Spacedmonkey

In the last couple of days, this site has been going up and down like a yo-yo. This is because I transferred this site onto a new host called Media Temple (mt). It is an nice looking host, gives me lots of options, but I am going to pass on making any comment about it until I have really tried it out. While I was transferring to the new host, I thought I might as well upgrade the content management system, from Wordpress 2.03 to the band new 2.1. The new wordpress 2.1 is giving me lots of problems with some of the plug-ins. I needed to sort out the contact form, which is giving me lots of problems, even with the RSS feed. So instead of using the contact form, if you want to tell me about any of the problems you are having with the site, please just email me.

Just thought I would just tell people what is going on and ask people to tell me about problems you have with the site.

Thanks
Spacedmonkey admin

Jonathan Harris

Sorry for the lack of posts, I have lots of work on at the moments I haven’t really had time to think about writting stuff down. I have exams coming up and I really do want to ace them to. There is lots of news I wanted to blog about, like the new Iphone, everything new that was at CES and the poor woman that died trying to get a wii and many other things. There was also the release of Wordpress 2.07 came out and that 2.1 is coming at the end of the month. That means lots of work upgrading this blog but these things have to be done.

On a side note, I am getting really really sick of spam at the moment. When I logged on today, there were 26 spam comments from four different sources. It is really gets on your nerves. I need to implement some kind of validation for my comments, but I can’t be bothered to write any code for myself. What would be the point, the spammers always find work arounds. If I had my way, I would get a team of hackers together and take those spammers down forever. I will work something out, but it people like spammers that make the internet not cool.

There will be lots of new stuff on the site, trust me, I just need sometime to write and upload it. I have been saying that for ages but it will happen. If you have ideas for the site, you would like to write the site or have any other thought, please use the contact form.

This is a Christmas message to the world at large. It is nice, when reaching the end of a long year, to reflect on things. It has been a very long and eventful year for me. It has been a year full of lots of ups and downs. A year spent in doing lots of hard work so that I could pass my A-levels to get into university. I am glad that I put some much time and effort in, going to university has been one of the best things that ever happened to me. This year has been full of problems with my father becoming extremely ill. Thank god, he isnow fine and I greetfull everyday for that.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, I am Jonathan Harris the administrator of spacedmonkey.co.uk. I am about to go off to univerisity for a while. I am studying Computer Network Management And Design at Portsmouth. As you might guess, I am very busy getting ready to moving to uni, so I haven’t had much time to post lately. I haven’t really written anything meaningful since 17th of September.

So what is the plan?

Well, for the next couple of weeks, I don’t think that I am going to be posting never much as I will be very busy. What about after that then?

Uni blog

Well, taking the idea that many people that are going off to uni have had, I am start blogging about my day to day life at an undergrad. I don’t think it is the right place to do that on this, It simply would not fit in with the style of the site other post. I may site up another site or use a sub-domain, like uniblog.spacedmonkey.co.uk. I will try and write down my experiences and I may upload them to the internet at some point. Watch this space.

Computingconrer

When I was buying Jonathandavidharris.co.uk and Joanthanharris.me.uk I did some research into other domains. I looked into other domains, like spacedmonkey.com and .net. But I like my current domain so decided against them. But I did invest in Computingcorner.co.uk domain. It is currently a holding page, but I hope to delevop it. As I am studying computing, I will be doing some program writting, I will upload these programs (if useful to others) to this site.

Spacedmonkey

As for the future of this site, I will try my hardest to keep posting, I think if I do the post’s will be longer and have some use. If I will keep posting, Computing blogs and the stuff blogs on the same site is another question. It seems like a very odd mix both sets of blogs up like they are. It lots of work to admin more than one site. The future of the site depends on what happens in the next couple of months.

Watch this space!!!

Lots of change in the design of the last couple of days. Researching on the internet, I found an Xhtml validation site called validator.w3.org. I found that my site was horriblely invalid from the analysised and comparing to the XHTML specifaction. So while I was in the mood to get rid of all the errors, I thought I would make some improvement lots of things on the site that was bothering me.

No more left hand pannel

The left hand pannel is completely been removed. The new right hand pannel, is a mix of the old right and left pannels. There are less links to other posts, but it means that the page is much less busy. What is displayed on the right pannel depends on what page you are on. This new design means that there is now space on the page for the posts to be displayed.

Search plugin

The old search plug-in used to use a google site search to look up your keyword. In the last week, google decided to add to it’s index, lots of links to addresses on the old design, V2. Even through, even if you go to these pages, you can taken to the address of where it is on the new page. This index problem, means that the search plugin as it was, was not good enough. So the new plug-in, uses the in-site search (see top right). It means that only the posts can be searched through and not the other pages and subdomains, the largest percent of this site’s content is in the form of posts.

Categories change around

The set of categories are arranged has changed. The sub-category updates has now become a category in it’s own right. Images was down-graded to a sub-category of stuff. I will try to redirect the old addresses to the new to stop any problems.

Can you digg it

Digg has become one of the biggest and most popular linking site on the internet at the moment. It was time that Spacedmonkey supported digg. So at the bottom of every post, there is a link that automatically adds that post to digg. Hope you find this useful.

Trackback

A TrackBack is a mechanism for communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a “TrackBack ping”; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. The new design has a easily to see and copy trackback address assigned to each post. These allows me and others user to use this address to link to each post.

Navigation bar reordered

The top navigation bar has be changed, the order of the items has changed. Also the broken links are now fixed.

Longer post titles

On the old left hand sidebar there was a list of the 10 most recent posts. Becuase of the way that the sidebar was formatted, It meant the post with titles more than 15 characters, mess up the list on the side of the page. Now the post’s title can be as long a I want.

RSS feed changes

Made some changes a while to the feed. As I have said to before, the computingcorner feed to no longer being updated, so please remove it from the feed reader. The most important change in the feed is that for longer posts, I add a “read more” link, splitting the post in two. It means that items in the feed are not extremly long. I also fixed an error, that means it displays better in Internet Explorer 7 reader.

XHTML ERRORS

I have removed all but a few of the errors in the template, so it means that the page will load faster. There are still lots of errors within the posts themselves, so all the page will never really be valid. I made some changes in the way that post’s html is generated, so the new posts will hopefullly be valid. With over 80 posts already on the site, It will takes days to change all the posts to valid html. At some point, I will fix these post but I do not have that kind of time.

Final thoughts

The design is new, I am sure there is going to be a few problems, specially, things like the search plug-in. They may be some more changes coming, which I will post about when they happen. If you have any problems, please use the contact form or email me.

It’s finally here, version three is finally finished. With weeks of playing around with the new software it is finally here. The site has tonnes of new pages and new features that I know you will find useful. The focus of the site is completely changed. It is now a part computing blog, part internet review, part whatever interests me. The site uses new blogging software that allows for content to be added at the click of a few buttons. To read about the site and what I the creator ideal for it was, please read about us on the about page. Also check out the cool features like the access keys designed to create browsering the site easier.

I hope the all the viewers of this site will enjoy the content and simply explorer the site and check it’s all features.

To keep updated to new stuff that is being added to the site, use the subcription links on the homepage to add the site’s RSS feed to the reader of your choice. You can also choose the email subcription option.

If you like what you have seen so far, added a banner to your site.

<a xhref=”http://www.spacedmonkey.co.uk” title=”Go to the spacedmonkey- the blog with randomness in mind” ><img xsrc=”http://www.spacedmonkey.co.uk/banners/banner1.png” alt=”Spacedmonkey banner” width=”468″ height=”68″></a>