Always rearranging the furniture, me.

What you can see is both a shift in design and tweaking of what was there already. Breaking it down in to two parts: the tweaking was making the site valid XHTML 1.0 transitional, which it should be now. The design shift was moving the shortlinks out from the sidebar, where no-one saw them and they were much deprecated, and interleaving them with the main blog (much like Jason Kottke or Tom Coates have done.

It adds a little more activity to the page, and keeps the content varied. It also leads on to my next plan, which is integrating my delicious links into this site (as incentive to use delicious more). With any luck, they’ll be impercetibly different from MovableType-made link posts.

As for the way this is done: it wasn’t hugely clear looking around the net and took me a while to work out. I use one category in MT for posts and another for links. To interleave them, you set the category of your frontpage MTEntries section to “main or sub“. That puts them both in one, and keeps them in date order. Then, you wrap the MTEntries definition in a div, of which the class is (in appropriate pointy brackets) MTEntryCategory. Thus a main post is styled with the main class, and a sub post is styled with a sub class.

Finally, all that remains (and here the Firefox Web Developer toolbar helps) is to restyle the sub-classes of .sub as appropriate; display:none; will just stop a div classed as such even appearing; visibility:hidden; will hide it from view, but the space it occupies will remain. You can view the source and my stylesheet to work out what’s really going on

As long as you’ve suitably crafted the blog tempalte, it’s not hard at all to do. Just a case of careful styling, and then experimenting with the CSS. I’m definitely no expert in this, but I at least thought documenting it would help the next time anyone else gets stuck on this particular problem. When I incorporate del.icio.us, I’ll document that too.

I have been away, on holiday, for the first time in yonks: six days in Dublin. And it was bliss. I have lots of pictures, which I’ll probably post here, there, and everywhere; I’ve read books; I’ve slept; I’m feeling a lot more rested.

Home, to the same cold weather (but with less heat) and a ton of blog-spam. The usual, then. Next up: making more things.

We made our Christmas Cake today. It was fun, and, with any luck, it’ll taste great. And, if you’re wondering how, have a look at the flickr set of the process.

Occasionally I make some kind of claim to being able to string a sentence together. It’s been a while since I’ve had anything published, but a recent article I wrote has now been published over at ak13. It’s on the death of Christopher Reeve – and indeed the death of Superman – and I’m quite pleased with it. Do check it out.

Wow. You can move a file to a new location whilst it’s open under OSX. That’s something I didn’t expect to work at all. And I completely love the fact it does.

The joy of moving to a new computer platform is that you learn a new thing every day. (Sometimes they’re a bit less underwhelming than this one).

John Peel has died at 65. Not much more to say, but it’s a huge loss, to radio, to the BBC, to music, and to everyone who ever listened.

Still, he was working to the end: I couldn’t ever see him retiring. I’m not sure he could have beared to.

Matt Webb pointed out a weird way of folding tshirts a while back on his mini-links. Now Matt Jones has posted a video of Webb performing the feat. Several times.

I’ve now sussed how to do it. It’s really graceful, a lovely way of doing things. The trick behind it is that two folds get performed in just one movement. At the same time, when you demonstrate to someone (or watch the video the first time) it doesn’t quite seem to make sense.

The stumbling block is that whilst you fold the tshirt over its own front, the resulting fold leaves the shirt-face up and puts the bend in the back of the t-shirt.

The first time I did it right, I jumped. You just don’t expect action a to lead to shape b. The fold at the beginning is fine; it’s the pull-through that’s weird, because so much of the topology seems to change in that single pull. It feels like you’re doing something inside-out, except you’re not at all, and it’s the pull-through that makes it all work out. I’m reminded in some ways of an un-knot; it feels like doing a knot but just doesn’t work like one.

That’s why I think it seems so strange and incomprehensible, to begin with, anyhow. It also is neat, elegant, a great way of doing things, and a fun thing to show friends. And hey, it makes me smile every time I do it.

Contents of my iPod’s On-The-Go playlist as of 16/10/04:

• Disco Cubizum (Daft Punk Remix) – i:cube
• Story of You and Me – Tim Deluxe
• Our Time Is Coming – Masters At Work feat. Roy Ayers
• Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough – Michael Jackson
• Girl-Boy Song – Aphex Twin
• Drop The Pressure – Mylo
• Different Drum – London Elektricity
• Sister Saviour (DFA Vocal Remix) – The Rapture
• Soul Dive – Aim
• English Summer Rain (Freelance Hellraiser Remix) – Placebo

This is what I have been jolting my brain into life each morning. Uptempo, funky, dance. Because that’s what it makes me want to do.

I get off the train, and I want to dance.

There was a car crash outside our house last night.

We live right on the South Circular (a big ringroad that goes right round the south of London). It was about 11.15pm. I was reading some webpage or other in the corner of the living room; the girl was reading her book.

Then, a screech of tires, and a loud, dull, boom.

I waited for something to come through our front window.

Nothing did. I went to the curtains. There, just across the road, was a red car, on its back. Glass across the road. Another car, pranged, by the little junction outside our house. I guess the red car had turned safely, and the brown car was coming up the road far too fast – loads of cars take it far too fast at nighttime.

I think people were OK, but I have no idea. The driver of the red car had got out himself, and just had a cut to his head; he said his son was still in the car. They eventually got him out of the back seat through the back window.

We went inside after five minutes; there were loads of witnesses and not much anyone could do. It’s a very busy road and does scare me a little at times. We were both a little shaken up by it, and we didn’t even see it happen.

We told each other we’d look after each other. Then we went to bed.

Now I know that most young people’s understanding of copyright law, the BPI, and why DRM is a bad thing isn’t that advanced, but sometimes the mind boggles.

“But even if we do download songs for free, we have already paid for them in a way because we have had to pay for our broadband internet connection.“

No, no, no, no, no.

I don’t need to pay for the shopping, in a way, because I paid for the petrol to get to the supermarket?

More comment on this, perhaps, later.