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

I have recently been in reciept of an e-mail or two questioning my motives for making blog postings in the past. My reasons for this are simple; I want to ensure that events I blog about are posted in the order in which they happen, however the time I have available to me to write blogs is often quite varied and so means I have to set the time stamp of some of my postings to be in the past in order that they fit inbetween the rest of my posts accordingly.

In terms of how I choose the time and date stamp, I try to pick the date and time such that if the time had have been available to me at the time, that is when I would have written and posted that particular blog. Hope this helps some confused readers!

I have had numerous calls to publish a page with all the quotes on that come up in my random generator. After keeping many people in suspense, I have now done this.

Simply click the link under the random quote on the right, “View all quotes” and off you will go to the page with all of them on. I add to them every day practically, so they are always changing. Hope you enjoy them!