October 17, 2006
The end.....
This'll be the last post in this weblog. For the last 2 years, I've used Ramblings as a test bed for some ideas, as a space to vent frustrations, and as a place to share goodies I've stumbled upon on my travels around the web.
Its now time to close these personal musings and move the concept to the mainstream site.
Ramblings will be replaced by a new addition to the MACLA web site stable, Metheringahm Area News which will be used to post all new material, links to interesting finds, trivia and anything else that peopel want to see.
If time permits, or on a slow news week, I'll migrate some of the better stuff from Ramblings to the main site.
So thanks for the ride.....
Posted by weaver at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2006
News Article Comments
The news article comments have been turned off due to a spam attack that has swamped the articles with irrelevant comment posts. The news articles are still available.
A longer term solution is being sought.
Posted by weaver at 12:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 19, 2005
Off-Line Editor
Prior to the upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 a couple of months ago, I was using MTClient as my off line editor. MT Client refused to work after the upgrade to MT 3.2. Unfortunately, MTClient no longer seems to be supported. Their forums have been silent since Jan 05.
After a bit of detective work this evening, I'm pleased to say that its now fixed and I can happily compile posts on my desktop client again.
Posted by weaver at 11:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Supanames
This site has been hosted by Supanames since its inception. The site was launched using their basic package and upgraded lass year to the Mid-Host package when more web space was needed.
Supanames have just excelled themselves and upgraded the hosting package at no extra cost. They have added 55 'under the hood' improvements, improved their customer support and increased the web space available from 100MB to 250 MB. Whoopee!
Over the years they have proved to be very reliable, with good email support. This recent web hosting upgrade is just an added bonus. If you're looking for good effective web hosting serveice with minimal hand holding, then you should make Supanames your first stop. Their basic package starts at around £15/year for a minumum of 2 years.
Posted by weaver at 10:56 PM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2005
Blog Upgrade
This blog has been upgraded to Movable type 3.2. This will hopefully mean that I can turn comments back on. I'm reluctant to do this because the comments script is currently getting about 1000 hits per day from an automated spamming bot.
Just need to dig into the manual a bit more to find out about styles and templates. The default look is pretty poor compared to what went before..
Posted by weaver at 6:56 PM | Comments (0)
August 23, 2005
My Del.icio.us
Been away for a bit. More on this later.
Now that I'm back, I've found a script that allows me to add my del.icio.us tagged pages to these ramblings.
You should notice in the left hand sidebar a new heading - my.del.icio.us. This will contain my last 15 tagged web pages
Every time I see a web page I'm interested in I could bookmark it so that I can get back to it. You should see my bookmark list - over 400 entries and not very well organised - then again, perhaps you shouldn't.
Using Del.icio.us has two main advantages:
- I can add tags to each page to categorise them
- I can access My Del.icio.us page from any computer.
There are other advantages to using this tagging method of bookmarking pages but I'll save them for a later post
Posted by weaver at 10:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 23, 2005
Surf's up!
After last week's spam attack, I'm really wary of high hit counts on the main web site. Starting yesterday, the hit count doubled and then trebled today.
Suspicious. After a little digging on the stats, I've found that the bulk of the hits are coming from one IP address. I checked the 3 main areas where users can add directly to the site; the forum, the guestbook and the events diary, all appears normal. Hmmmm.
Thinking cap. I have an IP address causing the increase. lets do some detective work. Resolving the IP address reveals that the ISP owner of the server generating the hits is NetLinc.
Worry over. NetLinc is the Lincoln Council's managed schools education network. I can only assume that a school or class somewhere, possibly even Metheringham Primary, has finally discovered the macla site. This is a good thing.
I warmly welcome them to our humble site and I hope they find everything they are looking for and maybe even provide some feedback on their experience.
Footnote: I note that netlinc's home page loads fine in Internet Explorer, yet fails to load in Firefox. Such a shame.
Posted by weaver at 10:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 17, 2005
Massive Attack
Trawling the logs for the community site , I noticed that over the past fortnight traffic had rocketed and the guestbook had suddenly become very, very popular, despite having only a couple of entries over the same period. Also noticed a suspicious increase in the spam emails in the macla email box.
