It’s suddenly occurred to me that today is the first of July. Which means that I’ve been throwing words at the screen which have occasionally been falling into some semblance of order and manifesting themselves as blog posts on this site for five years.

Five fucking years.

Ouch.

The archives on the left are not a complete set of everything that’s ever been written here. There have been a couple of hiatusessees and for a long time, I only had what was there from the reboot back in, um, 2005 I guess. (Yup - four month hiatus from Nov 04 to Mar 05, most of which you spent in and out of hospital. Ed.) I restored the previous two years a few months ago although not in their entirety as a lot of the highly personal stuff (of which there was quite a lot back then for one reason or another) was culled to concentrate on, well, less personal topics.
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After a couple of hours of pissing about with MySQL and PHP, I have finally managed to reinstate all the archive posts from the original incarnation of headCleaner(). I say all but actually I mean most of them. I don’t know why - it’s not like anyone’s going to go back and read them all but still, for completeness sake, it’s all there.

Now to get the redesign finished!

I’ve recently installed the Bad Behavior plugin in an attempt to quell the amount of comment spam I receive on a daily basis. (Akismet does a grand job but still ends up blocking hundreds every day) You may have noticed this as for a while there, it displayed that information on the front page. Of course, no-one told me and I rarely look at the front page myself so that was kinda embarassing!

However, I’ve just enabled strict mode on the plugin which has the possible side effect of some people not being able to leave comments or something. If this happens to you then let me know by emailing me at Dragon at this domain. I’ll get onto it in due course.

That is all.

Where ‘nugget’ is Battlestar Galactica slang for newbie/rookie/beginner.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that Ronald D. Moore, creator of the new Battlestar Galactica, has started blogging.

Don’t ever make changes to a live system. It fucks everybody off. Also, don’t do as I do, do as I say.

Some oddness and weirdness will abound around here while I piss around with template settings and so on. I still can’t be arsed to revise the design entirely - gods know it’s in desperate need of an overhaul but am I bovvered? Well, yes, I am actually. But anyway.

Blogroll is out of date and lists several defunct links. I might well replace it with my G-reader feeds but, having checked the outbound link stats for the last 6 months, it would appear that it’s very rarely used as for links so I wonder if it’s even worth keeping.

So much to do, so little motivation.

There has been a change around here. Hands up anyone who noticed!

If you’re looking at the blog layout and design, that’s the wrong place. Yes, it still sucks monkey arse but fuck it, so what. The answer you’re looking for is in terms of content. For years and years and years I’ve been talking about doing films more and for years and years and years I’ve been putting it off. Why all of a sudden I’m approaching the proverbial bull and seizing it by it’s big, hairy, metaphorical bollocks I don’t know (well, I do, but I can’t be arsed to go into it here) but carpe coleones I intend to.
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I’m anticipating a huge influx of visitors and an increase in hits to this site if not from now then from the middle of October onwards. There’s a new MMO being released by the renowned Richard Garriot of Ultima Online infamy with which this blog shares a title. I already get quite a lot of hits because of that - I can only imagine it will be more when the game is live.

I find myself wondering when the first fucktard will leave a comment along the lines of “This site is nothing to do with the game! WTF? This sucks! Fuck you, fucker!” So, the question is, do I change the name of the blog (again), do I add a little disclaimer pointing out that this is nothing to do with the game or do I just roll with it?

I stuck a MyBlogLog thing on the sidebar. I don’t know why. Because I could, I suppose. Plus I saw in one set of stat reports that someone was reading my blog through the MyBlogLog site. Which is both interesting and infuriating. Interesting because it’s clever how it did that without my apparent knowledge (although yes, I did sign up to the site for some gods unknown reason) and infuriating because they’re not coming here dammit!

Everytime I start thinking about a redesign, I lose the will to live because I wonder why the hell I should bother. (Also, I then get distracted and go and do something else instead like bash my head repeatedly against a wall, my lack of ideological principles or someone elses head until everything goes comfortably numb) Fuck syndication, fuck it up its stupid arse. Why bother maintaining a site that no-ones coming to visit. Apart from Matt. And Endie. And Lyle occasionally. Where was I?

Oh yes, so anyway, MyBlogLog. I actually hate it. I think it’s one of the ugliest widgets I’ve seen and I’m not entirely sure I like the data its presenting. More to the point, I’m not sure I want people to see the data its presenting. It’s interesting to me but when I see it on a site, I actually feel like I’m being violated. Just a little bit but even so. Still, I thought it would be interesting to see what happens here for a little bit, even though it’s heinously horrendous to look at. Then again, so are the other widgets I’m throwing in with gay abandon over there. Colour me bothered.

Back to syndication: I know that my posts get published elsewhere. The fact that I write occasionally about MMOs mean that my posts get published to some news aggregator sites. This irks me. (Annoy would be too strong a word). It probably doesn’t help that this site is named after a much anticipated, yet to be released MMO as well. So I wondered whether I could/should edit my RSS feed to provide indication of a new post but rather than contain the contents of the post, leave a message saying something like “Yes I’ve posted something new and it might be worth your while to read so perhaps you’d like to get off your lazy arse and come to my site and read it there, fucker!”

A different message, less polite perhaps, might be in order for blog aggregators.

Of course, I won’t get around to doing any of this because I just won’t. MyBlogLog will stay there forever beneath my never updated Last.fm list on that bland background shade of pale white with insipid pastel blue bordering, waiting for the darkness to descend and claim it for its own. I just need to take the step to rip the entire guts out of the beast.

No flesh shall be spared.

Posts and conversations about MMOs and online gaming will be happening less here as I have been taken on as a contributor to the popular MMOG blog “Kill Ten Rats“. (Well, they needed someone to lower the tone!) I know some of you are occasionally interested in that topic so if you want to read more, drop by there sometime.

A quick followup:

Unreliable Witness says it better than I can.

Keen to take part but not so keen on having a sheriff’s badge? Use the Blog Advisory System! (via Gordon)