Busy days…

Been quite busy after sunday trying to redo my website using MoveableType. It’s a lot more advanced blogging system than I’m using at present and the one feature I want from it is ‘comments’. After I get it up and running people can add comments to my stories if they wish

A lot going on at work too, we’re moving to a new office, probably in a day or two. The new office is near Baker Street, which is not too far from our current location. Since the central line went down about 2 months ago, I’ve had to find alternative means to get to work. Now that we’re moving to Baker Street, I don’t need the central line anymore *sigh* I really like the central line, it’s probably one of the fastest ones around. Extremely overcrowded but fast nonetheless.

Great weather for a few days

The weather has been great for the past 2 or 3 days. The sun was shining yesterday and I decided to get off my butt and go for a run. As is always the case in London, strong winds ruined my run considerably. I also had to dodge quite a few West Ham United supporters on the way to the football match (West Ham won btw). I had to push quite hard on the run but I managed my usual approx 3km.

On the Iraq war front, I found a website which I believe is much more useful than any other. It is Technorati Cosmos, which is monitoring approx. 155,000 weblogs and showing a listing of the most popular articles which are being discussed in the blogosphere It is quite useful indeed, especially since you can’t monitor just one blog and hope to see all the news. This allows you to see what thousands of people are discussing.

We are going to meet up with a friend in an hour to go and watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester square. They were giving out tickets at 1 pound each

Wow!

Wow, I can’t believe all the things you can do with stylesheets! The site looks much much better now after I wrote my own stylesheet and tweaked for about 3-4 hours The results are worth it!

I have to add a table for the stuff on the left and do something about the heading. Other than that so far, things are looking good. I thought I wouldn’t be able to do much customization with Personal Weblog, but it’s customization capabilities are pretty good

On another note, the war in Iraq is about to begin in about 18 minutes approx. according to the coundown timer on this website. Will be old news by the time anyway goes there from here, but I wanted to add this note especially for historical reasons.

Economics refresher

I was trying to find something to refresh my knowledge of Economics and came up with this project, written by some students at Clemson University.

So I went ahead and added Slashdot, Freshmeat and Linux Today news feeds to the site, as you can see on the right The sites make these feeds available by serving an XML file, called a Resource Description File Site Summary (RSS). All you have to do is parse this file, and apply some formatting. This is quite easily done in PHP. I got ready-made PHP scripts for these sites from here. An excellent article on how to use PHP to parse XML RSS feeds can be found here.

Website updated

So I spent quite a while yesterday working on my website. It took me quite a while to get the back-end stuff and layout sorted. I opted for a table-based layout which I wanted to avoid because of text-based browsers, but i think it looks quite alright.

I haven’t added much content yet but I do plan on getting to it ASAP. I’m currently working on a PHP/MySQL-based bookmark manager so that I can store my links (with categories) in a DB. I’m doing this because I dislike the fact that whenever I come across an interesting link on the web, I have to bookmark it in the current browser. Since I switch browsers all the time I keep losing my links. Hopefully this way I can quickly add any link to the DB on my website whenever I need it. I’m getting to learn some PHP along the way which is great

One other advantage of this top-left-center table-based layout is that I can add another column to the right-hand side whenever I wish to, possible for RSS feeds from other websites or blogs.