A quick check on the guestbook and all seemed fine. It's got an image verification script to prevent scripts from spamming the entries. Dig deeper. There's about 180 entries in the guestbook. Somewhere in the middle, about 50 entries had the comments spammed, in a really large way. It took almost 2 hours to manually cleanse the guestbook - all the while my resentment was growing. First at myself; having protected the entries from spam, I'd inadvertently left a back door through the comment field for the spammers, and thenmore accurately at the spammers for potentially ruining the macla experience for every one who visits the guestbook
Solution:
1. Apply a password for all comments. - implemented - limits who can comment on entries
2. Change some default variables to hide the guestbook scripts from the automated spam harvesters. - implemented.
3. Wait and see and hope I don't have to close the guestbook permanently - fingers crossed
Posted by weaver at 12:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 4, 2005
Smoother process
With a change in Parish Council Clerk has come a change in the format of the Parish Council Minutes.The new clerk also produces them in a more user friendly format
I now receive a copy on a floppy as a word doc. This makes cutting and pasting to a web page so much easier than scanning the printed page. Thanks to Jenni & Pete for setting this up.
Now, if we could only encourage Jenni into using email, it would be even smoother.
Posted by weaver at 11:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 1, 2005
More spam
Another 80 or so spam comments to deal with today. I've resorted to locking down the comments on this blog to registered users only, which will effectively kill participation. Trackbacks have already been disabled. Why should legitimate users have to go through extra hoops just to keep out the spammers?
The continued spamming has made me lose faith with blogging in general and Movable Type in particular. Having to deal with it on a daily basis is becoming tiresome and not why I started the blog. Perhaps its time to move on.
As my old gran used to say - 'Life's to short to eat peas.'
Posted by weaver at 12:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 30, 2005
Another comment spam attack today.
There hasn't been one for a while now, but today there's been over 50 spam comments... and they're still trickling in. IP addresses are all different so no easy way to use MT Blacklist. As moderation is set for the comments then at least they're caught before reaching the main site.
Still its another annoyance....
Posted by weaver at 10:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 4, 2005
Lincolnshire maps
Here's a page of links leading to old maps of Lincolnshire. Its fascinating to see how the area has developed over the past 300-350 years.
Posted by weaver at 10:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 23, 2005
A walk in the park.
Blankney Park to be precise. Today is (was) a beautiful warm spring day. The Sleaford based, Society for Lincolnshire & History & Archeology (SLHA) had asked Rodney Garlant & Heather Routledge to arrange a walking tour of Blankney & its surroundings.
A group of about 40 of us turned up and were treated to Roger's guided, informative talk around Blankney Park & village. Heather finished off in Drury Street, Meg, before we invaded Meg Church Hall for tea & refreshments.
A really enjoyable way to spend an afternoon in the company of such knowledgeable people. Well done Heather & Rodney.
Posted by weaver at 9:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 20, 2005
Transport Direct
The Department of Transport hosts an excellent UK travel planner, Transport Direct. It allows you to specify your mode(s) of travel: car, bus, train, plane ferry or foot. It will then give you directions and a map.
The really clever part is that it will also supply you with timetable details if any part of your journey is on public transport. What a truly useful feature, tying together mapping, planning and public transport timetables. Not bad... and from a government department too.
It has a couple of extra features; a live update listing of severe incidents restricting travel and a UK inspirations section, where you can vote for the place in the UK that inspires you the most. Football grounds seem to be quite popular!
This site will be added to the really useful links page on the main site.
Posted by weaver at 10:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 9, 2005
Blank page
The time since the Easter break has been spent with family so there hasn't been much work done on the site or this blog lately.
I loaded this Ramblings page today and found a blank sheet. Panic! Its broken! What's gone wrong? It worked fine before. Hmmmm. A bit of investigating shows that the template is set up to show content from the last 10 days. As I've not posted for over 10 days, the blog is only doing what its been told.
Panic over. Time for breakfast.
Posted by weaver at 9:38 AM | Comments (0)
March 20, 2005
Blowing in the wind.
Wind farms are a contentious issue. Sustainable Power? A blot on the landscape? There are many valid arguments for and against.
The project for building a wind farm with 34 turbines on Nocton Fen has been shelved by the company.
Taken from the Macla forum (thanks Chris):
For Release: 14 March 2005
RES DECIDES NOT TO PROGRESS WITH WIND FARM DEVELOPMENT AT NOCTON FEN
Renewable Energy Systems Ltd (RES) has announced today that it will not be pursuing plans for a wind farm at Nocton Fen, Lincolnshire, after careful consideration of a range of issues including the results of bird assessments and MOD issues.
For the last year, RES has been carrying out a number of detailed studies to ascertain the suitability of the site southeast of Lincoln for up to 34 wind turbines. These feasibility studies - including access studies, ecological surveys commissioned from independent experts and others - have now revealed the unsuitability of this particular site for development.
Project Manager, Nick Bristow, said;
“As a company committed to sustainability, we are careful to follow industry good practice guidelines to develop well-designed projects that can only bring benefits to the local communities, wildlife and to the environment as a whole, through reducing CO2 emissions. On balance, and for a number of reasons, we have decided that this particular site is unsuitable."
