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!

An album of photos taken at a family gathering for Grandpam’s 80th Birthday

A small album of pictures related to Grandad’s last visit to Perula, his boat, before she was taken out of service forever

I found the following image as I was browsing a few blogs and could immediately identify with it and chuckled a fair bit so I’m sharing it for all you web designers and developers out there 🙂

It’s amazing how nifty design can be made to look like the most stupid thing in the world. After all, who can post on a forum if its closed? Why then does it say I should post if I can’t? Surely the most elementary of programmers could manage an if statement to deal with such issues *sigh*.

See what I mean here

I’m down south in St. Albans at the moment staying with my family for the next couple of weeks because a number of things I’m due to attend down here are happening all at once. When I pack I’m normally very careful to double check I’ve got everything, but this time because the taxi arrived literally 2 minutes after hanging up the phone to the cab control centre I didn’t have the time to give my bags the once over. As a result I forgot my Bluetooth dongle (meaning I can’t use my wireless mouse with my laptop for 2 weeks), my shaver (meaning I will have to use a blade razor for 2 weeks which I hate) and my jacket (which means I will have to borrow one from the house – luckily very doable).

I guess the moral of the story is to always check you have packed everything and if there is a taxi involved, do so before calling the cab company!

Huge congratulations go to Hannah O’Shea for achieving the 3 A grades required to gain entry to the English department at York University. Further to these superb grades Hannah also managed to achieve a 100% mark on her English A2 papers and a distinction in a history extension paper. I’m sure others will join me in wishing her the very best of luck at university. With the ability to achieve grades like that she is sure to go a long way. Drinks on me when I’m next home 🙂

It would appear that my couple of games of bowling in Jersey stood me in good stead for getting a fairly nice score when I went bowling with Claire and Chris yesterday evening. Generally though it was good fun and great to meet up again with people I haven’t seen for a couple of weeks. I was also sad to learn that my galivanting off down south will result in me missing various festivities for Claire’s birthday, but I guess it can’t be helped. Freshers week Bondi will be the event to throw us all back together though I’m sure.

After bowling Chris had to head off home but as Weatherspoons is just across the road from the bowling alley, Claire and I decided to get food and a few drinks. We set the world to rights in discussion and chatted about a whole load of different things relevant to each of us which was really cool. I’ve come to realise the value more and more of chatting with friends on a one to one basis. Later on a few of Claires friends from Rock Soc came along and so we chatted with them for a while, and I got onto some crazy physics and black hole discussion with Ian which was rather ace – we swapped phone numbers as we could have gone on all night debating about it all so we figured we would probably have to arrange another drinking session in which to do this, lol.

Claire and I went home at about 11 as she had work early and I’m still sleeping more after my rest in Jersey and the others moved on to another bar. All in all it was a good night and made me feel happy to be back in Leeds, even if it is only for a short while.

Well we all do it, punch our names into Google and see if we come up. Those of us with sites want to see what key words we think potential readers might type in and see if our sites come up in addition to the ego induced self-searching. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to see that I have not only come top in Google on a search for my full name, with a number of other sites I run coming in the subsiquent positions (I have known this for quite a while), but that on a search for just my first name I now rank 6th on world sites and 5th on UK only sites. True I’m not top, but as most Google users only see/use the top 10 entries its good enough for me to be in said top 10. Screen dump shown below in case I slip down the rankings in a few weeks or so 😉

While away in Jersey I read one morning in an interview with the Guardian newspaper that the identity of the author of one of my favorite blogs, Girl with a one track mind, had been uncovered by a tabloid journalist. “The Girl” as the blogs author is known online, writes both the blog and a recently published book under the pen name of Abby Lee and for many of us this was quite enough information, in fact the annonymity of the whole thing was what gave it that even greater intrigue.

Clearly however this isn’t enough for some people and I was upset to see the life of a great blogger turned upside down by a tabloid in search of a quick buck by revealing The Girl’s true identity. I think this behaviour is shameful and I really feel for Abby in this. By the early blog postings it is very clear that the blog was never supposed to be a money making scheme, far from it, merely an outlet for her own thoughts and feelings on a subject not often talked about and something that is rarely found shared in such an open way.

To the un-named journalist who did this deed I hope you realise how many issues you have caused for Abby and how many of Abby’s readers you have pissed off, and even if you don’t I’m sure you’ll sleep easier knowing that you have a few more enemies in the world now won’t you.

I hope Abby keeps writing as even with the unmasked identity I feel sure her postings will continue to be of interest to readers from around the world. To all who have read her blog and enjoyed it, please buy Abby’s book as I feel sure that a confidence boost at this stage would really help yet another individual trapped and hounded by the modern day excuse we have for news.