Monday 30 November 2009

Beauty and the Beast

following on from approaching Leeds from the east
I attempted the same from the west this sunday gone, however the weather was not on my side and I cut short my walk which meant I did not get as many photos as I wanted.

Approaching from the west is a pleasant contrast to the previous walk and it was nice to see lots of people using the path and there was abundance of wildlife to be seen en route, including this fella.



Shortly after passing him was when the heavens began to open and instead of walking directly back along the canal path, I decided to cut off the corner and walked through the suburbs to get back to the centre on doing so I passed the former site of Leeds International Pool.




The Pool was built in the sixties and as local legend has it, the architect John Poulson who five years later would be up on corruption charges, didn't factor in the width of the pool lining, thus making the pool one inch too short for international competions.

There is a great write up and urban exploration photos up here from January 2008 and some more of my own photos from Sunday are in my THIS IS LEEDS set on flickr

I cant wait for it to be out


Includes Men of "Men of Harlech" and all your favourite Zulu chants.

Friday 27 November 2009

Bit of a waffle on prose and screenwriting.


I have been doing a lot of writing this year, down to joining the Leeds Writing Group (I heartily recommend joining a writing group if you need a kick up the arse)  , #fridayflash and the fact that it is cheap to do (except for the many beers at the LWG!)

When I say cheap, I mean in comparison to my main passion which is film. Sadly work has been a bit short coming on what has been an expensive year and I haven't been able to make much progress on developing my next feature film Silva Superior due to lack of funds. 

My previous feature film Mortus Illumina (if you are reading this in the future , the link might be mortusillumina.com - why are you reading this post ?) which has been going through post production hell, should finally be seeing the light in 2010.  I mention this as I have another feature length script which is set in the same universe as MI which I have decided to short-story-with-chapters-ise ( I did try finding a verb to create a Novella but with no joy - thanks for @Britmic for the suggestion) to give myself a longer writing challenge than the DAC.

Re reading the script, it feels right for a novella and it feels like its going to be about 40'000 words (script is 101 pages) in length. The nice thing about having the script is all the story elements and arcs are already there , all I need to do is flesh out the script and convert it over.

I made bit of a start on it yesterday writing what effectively is going to be the prologue which in the script is defined at the end by "ROLL OPENING CREDITS:"

Talking to Mazz in Leeds last night, we started discussing the differences between screenwriting and story writing. Firstly there are the obvious ones such as the technical nature of scripts which requires the following of certain formatting rules and terminology, but the big one,  and feel free to disagree is that when writing a screenplay you should treat the audience stupid and keep it simple.  Whilst with prose, you treat your audience with respect.

Which when you think about it is correct, a screenplay is effectively a set of instructions which is down to the the director to execute, whilst with prose,  not only have you got to get the story across, you have also got to keep your reader entertained.

A bad script does not necessarily mean a bad film and vice versa.  There are many elements that go into a film and a vast array of talents and technicians all bring their own unique flavour to the pie that the director is cooking. However, writing prose on the other hand , the writer is alone and all they have to rely on is the words they put down.

I did do a quick google (very quick) and it seems a lot more novelists extend out into screenplays,  but I can't see any screenwriters turned novelists- are there any ?

Whilst mentioning differences so far, there is one thing that both forms have in common and that is a .... Wait for it - story and the creative process for that is like for like.  It does make me wonder though, how much the differences in discipline effect film adaptions of books, or is it irrelevant ?

As for my novella, I wouldn't hold your breath as it is going to be the first casualty to be sent to the back of the shelf when I am back working and able to  get on with Silva Superior.  But, when it does get finished (I have added a word progress meter to the sidebar), I may send it out to get my first few rejection letters or alternatively link it from the Mortus illumina site.

The Picture on this post is a still from some of the VFX work which is being done on MI at the moment and there are a couple more trailers up on youtube.

A Cocktale ...


