Keri Henare

I'm not the kind of person who makes new years resolutions. The new years resolution is the ultimate form of procrastination and let's you put absolutely anything off for an entire year.

I'm one of those people who resolves not to make resolutions. (And yes, I do see the flaw in that logic.) I do however, want to make sure that this year is a fulfilling year and that I regret as little as possible. This is the year of no promises.

Promises make you feel obligated and trapped. When you can't meet a promise, you just end up feeling bad. If that promise is to update your blog (content, design or code) and you don't do it, then it's plain embarrassing.

Therefore, this year I promise nothing. I do want to update this blog and this website in general, but if and when that will happen, even I don't know.

But I do have goals for this year:

• I want to go sky diving.
• I want to launch my gaming website project, Game NZ.
• I want to be debt free (or at least reduce my debt down to just a much smaller student loan).
• I want to start and finish One Hundred Push-ups.

Today (while procrastinating about things that I should've been doing), I gave myself a little kick in the butt about this website. As Brian's Mum would say, I've been a Very naught boy! I've barely managed one post every couple of months since I got the site back up and there's only been one comment in the last 18 months. It's got to the point where redevelopment of the site is like a running gag in a sitcom or late night show (see "I'm f**king Matt Damon") with me talking about various things that I want to do but never actually do. Now the time has come to finally fix things.

As we all know, a blog is driven by it's content. I've made a commitment to myself to try and make one post per week. I might not post every single week, but that's my goal. I will most definitely be posting within the next week because I want to write about that thing that I was procrastinating about. To make things a bit easier, I've created a Fluid app solely for my Wordpress Admin area (I'll be talking more about Fluid and Wordpress at a later date). Hopefully having an app that I can bring up quickly with spotlight will encourage me to write more often.

As for development, I'm still sticking with Wordpress for the immediate future. I've previously talked about Django, which is soon going to at Version 1.0 stable release, as a possible alternative but I just don't have the free time for major development at the moment. What I have done today, is moved the site into a subversion repository because we should all be using version control. SVN will allow me to make incremental changes to the site without worrying about FTP. I've also added a few helpful plugins to Wordpress to make my life a little easier.

Will write again soon, until then, hasta luego (because I'm learning Spanish now).

Due to the limitations of my UK Visa and the financial pressures caused by those limitations I have now returned home to New Zealand, alone. I have had to leave my darling Carmen behind to finish the last little bits of her university work. Carmen will then be going home to Valencia for a couple of months to spend time with her family before permanently relocating to Auckland. I'm man enough to admit it... I miss her terribly!

Shortly after arriving home I found a great job with Pixel Fusion. It's a very welcoming work environment and I'm working with an amazing group of people. Look forward to seeing some great stuff coming from us in the future.

The new site, is still coming.

I really like CakePHP and as I have previously mentioned, I had been intending to use it for the all new KeriHenare.com. However, I've decided to forget that and try something really new.

I would therefore like to announce that development of the new version of this site is underway right now and it is being developed in Python, using the Django framework. I'd been considering this change for a while now but it's all a whole new world to me. Until a week ago I knew absolutely no Python. I've now started reading Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python which I've found to be one of the best resources that I've ever come across for learning a new language. Luckily for me Django is aimed more at designers than hardcore coders so it's pretty easy to get started with. I'm really excited about this change to Django and I think that Django has a really promising future.

As always, keep coming back for updates. I'll try to post a bit more often... At least I hope to try.

Dan Cederholm is in the middle of another live design refresh. In the meantime SimpleBits has no styling what-so-ever. I'm not a very patient person and I love Dan Cederholm's designs so I decided not to wait for the new design.

Dan removes the <link> element for his screen.css so I've created a Greasemonkey script that add's it back in as well as removes the little 'tune up' message.

var link = document.createElement('link');
  link.setAttribute('rel', 'stylesheet');
  link.setAttribute('type', 'text/css');
  link.setAttribute('href', '/css/screen.css');
  link.setAttribute('media', 'screen, projection');

var style = document.createElement('style');
  style.setAttribute('id', 'hide-h2');
  style.setAttribute('type', 'text/css');
  style.setAttribute('media', 'screen, projection');

var text = document.createTextNode('body > h2 { display: none; }');

document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(link);
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(style);
document.getElementById('hide-h2').appendChild(text);

The web standards community will probably remember today as the coldest day in hell. Microsoft have announced that the latest build of IE8 successfully passes the Acid 2 test. For those who don't know what Acid 2 is, it's a test page created by the Web Standards Project for browser vendors to use as a method for validating the standards compliance of their products. The fact that IE8 passes Acid 2 must have silenced a few of Microsoft's critics.

This news seems to have come at the worst time for Opera's antitrust complaint against Microsoft. The complaint was filed only a week ago but it already seems to be loosing it's footing as a major part of the complaint was based around Microsoft's lack of support for web standards.

It has been an incredibly long 11 months (to the day) since I last posted on this blog. Sorry.

I had originally planned a quick redesign back in about April 2006, but then I went travelling. And then I came to England. And then I just never seemed to have the time. I took the blog down in an attempt to motivate me to get something done, but that didn't work. What can I say, other than :

The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray.

I'm now in the middle of a redesign and the development of a custom content management system powered by CakePHP. In the meantime, I have put this simple Wordpress blog back up simply because I don't feel that I can keep quiet. I need to Blog! This isn't official Version 3 of KeriHenare.com, more like Version 3 Prologue. This isn't a reflection of the finished product but something to get me moving along.

Jeremy Keith is probably my favourite AJAX specialist, especially with his focus on Hijax. So I was really happy to hear that he's now written a book. Bulletproof Ajax looks like it's going to be a great book for those of us who want to experiment more with AJAX but aren't necessarily JavaScript pros. It's definitely going on my shopping list. (via)

Before I started traveling around I handled all of my email from Mozilla Thunderbird on my Desktop PC using POP3. Thunderbird's spam filtering was great at filtering my spam client-side and I was content. But then I sold my PC and started traveling. I quickly switched to using the RoundCube webmail client (I could have used DreamHost's default SquirrelMail but it's ugly as hell) but ran out of time to configure SpamAssassin to protect my inbox from the torrent of junk floating through cyberspace. So I traveled the globe, often with little time to check with my email, sometimes weeks apart... and the spam piled up.

Now that I'm settled down in the UK I finally got to tackle the spam problem. I started with a new clean shell account on DreamHost and installed the latest versions of SpamAssassin and its dependencies. I directed all of my email addresses into the new account and moved all of my old emails over too. Finally I installed the latest Thunderbird onto my MacBook (yes I prefer it to OS X Mail) and am now using IMAP so that I can still access my email from anywhere. I'm slowly training SpamAssassin to filter my emails properly, it's already got things 90% right on a fresh install. This will improve week by week.

I also google'd my email address and removed it from various pages and websites to avoid it being picked up by spiders. On my contact page I've used some PHP to generate a unique email address based on the users IP address and the time and date. This should help me keep track of the spam coming in. The only place that I haven't hidden my email address is my C.V. as I think that'd do more harm then good.

I've finally got the upper hand in my battle with spam,

This is something that I've been meaning to post about for ages but haven't gotten around to, so I'll do it quickly now.

While surfing through my Mint Stats one day I found inbound links from Microformats + DOM / AJAX = Mashup Nirvana, a presentation by Kevin Lawver a developer at AOL. The reason for the links was that Kevin mentioned my C.V. as an example of the hResume microformat. I've been really committed to microformats so this is a great honour. Thanks Kevin.