Category: Uncategorized

I’m back

Well, I’m back. And if I wasn’t so damn tired I’d write-up what I did last week. It’ll have to wait. #

I’ve finally started to look seriously at re-designing this whole site. Using CityDesk for everything just isn’t working for me anymore. I’d like to be able to blog from work, or from the laptop when I’m at home. Unfortunately, excellent though it is, CityDesk is tied to my desktop machine in our home office. So I’m actively looking at building a simple ASP.NET framework that gives me some of the capabilities of CityScript, but with a dynamic database at the back-end instead of CityDesk’s static approach. I can then add some simple webforms to enable me to blog from anywhere I have a browser window. I’ll continue to use CityDesk to create the more static content, and this will all live under a new “weblog” sub-domain that I’ve set-up. I also plan to split-off the photo galleries into a separate sub-domain, XMLify them, and use a different page layout to the blog. Now all I need to do is find the time to do it…

And in other news:

Halley Suitt points to Michael Wilson’s account of escaping the WTC just in time. Raw, gripping, mandatory reading.

William Gibson steps out of the blogosphere, just as Brad Wilson returns.

Ray Ozzie steps in to try to save the web browser. Best of luck, mate.

Kraig Brockschmidt’s book “Mythic Microsoft“. Interesting, if you can filter-out the bogus spirituality.

Going dark

There’ll be no updates here for the next week, as I’m heading up to Scotland for a backpacking trip. Shiel Bridge to Ullapool via Strathcarron, Kinlochewe, and the wonderfully remote Letterewe Forest. Piccies and a report when I return.

CityDesk

Fog Creek have just released version 2.0 of CityDesk, the rather spiffy content management tool that I use to author this blog. If, like me, you bought a copy then its a free upgrade. Plus, if you bought the size-limited home-user version, you are rather generously upgraded to the unconstrained professional version.

I’ve downloaded the bits and played with the new version, and it seems like a great improvement on an already excellent product. A lot of niggling bugs have been fixed, and the scripting language has got some improvements. I’m not sure why they added a built-in image editor when there are so many good third-party editors, and it still uses the multiple top-level window approach that I personally dislike, but overall I’m enormously impressed and looking forward to using the new features.