My #fridayflash entitled "A Cocktale" is now up on the Dead Adventurers Site and you can read it by clicking on this hyperlink

Wednesday 25 November 2009

Mount Norfolk (13,016ft) Part IV



The Penultimate part is now up on the DAC and you can read it here , The image to the left I took myself when I was a helicopter ride in Revelstoke, British Columbia earlier this year which is partly where the idea of the Mount Norfolk story came from.

Gentlemens Spice


Just finished the draft for this weeks #fridayflash which is going to be another helping of Gentlemen's Spice on my  Dead Adventurers Club Site. The Gentlemen's spice section is my salute to Ronnie Barker who did a series of books in the late seventies and early eighties with titles such as Gentlemen's Relish and,  as pictured Sauce.

The Books are a collection of old saucy postcards, early erotic photographs and other paraphernalia packed full of vintage innuendoss and on top of that, a narration by Barker himself.  I think I own all the books; in probably the wrong order

Sauce
Gentlemen's Relish
Books of Boudoir Beauties
Oh La La - The Ladies of Paris
Sugar and Spice


All the Characters in the Dead Adventurers Club exist in the same universe no matter what heading the stories are under. A More subtle nod to Barker, is the Duchess Bloemfontein who has a name check in Tiberius'd Dabble with The Occult and will also appear in this weeks Gentlemen Spice and no doubt future stories.

The Duchess Bloemfontein In Ronnie Barkers own words;"... served in Paris during the first world war and now serves in my local."


Tuesday 24 November 2009

Smokeback - New Drawings Up


Alas, poor Manikin I knew thee well ...

New Drawings up on my drawing blog including the Patella and Incus Bones.

Bit worried as my site no longer appears in google blog search, I can't find any reason why...

Monday 23 November 2009

Leeds Victoria and Hunslet Mill

Went for a walk last sunday along the canal heading east into the city of Leeds. Firstly, boy does it stink and a lot of the tow paths were closed, so a fair chunk was spent walking around souless industrial estates.


Did however come across this place which from what I have been reading was the Victoria and Hunslet Mills.  The site is quite large and the black and white image below shows what it would of looked like in the fifties


I found the B&W image on the 28DaysLater site, which has a thread that gives a bit more about the history of the place and some inside photographs.   The Photographs I took up are up on my flickr account


Silent Hill The Film



The DVD has been sitting on my shelves for sometime, I have only briefly played a demo of the first video game (long time ago!) and had not heard much about the film and knew little about the franchise. From having watched the Resident Evil films, I was expecting Silent Hill to be a good old rubber monster fest which was what I was in the mood for this Saturday gone.

However, was pleasantly surprised to find that there is a cracking horror story in the film. Yes, its by no means the most original of stories, but sometimes all you need is a small American deserted town that had some over zealous religous nuts who have dammed themselves into purgatory, a good dollop of evil and demonic rules and the nightmare world of a little child. 

Onto the cast, I was surprised to see Sean Bean in this film who had a some what supporting role. The character really doesn't do much but is needed to help fill some gaps for the story - It does make me wonder if there is a longer version of the film in existence. I think Christophe Gans, the director has done a pretty fine job of packing in a lot of story elements into the two hours, but one criticism is, a couple of things feel rushed and have bits been skipped in the edit room I wonder ?

Of the rest of the cast, Jodelle Ferland does a fine act of being a creepy and demonic kid (aren't they all anyway?)  and Radha Mitchell does a fine job of carrying the film as the main protagonist. The real star (except for the monsters) is Laurie Holden as the "kick arse" Motorcycle cop.  This is definitely an actress who deserves more big screen time.

The limelight for the monsters is unashamedly stolen by the evil nurses. The picture does not do them justice, but truth be told I cannot be arsed  to walk over to the shelve, pick up the DVD, put it in my macbook , remind myself how to take screen caps on a mac and then resize it for the blog. Watch the film instead!  They are genuinely creepy and well choreographed as are the rest of the monsters in the film. I did feel that the Pyramid character could of been used a bit more, which again gets me wondering if there is a longer cut.

