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).

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 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 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);

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.

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.

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,