Keen eyes will have noticed a new link in the sidebar called calendar. As the one line intro states its a page that lets you know what I’m up to and when I’m free. I have introduced this so that everyone who knows me can find out in advance when I might be passing in their direction so meeting up is easier and also so that people who want jobs doing and such know when I am not away somewhere so they can ask me.

All comments on the new calendar are most welcome and suggestions for additions or improvements will be considered. I’m still finalising the interface through which events are added in the admin panel, but when that is finished I will be releasing the code for the calendar as a WordPress plugin for all those who have seen my calendar page and are screaming “I want one of those!”. You can start using my calendar page to find out when I’m free right away though. Enjoy!

Direct link here

Its been a long time coming but my new photo gallery is here with a great look, a nice set of functions, an easy system of updates and album additions and pretty links to make it easier to share the locations of albums and individual pictures over messenger or e-mail with friends and family.

The system is powered by gallery and the development team are credited in my sites’ footer. It marks the end of the old basic gallery system with no cache that took a while to generate thumbnails on the fly for large albums and used up a lot of server resources doing so. You can also see a random photo picked out from the whole photo collection that may (or may not) entice you to view a wide selection of albums in more detail.

I’m currently in the process of pulling together over 5 years of photos to place in the new gallery (after calls that my temporary system was too small and the one prior not updated enough) so it should soon be rich pickings for friends and family with an interest in days gone by and those looking for the latest shots I have taken. Have fun!

After a discussion on the subject of keeping track of blog comments yesterday in the Quilted Llama I present yet another little update for my site, this time allowing readers to subscribe by e-mail to the comments when they post their own or see the potential for an interesting discussion that they want to follow. You can manage your subscriptions by clicking a link at the bottom of every notification e-mail you recieve. Subscribing is now an option at the bottom of all posts that allow comments, be sure to check it out.

I hope that for the more provocative posts that this will result in more comments and interest, so if you are interested in something I have written about or what someone has placed in a comment then please consider signing yourself up to follow that discussion - you never know when someone might say something you can’t resist replying to

After a few weeks of no “out of the window” webcam it has now been reinstated. For a view of my own and surrounding streets from my new house, check out the link in the nav bar now

In the true spirit of blogging I’m now listed on Technorati, an online service that links your blog to other blogs and keeps track of your postings so you come up when people are searching for things you are writing about. It also allows you to see who is linking to who from their blogs. It’s pretty neat. You can see a link to Technorati and some links to interesting information about my blog from the same source in the Technorati section of the nav bar, near the bottom.

What’s especially nice is unlike MSN and MySpace and all of that, it syndicates 90% of your content so you don’t have to update it all the time. Its very much a register and forget system - something I find invaluable.

I have taken a few minutes break from revision and collated all my past radio shows from URY and made them available for download in chronological order on the radio page. Anyone who was curious as to what I sound like (if you have never met me in person) or what I sound like on the radio (if you have), feel free to take a listen. If you are a jazz, blues or fusion fan then I highly recommend it; the music selections were made carefully and should appeal to a broad audience.

Due to being recently bombarded with an insane quantity of comment spam to my blog postings, which gives me more comment moderation to do and takes some of the joy out of getting comments, I have now installed a number of anti-spam measures.

All comments classed as trackbacks now require that the site they are from links to me (essentially what a correct track back should be anyway). All comments posted are scanned for common spam traits against a large central database, and as if all that wasn’t enough, you have to enter a little code from an image when you post a comment now to prove you are not a robot. Hopefully this lot will keep all the nice comments that I enjoy reading and automatically can the spam. Only time will tell though.

Last night the load on the server that hosts kieranoshea.com went critical, so much so in fact that the server stopped serving web pages, and access was extremely limited. At this stage I have no idea what caused the high loads (and indeed is still causing slightly higher than normal loads), but I’m posting this so you are aware of why some of my network of sites went down last night, and that at this stage, nothing is certain with respect to uptime.

I was bored today, so as I was glancing around my room for inspiration I noticed my logitech webcam sitting on the shelf, unconnected since I moved in. Well, nuts to that I thought, and hooked it up to my Linux box. An hour or so later I had sorted out drivers, a video feed and an application to create a new image every few seconds on my apache2 webserver, running on Lara. The result is a webcam image in a pop-up window that self-updates every 3 seconds and you can view it right now, simply click the “View Webcam” link in the navigation bar.

All I have to do now is find somewhere to point it that is both interesting, and doesn’t cause me to live in big brother hell. Suggestions on a post card…..

I have just uploaded some photos to the site that I took earlier. The sunshine was just too inviting, and I got some interesting shots of some of the buildings and stretches of canal around Clarence dock.

Photos are here

I have also updated my Radio page at long last with downloads of a few of my shows (hosted on Lara of course) and some photos of me and some of my past guests on air. Enjoy