Someone behind the scenes who most definitely deserves a mention is Carole Spier, the production designer who has done a fantastic job on the film. Watching the making of (which is very good as a making of') she does not at all look like your normal production designer, who (this is from experience I might add) are normally to be found on the cheise lounge along with the art director eating grapes and drinking wine whilst occasionally waving their riding crop to order some beautiful young thing with whimsical instructions (we need a tree) which eventually gets filtered down to the crew - who then do all the work!.  She seems really hands on and passionate, which shows in the design and especially the consistency of within the film. It would be hard to argue that Silent Hil is not a very gorgeous looking film and one that makes you ponder for a second , where you would take it for a date.

All in all, Its not quite a rubber monster movie, nor is it a dark and intense horror.  Instead it has its place on the gentle green park inbetween which you and I  know has been built on an ancient indian burial ground.

Will I be rushing out to watch the sequel next year ? probably not. Will I be keeping an eye out for the sequel in the DVD bargan bin - yes , and if a longer director cut comes out I will be keeping and eye out for that too.

Saturday 21 November 2009

MotorHead at the 02 Academy Leeds



You don't describe a Motorhead crowd, it is normally used as a simile and those of you who take an interest in the arts of crowdo'measurelology would not of been disappointed by the crowd last night. Conversations were rife about whoes head was who in the crowd shot on x dvd's, old battle stories were being swapped as season veterans rattled off lists of concerts venue. There was enough leather in the room, that any passing cows who happened to pass by and look through the window, would of thought they were looking into Dante's Inferno and then proceed back to their bretheren and started suicide cults.

It goes without saying the audience was only dressed in one colour - black.

The night began with the Amazonian (though all breasts in check) Girlschool opening, a little slow to get going in their first couple of numbers, but by the end of their set had laid down just that perfect balance of distorted guitar to wet the appetite in preparation for the main course of Umlaut.

Next up were the Damned who last time I saw them was at the Kentish Forum four years ago and my viewpoint was this . I was thinking about taking some front on grainy images this time, so I could flick between the two to create some sort of 3D captain sensible, which I m sure was the ambition of many a school child in the eighties.  The Dammed played an extremely tight set and were absolutely full of beans with Vanian being on top form.

Then onto the main act itself and if it was disappointment you were after, then you would of been disappointed as it got off to an explosive start.  My first reactions were how much I missed vinyl as the crisp studio remastered digital copies of the songs on my ipod have removed all those wonderful , slight off notes and guitar strings scratches and whilst the computers can make things nice and crisp, I prefer my motorhead raw and that it is exactly how it was served last night.

Do I need to mention it was loud ? Yes I do, I believe by asking if I need to mention it and then by mentioning it , I can add to the stress that it was loud - would you want your killed by death any other way, I think not.

Mikkey Dee's drum solo was made of the stuff that could make the world a better place and politicians should take note. I think it would be an understatement to say that the lad had some energy.

The highlight of course was hearing Ace of Spades as the devil intended it , though I must also say some of their new material they played was worth the price of the admission ticket alone.
All in all, everything you could of wanted from a motorhead gig with an added dollop of loudness and rawness.

Ps. To the dollop who standed behind us and threw his beer straight up instead of forward - your doing it wrong.

Friday 20 November 2009

Icerocket


I came across this week, a site called icerocket which is a real time blog search engine. The nice thing about it, is you can also search the web,  twitter, myspace, newsources and images. It is also nicely laid out.

It also has a blog tracker tool, which I have added both of my blogs to and one of the pieces of information it gives you is your blog rank. I thought I would take a look at what was above and below my sites in the rankings.

First of all my Smokeback site has a ranking of #1645.

Above that is Mikes Money Making Blog  which looks like one of those sights that just scrapes how to make money articles - I can't even be arsed to read it.

Below my site is The Best PTC  which is a site just listing Pay to Click sites banners.

