run, but that didn't really come out right. In the past, I've felt that the hands-off approach of the management has been a bit too hands-off, but that's all been sorted and I haven't had a beef about anything since then. I shouldn't blog when I'm grumpy.
LiveJournal II
Wow that spammed my friends list. Let's try this again and see if it updates everything again or just adds the newest entry.