The proposed project would have had significant pollution-reduction benefits, generating enough clean electricity for over 41,000 homes, and would not have adversely affected the quality of life of local people. RES will be concentrating its efforts on other potential sites in the UK and abroad.
ENDS
CONTACT:
Anna Stanford, Media Officer, RES, 01923 299203 or 0776 1103465
Email anna.stanford@res-ltd.com. Website: www.res-ltd.com
Posted by weaver at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A good evening's work
Lots of good work tonight. Most of the village directory index pages have been migrated to the new style and the menus have been tidied up. I intend to start on the rest of the top level pages this week.
i feel another glass or two of hardy's Nottage Hill is warranted as a reward.
Posted by weaver at 11:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 13, 2005
House Prices
In order to sate all your prurient needs, this site is offered to satisfy your craving. I can guarantee that this is one site that everyone who reads these ramblings will visit at least once.
It's the on-line equivalent of peeking over your fence or spying on your neighbour. Just how much did they pay for that house? Now you know. Enjoy!
Posted by weaver at 6:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 21, 2005
Clearing the backlog
The backlog of items awaiting publishing has been growing steadily of late. A concerted effort was made today to clear some of it. December's parish council minutes, the football team pictures for the current season,a new page on a pub that closed between 1871 & 1881 and some style work down on the images, all made for a busy day..
Struggling a bit though with the correct styles to use for the embedded images on pages. Using float looks good in IE at most sizes but looks pants in Firefox at lesser screen resolutions. Next time there's a free hour, it'll be the turn of absolute positioning.
Posted by weaver at 12:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 11, 2005
Forum woes
In a previous posting, i declared that ignorance is bliss. How right.
When I changed the permissions I failed to spot that the topics had become read only. This caused the date time & number of reply, for each topic that someone tried to write to, to become corrupt. A quick whizz round with the permissions duster with a spot of polish to 4 posts and all is well again.
This web stuff is really humbling. Just when you think all is going well, it rears up and has little nip at your ankles. One day, It'll bite real hard.
Posted by weaver at 9:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 29, 2005
Ignorance is bliss..
in an earlier entry, the lack of postings in the forums was commented on. An email was received today saying that an attempt to post to the forums resulted in several error messages. A quick check proved it to be the case. Resetting the access permissions and the problem has gone away.
How stupid have I been? Very! When I upgraded the web host package, the site was moved to a new server. I reset the permissions for every other application but forgot this one, perhaps because its not associated with the MYSQL database.
My forgetfulness has probably driven away some of the few visitors that come to the site. Grrhhh. Time to look forward.
Posted by weaver at 5:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 11, 2005
Comment spam
Checking my email tonight, I find 8 new comments for this blog. Hey , excellent, I'm getting noticed. Perhaps some of them might even be constructive.
Hmm. Nope, not a chance. Its all comment spam. The content for all 8 is downright disgusting and, in all 8 cases, identical but for the sender's email address and IP address. These are all different.
The fact that I turned on comment moderation after the first attack means that the blog hasn't been infected, but I still have to go through all the comments and delete them. What a waste of time.
If the attacks continue, I'll have 3 options;
a. turn off comments completely, which I don't want to do or
b. move to a different blogging tool such as wordpress, but there's no guarantee that the same thing won't happen there or
c. stop blogging, which means that they 've won. again, I'm not keen on this option.
For now its a case of sitting on my hands and waiting to see if the problem becomes unmanageable.
Posted by weaver at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)
January 6, 2005
Christmas Quiz Answers
The answers to the 2004 MACLA Christmas quiz are:
Part 1.
1. Silent Night
2. Let It Snow
3. Ding Dong! Merrily On High
4. The Christmas Song or Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
5. Hark The Herald Angels Sing
6. Do They Know its Christmas? (Band Aid)
7. Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
8. Winter Wonderland
9. Rocking Around The Christmas Tree
10. Once In Royal David's City
Part 2
11. Yes, everyone has the 4th July in their calendar!
12. 1, the day he was born!
13. 12, all have at least 28 days in them
14. 6, 3 per side
15. No, because he’s already dead!
16. 70 or What!
17. 2, the ones you’ve taken away!
18. 60 mins! Take one pill, 30 mins later the next and 30 mins after that the third – ergo 60 or 61 mins
19. 9, obvious really
20. 0! Noah took the animals on the ark.
21. A butcher weighs meat!
22. 12! Like in a dozen stamps
How did you do? The second part required you to read the questions very carefully. Most people fail to do so. They see what they expect to see. I've not met anyone yet who managed to get more than 6/12 in the second part.