Moving onto  The Dead Adventurers Club  ,this has a rank of #4655

Above that is Tanto 84 , which I have no idea what it is about , looks like its in some sort of nordic language - though I am most likely wrong,

Below it is Chad and Tammys Adventures  Which is a blog from a couple of Triathletes from Victoria ,British Columbia

So what I have learnt from looking at my rankings ? absolutely sweet FA, I also notice that my Dead Adventurers Club site has jumped 647 positions in a day and my smokeback site, a mere 30. Well I do have a pretty looking graph.

Thursday 19 November 2009

The Next Tall Tale...


Gave a read out of "The Most Blasted Blizzard" last night at the Leeds Writing Group. The story is another installment in the Tall Tales of Tiberius O'Donnell and is the first historical outing for Tiberius as the action takes place in The Great Blizzard of 1888

My Tiberius Voice was not on form last night - was a bit clunky but it got some laughs in the right places.  Ideally In my head I have a very posh public school voice that occasionally slips into a Irish twang and a drunken slur. The drunken slur, I have no problems doing.

A lot of these early tales are going to be more giving back-story and introduction to other characters in Tiberius world.  One of the things I am most pleased with "The Most Blasted Blizzard" is I finally got a mention of Tiberius pal Hans, who has been deleted from all three stories so far.

Might sound a bit odd, but I have a self imposed 1000 word-ish limit on the Tall Tales and Hans has been the main victim of cutting.

In "The  Despicable Beast of Marrakesh" Tiberius meets Hans for the first time and shares a cabin with him on the Steamer to Marrakesh, which I have made canon in the Tiberius universe.

In "The Backstreet Berlin Brawl", Before Tiberius starts telling the tale,  Hans was going to be mentioned in Tiberius thoughts about the Germans. Finally in "The Dabble with the Occult" I was going to have another attempt at introducing the character, but I swapped that out for the three rules Tiberius mother told him.

Hans is going to be a recurring character as much as Tiberius and his Zeppelins investments will be, so I am pleased to finally get a mention in at last. I will be posting "The Most Blasted Blizzard" this friday as part of #fridayflash so check out the DAC then.

Wednesday 18 November 2009

Simple insert into mysql from html form via php example

*** Disclaimer if you think the internet is there to do all the work for you, then this post is not for you, go and enjoy a chat with your neighbour  ***

Just been spending a bit more time learning php and on the future recipe section for my chance1234.com site. I wanted a clean and simple INSERT INTO example which I can use as a basis for future development.

In the php book I am reading I have tons of examples and on the web, there are tons of examples - but!! A lot of them have lots of other bits and pieces cluttering them up. In good time, as I learn more I am sure it will begin to make sense. But, I think a lot of people who write tutorials forget who they are writing for. Putitng in ISSET() might be second nature for yourself, but if you do not explain why you are putting it there, then it is just confusion.

Also, Yes sometimes the most simple solutions are not the right solution, but for someone learning, stripping back to the essentials can be most beneficial so they can see clearly what is going on. Remember making mistakes is one of the best ways of learning.

Anyway, end of rant and onto my insert.

I have a php file for adding recipes to my database. It currently looks something like this and is tentatively named add.php

<?php
require_once 'funcLists.php';
?>

<form action="transRecipe.php" method="POST">

<h1>Add Recipes</h1>

<p>Recipe Title
  <input type="text" size=50 name="recipeTitle" maxlength="255"  value="">
</p>

<p>Recipe Type
  <?php listRecipesTypes(); ?>   
  </p>
 
<p>Quick Description<br>
    <textarea name="recipeQuick" rows="6" cols="63"></textarea>
</p>

<p>Select Ingredients</p>
    <?php listIngredients() ?>   
<br>

<input type="submit" type="submit" value="Add Recipe">   

</form>

I also have a second php file called transRecipes.php , which contains my INSERT INTO code and that looks like this.

