Finding the chase and cutting to it

I’ve just spent some time catching up with the comments made to my blog. Thank you so much for your enthusiasm!

Rather than reply to the five most common questions in line, I am going to reply in a post.

The power of words

People all over the world have many talents.  I’m OK with a still camera, have some fun with geometric shapes and graphs, but my movies and videos are not easy on the eye.

This is a written blog for that reason.  At school, I had some material published (mostly poetry, a couple of songs, one article) but had the opportunity to hone my style while working for BT.  My manager, Jeff Patmore, helped me convey messages easily.

The title came from an article in the Observer many moons ago while I was considering starting a blog.

Style – the choice is yours

I bought my first digital camera in 1999, a Fuji Finepix 700, which looked like the one featured on Steve’s page.

I lent the camera to my husband as he visited Svalbard for work back in June 2001.  This was my favourite picture from his set on the midnight sun, a beautiful vista.  I use that with a free theme from Andreas Viklund as he has a really clean style I can tie in to the photo I am using.  For work, the colours are different to the ones I use on this site.

I have updated this theme’s CSS a few times to migrate to newer browsers and newer issues of HTML standards. It’s not necessarily perfect – I tend to use Firefox and Android browser to test and only rarely use IE.  As such, compatibility with IE is best efforts.

Achieving this for the web would be difficult and time consuming without ImageMagick and the W3C.

I’m not saying you should copy what I do (please don’t in fact).  Make it yours, simply and easily, in a way that works for you.

Many reuable images are licensed on the web: I mix these brilliant images with my own (I did produce my own version of Flickr to help me catalogue my digital images 😉 ).

Blog it

My manager at work in 2007 was interested in the potential of Web 2.0 tools in large organisations.  I was a keen wiki producer and have published some articles and edits on Wikipedia as well as running a collaboration site between my company and our partners.

I run the software for my media wiki and WordPress sites here and for my team’s sites within the company who employs me.  My wiki has a different look and feel as does my HTML and servlet servers.  These are tailored to the team or partner in question.

By 2008, my manager had migrated on to WordPress.  Work wise I did a similar thing and found that I loved the speed of moving from empty article to a published piece.

So this is a WordPress blog run on my own server so I have full control and copyright.

I appreciate that there are people who like to crash sites and damage resources.   I have learnt a lot about this in the past 10 years how to protect against malicious attacks.  I am very considered about any changes I make to the underlying security of the servers and the material they contain.

Spam, spam, spam

I am not talking about Monty Python sketches here!  All of the comments are manually approved or not.  I have control of the data on this machine and if I think the comment is from an untrustworthy source, it is not approved.  I am not always right in these judgements, but they are at least mine.

Links

I learnt how to manually write HTML in 1995 and migrated to using CSS in 1999.

If WordPress won’t let me achieve what I want to I find another way.  As such, I had had a web presence for a while before this blog.

I run four webservers, have UPS and a good back up mechanism.  It doesn’t cost me anything to run.

If WordPress won’t give me a result I like, I go and do it manually.  About 30% of my work ends up in WordPress.  I publish my analysis etc. through dynamic HTML: either JSPs, Java or LAMP.

For graphical links, I use ImageMagick to tile images together (and resize them) and image maps in HTML  I can produce a 10 item image map in less than 3 minutes from a set of unformatted images.  (The power of scripts compared to using Photoshop, for example).

I published 3,000 holiday snaps in less than an hour modifying this mechanism.  The hard bit was losing the bad images :o.

Where does that leave me if I want to do this?

Start off somewhere that hosts a blog for you: blogger is pretty good.

Get your written style sorted then start to learn the rest if you want to.

It’s the web, a great collection of thoughts, facts and opinions in the form of  images, words, music and recordings which can be shared across the world.  Find your voice and be part of it.