Archive for December, 2005

NTL issues

Friday, December 16th, 2005 | Life

NTL introduced bandwidth limits in November (unknown to me until I arrived home) which I can see as a serious issue. The result was that I needed to upgrade to a faster connection to get increased bandwidth limits because at the moment by amazingly fast 1mb connection is useful for about 10 hours – that’s how long it would take me to max it out if I was downloading.

So we rang them up and asked to upgrade to the 2mb a second connection which has a more reasonable bandwidth limit. They said we sure could but the current set top box modem couldn’t handle it so we would need a new modem. No worries, they could have that to us by mid-January. Just after I go back to uni as it happens.

Lot of good that is. After moaning to sales they are coming next week or something now, I don’t really know what’s going on but it looks like the bandwidth limit is going to stay until January when they remove all the bandwidth limits which means I will be stuck with this limit until January when I only have like a week.

Horror Blog

Friday, December 16th, 2005 | Life

I’ve just finished working as I have a habit of watching a movie every night for some reason now but what I’ve just been working on is a new site named Horror Blog. It’s along the lines of my last post about how a blog can be an entire site but be more than a blog as it will have stuff like reviews, top 10 lists, pages, etc.

It’s going to be powered by WordPress but I’ve stripped down the default theme and re-build all of the CSS and most of the main templates as well. I’ve re-written the header and footer files from scratch and there is hardy a trace of the original sidebar code in there.

I’m having some problems getting it compatable with Internet Explorer but that’s because I haven’t tried yet, I’m getting it perfect in Firefox then going to move on to the problems with IE.

Blogs as sites

Thursday, December 15th, 2005 | Life

Recently I’ve started to think a lot more about blogs. Not that I’ve been ignoring them until now, stuff like Celeb State and Gamer Forge had them built in but they seem more at the forefront now rather than an addon or even part of a site.

I seem to have accumulated a few recently at various locations though usually with WordPress, not exclusively though, and I am in contact with quite a few blogs on a regular basis which post about celebrity news such as Just Jared which is one of the first blogs that I actually like reading. I mean, I’m fully kitted out with an RSS reader and all I just never usually use it :P.

What it really has me thinking about is the potential for blogs to be entire sites. Not just to have a blog on your site but for the blog to be the actual site. But for it to be a site rather than just a blog. I know that’s a little wordy but I can’t be bothered to explain it any clearer so I’ll just have to hope you understand what I’m getting at :D.

AJAX in vBulletion 3.5

Thursday, December 15th, 2005 | Life

Been playing around with vBulletin 3.5 and I have to say the AJAX is pretty amazing in it. On the quick reply, once you hit post it brings up a message below the box telling you it is processing the post and then providing it is ok it will insert the post into the page without reloading!

DVD Library

Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 | Life

Still working on my DVD library. Still have to remember to burn Book of Vegans and I have That’s Our Hardy and a compilation of the web TV shows I need to burn as well though I am still putting stuff together at the moment. Couldn’t find the original CNT Show files so I’m probably just going to use the compressed Windows Media Video version.

There will be a few shows I will have to do that for I think but so far I have managed to get hold of the full quality stuff so far. I love the way video looks so much better when you’ve been watching it low quality and you get it onto DVD.

WordPress pages

Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 | Life

I’ve started playing around with WordPress pages on a new site I’ve just launched, Celeb Linkage. Originally I intended it just to be a directory but then I decided I wanted some content about each celeb on each page too and it might be cool to post some blog posts on the site every now and then.

So I decided to go with WordPress and check out its static page capabilities. It’s pretty much just like a normal page but it automatically creates some pretty cool static URLs as it does with blog posts so for what I want to it’s working out pretty well.

I miss Bod

Monday, December 12th, 2005 | Life

Home is way to stressful! I’m trying to sort out my filmography library which I’ve been compiling but I don’t have all the files so I have huge amounts of video files that can’t be burned to disk because a video file or image file is missing from one of the timelines so I can’t encode one of the video files that needs to be on the DVD.

For instance I’m chasing after an episode of the Gangster Match so I can’t burn that DVD, the same with The Hootrix DVDs and I can’t find the source files for That’s Our Hardy or Hardy’s Run.

Firefox 1.5

Monday, December 12th, 2005 | Life

I’ve just installed Firefox 1.5 on my desktop. It seems a lot like 1.0.7 except everything seems wierd. but other than that it seems ok so I guess I will get to like it once I start dragging and dropping tabs.

177,000 uniques

Monday, December 12th, 2005 | Life

I’ve just gone through all the sites in the Worfolk Online database bringing the statistics up to date. The approximate uniques for all of the Worfolk Online sites put together were sitting around 96,000 and I was hoping a complete update would push us over that.

So then, I’m pretty happy when the stats came up 177,000 monthly uniques. I’m liking what I am seeing here.

TrackBacks at xmeltrut.com

Sunday, December 11th, 2005 | Life

As the news stories on xmeltrut.com often comment on stories posted on blogs, particuarly the major celebrity news blogs, I thought it would be a good idea if when the news stories were posted they were able to send a TrackBack ping to the blog posts as most of the blogs support TrackBack.

So at the moment I am working on putting in a TrackBack system into xmeltrut.com which will hopefully ping this post to let me know it’s working once it is complete.