<?php

require_once '../conn.php';


        $sql = "INSERT INTO recipe (rType,title,quick)
        VALUES
        ($_POST[recipeType],'$_POST[recipeTitle]','$_POST[recipeQuick]')";
       
       
        echo $sql;
         echo "<br><br>";
       
        if (!mysql_query($sql))
          {
          die('Error: ' . mysql_error());
          }
        echo "Here is my bottom";

?>

And here is a list of the important condsiderations
  1. In the form action part , there is the reference to the transRecipe.php file , which you need for it to work
  2. The $POST[...] parts in transRecipe refer to the names of the input controls on the Add.php file
  3. The echo parts are there to help me debug and allow us to concentrate on getting the SQL right in the INSERT statement

Tuesday 17 November 2009

More Crap Left Over from moving from Blogger to Wordpress

Following on from my post Crap left over... , I noticed on google webmaster tools that my site had been rescanned and along with all the new paths on wordpress , there is still old paths appearing.

having another look around the server, I did notice an old index file, which was renamed index-old.html.  'am wondering if google is scanning this...

Monday 16 November 2009

Last Mention Of My Drawing Blog

For today...

Just added the images from my drawing blog on to an album/stream or whatever you call it on flickr , which you can see here

To be honest, not a huge fan of flickr, much prefer fotki , however I am hoping that having the pictures up there, will drive a bit more traffic to my site

New Content Up

On My drawing blog Smokeback.com , including a jaws like Ossicle - Malleus

Crap left over from Deleting A Blogger Site

My Smokeback site originally was on blogger, but at the start of November I moved it over to wordpress. After backing up the blog, I deleted the blog from the blogger dashboard and all that seems to do, is to remove it from ...  the dashboard.

On the server itself all the folders and files were still there, I deleted the folders but only noticed that I had left the old atom and rss files on the root the other day.

I have taken a drop of hits since moving over, and I was wondering why old urls were appearing in results as according to webtools, my site had been rescanned.  I am wondering if this might of been the cause...

Sunday 15 November 2009

Das Boot

It had easily been about 10 years since I last watched this film and was a real pleasure to rewatch. As there are several versions out there, I should note it was the 3 hour and twenty minute version.

Got off to a bit of a false start when the film started in the english dubbed version, but a quick flick through the menu's and into the German. It is a shame the swearing does not appear in the subtitles, but - and this is the reason I think it is essential you watch it in German, you can't beat a good German screaming Scheiss! when noticing a destroyer.

There are two things which I think make this a cracking film, the first is the crew on the ship is totally believable in their interaction and personalities. It feels like this is a real crew on a real submarine. The second is the feeling of claustrophobia, and there is some real nice attention to detail in the scenes that help achieve this, such as when the officers are crammed in at their table eating, and one of them has to keep getting up to allow other people on the submarine to past through.

Those two factors really mould the film and as the events unfold you find yourself not trying to make any sound when the Captain orders it and holding your breath when the Petty Officer is trying to work out the location of the destroyer.

I felt a bit Jealous of the wife who watched the film with me, as she had no idea of the ending, but was pleased to again experience it after all this time. If you have never watched it, go and watch it - now! if you haven't watched it recently , go and watch it now!

Friday 13 November 2009

Wordpress blog not appearing in Google

I started the Dead Adventurers Club back at the end of September 2009 and I have been wondering why it has not yet been showing up in google.

I did read somewhere, that google ignores blogs with less than ten posts. I do not know if this is true or not. However, Looking into ways to boost my site presence, I came across a wordpress plug in called Google(XML) Sitemap generator , when I was installing this on my blog I came across the following setting on wordpress that I have never noticed before.



Guess what setting it was on...

An Unsent Letter From a Tommy

A First World War fridayflash story for this week now on my Dead Adventurers Site and you can read it here

I would also recomend reading William J. BIll Schira diary , which was the inspiration for the setting of this story.

Thursday 12 November 2009

Scalp

A new Sketch on my smokeback.com site, this time of the scalp. I didn't know, till I came across it that scalp is actually an acronym. You can see the post here

Creating a Multiselect box from mysql source

*** Disclaimer, If you are the type of person who thinks the internet owes you everything then this post is probably not for you. Read a book for a change ***

Just adding these disclaimers, as this blog is more my thought process as I am teaching myself php. I make no claims for anything being the best or right way to do things.

One of the main reason for these posts, is so I cam easily copy pasta bits no matter where I am.