If you are still reading this and attempted the quiz, let me know how you got on and what you thought of the quiz by adding a comment below. Thanks.
Happy New Year
Posted by weaver at 11:05 PM | Comments (0)
December 20, 2004
Christmas quiz....
In the most recent newsletter is a Christmas quiz. I try and do something different each year. This year's is a 2 parter, slightly harder than previous years. If you need more, than an excellent UK based site is Quizardry which has over 200 Excel based quizzes available for free download, providing hours of fun over the festive period. Enjoy.
Posted by weaver at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2004
Parish Council Minutes
I've been publishing the Parish Council Minutes for about 3 and a half years now. Its a relatively painless job. I get a paper copy once they've been approved by the PC, usually about a month after the event. again thanks must go to Pete, who has been supplying me with the minutes from the start
The Parish Council: These community worthies are the largely unsung people who make a community tick. They look after all the minutae that ensures the village runs smoothly. Things would be much more difficult without them.
The minutes: These are a record of each meeting, usually taken by the parish clerk. They are then presented at the following meeting for approval. Once approved they then become a matter of public record. A copy is made available in the Info Links Office and the Library. Publishing on the web is done with the full approval of the Parish Council to enable the minutes to reach a wider audience and in the spirit of openness.
The web process: The Parish Council Minutes are usually 3 or 4 pages long. After scanning, save to word and correct any errors induced by the OCR part of the scanning process. From MS Word, I cut and paste into notepad to strip off all the code that word adds. Meanwhile in Dreamwevaer I copy the previous minutes page and rename for the current month. I then dump from notepad to the new page. The rest is just tidying up. Emphasising each section and ensuring the page flows smoothly. I also update the table used for attending councillors. Finally I publish the page, check it in 2 or 3 different browsers at 2 resolutions and then add links from the Council page and the updates page. The whole process takes between 2 and 3 hours.
Are they used? Well I'm really not sure. I know a District Councillor looked at the first couple but apart from one comment at a Village Hall function, I've never recieved any feedback at all. It doesn't help that I've never asked for any. personally, I think its worthwhile. The PC minutes web pages allow users, who might not otherwise be kept informed, to see what's happening within their community.
Perhaps an online survey in the new year will help to give me a better idea of what works and what doesn't work on the site. One to ponder over the Christmas break.
Posted by weaver at 5:14 PM | Comments (1)
December 8, 2004
20, 000 visits..........
Its been a long haul, just over 4 years, but the MACLA site has reached the landmark of 20,000 visits which works out at roughly 100 vists per week.
Although this is not an earth shattering number, I take a small amount of pride in getting this far. During the past 4 years, I've seen the site grow from about 20 pages with the first newsletter to over 500 today. A not inconsiderable feat.
I look at what the site contains now compared with the start and see that we have come along way. The 1881 census database came about from a family history query , I received early on. The numerous photo albums have all come from the members of the community who have contacted me offering their work for the site. Interaction has increased considerably with a guestbook, forum, events diary and now you can even comment on the items in the newsletter.
The macla site has outlived some of the other local sites. Sadly Nocton's site dropped off the web last year as did metheringham.info which aimed to provide local businesses with a customised web presence. Other have grown, Martin & Timberland's site for example and some, having served their purpose, have been and gone such as the highly successful and excellent Broadband for Metheringham Campaign Site. macla.co.uk has spawned some sites from pages it first hosted. The Swimming Pool Association's site and the LIVES site spring to mind.
Recently, I've eliminated almost all of the off site advertising. I've tidied up the navigation, putting all the options at the top. I've migrated away from M$ Front Page and its spurious code that it adds without telling you. I've upgraded the web hosting package that now allows 3 times the webspace and, for the first time, access to detailed stats without the need for some code on the home page. Once they've been running a few months I should get a better impression of the most and least popular pages.
What of the future. Well I've a couple of ideas I'm working on at the moment. The extra space allows for the inclusion of more photographs and I'm working on standardising the galleries, again allowing interaction through the addition of user comments. I've also been given the first half of a fascinating photo collection about local farming in the 1950s and 60s. Excellent stuff.
This blog will go live soon and the home page of the site will be rejigged to include more upfront information. (Must be careful not to make it too busy though - musn't dissuade outsiders that Meg is naught but a sleepy village.)
Longer term, I'd like to make the site web standards compliant - this will mean migrating the code to XHTML and CSS, separating content from presentation. The trouble is that too many of the current browsers have CSS quirks requiring numerous workarounds. More on this later.
So to mark the event, after thanking everyone in and outwith the community, I'm just off to give myself a pat on the back and down a pint of Black Sheep (or Two!)
Posted by weaver at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)