Anyhow, going back to my recipe section on my site that I'm building, I want on the form a multiple select box for the ingredients. I have the following table on my database


CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `ingredients` (
`iId` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`type` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`notes` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`iId`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=31 ;

Just a note about why I have type in my ingredients. This is one of my bugbears with a lot of recipe listingsis they never group the ingredients by type. I am including type so that you can copy down the recipe and go to the supermarket and be less likely to miss anything off.

The Function for the multibox select is as follows

Function listIngredients()
{
$html ='<select name="Ingr[]" multiple="multiple">';
$sql=" SELECT `iId` , `name`
FROM `ingredients`
ORDER BY TYPE , name
LIMIT 0 , 30 ";

$result = mysql_query($sql)
or die(mysql_error());

if (mysql_num_rows($result) == 0)
{
echo "<em>No created.</em>";
}
else
{
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
$html .= '<option value='. $row['rId'].'>'.$row['name'].'</option>';
}
}
$html .= '</select>';
echo $html;
}

Wednesday 11 November 2009

Mount Norfolk (13,016ft) Part III

A new part of my Mount Norfolk story posted up on The Dead Adventurers Club which you can read here

This might be of interest to anyone else who publishes short stories on their blog, I did originally post the entire story up (6000 words apx) and - no one read it. But breaking it into parts seems to have done the trick.

Not basing this on any real maths, but I would say around a 1000 words is the attention span of a blog post.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

I've just added a link from the front page to my interpretation of this poem in a flash animation which you can view here

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Lend me your ears

Just added a few more posts to my drawing blog , including a drawing of one of the smallest bones in the human body, the stapes.

For a while the blog was using blogger, but I moved it over to wordpress a few weeks ago. I have seemed to have a drop of traffic in the move , but I think that is slowly beginning to pick up now. Main reason I moved it over to wordpress was to make it more user friendly with the following elements
1) Tag Cloud
2)Categories
3)Related posts

All of which can be done with much ease of wordpress.

Google Analytics, Aptana and FireFTP

I Just went through the old pages on the Vault section of the site to include Google Analytics code. For all new pages I have a footer file with the code in , which I can simply include with one line on all future pages.

Just thought I would also share a couple of bits of software I am using .

The first is Aptana Studio 1.5

Note the 1.5 ; I could not get version 2.0 working on my machine and for a while after trying to install it, 1.5 didn't work. Its all right, I think the navigation folder could be made a lot more bolder, and a "breadcrumb" like status would also be handy. A couple of times I have been editing the wrong file in the folder.

The second is FireFtp

This is a FTP client plug in for the Mozilla browser . It works really well, however probably not a good one if you are trigger happy as there is no undo. For fast and quick access , I highly recommend it.

Monday 9 November 2009

Adding items to a dropdown from a MYSQL Database

*** Disclaimer I do not know if this is the best method or is even correct, if you are the type of person who reads things on the internet, tries them out and then gets annoyed when things don't work out. Then maybe this post is not for you, go outside instead and enjoy some fresh air ***

My next php project is, I'm building a small recipe section for my chance1234.com site. I've started on working on a form to allow myself to add recipes to the database.

One of the options I want when adding recipes is to be able to clarify recipes by type. ie pasta dishes, soups etc

What I did was set up a table on mysql database called rtype


CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `rType` (
`rId` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`type` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`Notes` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`rId`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=3 ;

Then on my php file, I created the following function

Function listRecipesTypes()
{
$html ='<select name="'.$name.'">';
$sql="SELECT rID,type FROM rType";

$result = mysql_query($sql)
or die(mysql_error());

if (mysql_num_rows($result) == 0)
{
echo "<em>No created.</em>";
}
else
{
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
$html .= '<option value='. $row['rId'].'>'.$row['type'].'</option>';
}
}
$html .= '</select>';
echo $html;
}

?>


I adapted the code from a Make a Website post. Ideally what I want to do is adapt the function so I can chuck any array at it.

#FlashFriday Update

Had a bit of a tidy up on my #fridayflash page on chance1234.com

Firstly I had all the SQL for the queries on the page, I took them out and placed them in a separate php file and organised them into functions. This has had a noticeable improvement on the speed of loading up the page.

I also added some <hr> tags to make the different sections a bit clearer.

I am a bit stuck on what my next move will be for this page; a couple of thoughts

1) I want to make the random selection, more prominent
2) I need a way of organizing the archive, whilst treating all entries equal !

How to Post Code in Blogger

Following straight after my last post; I came across this as away of posting HTML code snippets on Blogger Encode/Decode HTML Entities

Which I found on Fryan's Digital World

A note, there also seems to be something called syntax highlighter, which involves installing something. I haven't tried it, but might be worth a google

Centering Google Ads

I don't know if this is right or wrong, there seems to be a lot of conflicting (like most things about web design) views on how to correctly centre things.

I did try using margins, but could not get that to work, so I simply enclosed the adsense block with the following div tag

<div align="center">

</div>

Saturday 7 November 2009

Gravatar

Handy way to associate an avatar with your email address universally across the internet

Gravatar

HTML refering to one folder up

I always forget how to do this , but to refer to a file one folder up use

../

Friday 6 November 2009

Break Creek

Just added a new yarn to The Dead Adventurers Club , entitled "Break Creek" which you can read here

This is a rehash of a story I have many drafts for, the first I did back in college 14 years ago! change of setting and time period in this version for #fridayflash

Thursday 5 November 2009

3 New items to the front page

My Fotki Pages

I have had an account since 2001 and I think fotki is one of the best services out on the internet for photo sharing, however I do think its approaching the time where it needs a bit of an overhaul - with user input.

Youtube Channel

A few videos that of which some used to be listed in the blog postings of the old chance1234.com site. Most recent was a timelapse video I shot when I was driving in Vancouver in a Mustang.

The Vault

One of the old pages from the original site, I quite like the spinnign carousel and I pictured having lots of items on this. I think one of the problems of the internet, is too much stuff gets buried and I think this was a novel way of showing content. I might reuse that for something else in the future. What I do not know.

Removing the blue border around an image

This is why i think i have stayed away from web pages in the past, there is all this crap like, one thing works in one browser and not in another.

On the front page to my chance1234.com site, in firefox there was a bluebox around the images which was not present in safari.

Doing a quick google and being flooded with pages with different solutions, I added

"border=0>" to my image link tab.

I don't know if this is the right or wrong approach, but it seems to be working

Wednesday 4 November 2009

The New Front Page

Very basic at the moment, but its the direction I want to go. Have a database table sitting in the background holding link information and I'm selecting this in a query using the rand() function.

As I pull this information back, I am then creating an HTML table with this information in and using a counter to start a new row, every 3 items.

Not sure if i will use thumbnails, banners or even just text at the moment, so it is bit of a mix match.

Quick Webpage thumbnail


I wanted a quick thumbnail of a couple of my other blogs pages. I did a search on the web and came across several options for acheving the result, but they all seemed to involve paying or inserting something or other into your webpage. So I thought about just using the coverflow history feature in safari and taking a screenshot, the result is as above.

What ???

To those two people, of which I was one of, who used to visit and enjoy the chance1234.com site in its old format. Alas, I have decided to rip it down because
  1. Most of the stuff in the posts exists elsewhere on the internet
  2. Bar from the Anthem for Doomed Youth animation, this site was not getting any traffic
  3. Both my short story and drawing blog have surpassed this site in terms of visitors and hits in a very very short time, especially my drawing blog.
  4. I am trying to learn php so I can execute my plan to make a dotcom site and retire to a beach. I thought this site would be a good place to mess around on.
So to you my other visitor, though we didnt meet in the last world, I hope we meet in this one. This site will most likely definitely never be finished and will change appearance at random.

This blog, will serve as an infrequent commentary to the new chance1234.com site and may contain other ramblings which make fine art of the rules of english grammar. Though, I will more likely just shout something on twitter

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