graham’s blog

Sushi

Adjustments

I’m making some adjustments to my new theme. I’ve increased the overall width then increased those of the two columns. The right sidebar remains as it was.

I’ve also increased the font size to 120% making it, I hope, easier to read.

This leaves the beader and the feature photos narrower than they should be but I’ll get round to that later. Please be patient.

I’ll be bringing some of the widgets too and adding the plugin suggested in a recent comment.

Changing Directions

I’ve been maintaining blogs for over 7 years and the history on this one goes back to August 2003 which is almost 5 years.

Before starting this blog I had a LiveJournal blog and before that I maintained my own pure html site provided by my ISP.

I’ve gone through a few domain changes too. The first domain I purchased was wynderful.net. This was because at the time I was gaming on Asheron’s Call and my character was called Wynderful (Wyn) for short. I wanted to be somewhat anonymous so I set things up on wynderful.net.

I still own that domain by the way but use it with my .Mac account and play around with my photo projects. It’s another work in progress but I’ll let you know when it’s presentable.

Then I purchased justgraham.net and now I use it as a labo site for testing stuff and installing various webware.

I changed my hosting over a year ago and now Siteground handles my newer sites and also my clients websites. It’s a good service and I’m happy with them (that’s why I agreed to host a banner).

This brings me to the purpose of this post which is to introduce the new look and focus of this site.

As you can see, I’ve changed (once again) the theme and hope to render the whole blog easier to navigate. The trouble with a purely chronological layout is that posts tend to drop off the radar after a while and if you, the visitor, don’t visit for a while you might miss something that I wrote a few days, weeks or months ago.

I have almost 800 posts, so there is a lot of material. A while ago I started a lot of work behind the scenes. Before the advent of tags (or my use of them) in WordPress I used categories and was left with lots of categories and few tags. I spent some considerable time converting categories to tags and tidying the remaining categories into something workable.

I am therefore highlighting Features, News and three categories and a lead post on the front page together with links to categories and links to posts by month. I am having to sacrifice some widgets but will be working on the theme to extend the page length.

I hope these changes will be to your liking. One major difference is that all my posts in French will be available from the front page without disrupting the flow for the majority of readers not speaking French - unless I have a silent majority which I doubt.

I think it’s a good change although it still needs a little tweaking. I hope to be able to increase the width and make the font larger so as to be easier to read.

Let me know what you think.

I’ve chosen to illustrate this story with a recent photo of David Jennifer that was taken during a visit to a local Chinese Restaurant with friends visiting from the USA. Enjoy!

Tuesday’s shorts

• An article on the BBC News pages remarks that : After 30 years of unprecedented economic growth, the British are richer, healthier - but no happier than in 1973.
• Read in my feeds : How to take better photos for selling articles on Etsy-Ebay etc.
• Je viens de recevoir un e-mail me conseillant de voir le nouveau portail Bluewin.ch. Ce n’est pas très beau et plutot chargé et confus… Je ne l’aime pas et vous?

I’ve been “had” by my choice of template (or rather by my use of it).

My idea here was to just jot a few notes of what I’ve been reading and drop them off for your reading pleasure. I have two badges in the left hand sidebar that take up space and if my article has only a few lines I’m left with a blank space between the latest article and the preceding article.

I’m having to write these lines - usefully I hope to explain the situation - to fill in the gap for a balanced entry.

I’m in the market for a new template. I’d like this one to have three categories as lead articles to their respective categories and older posts to fill the front page. A lot like the leaders in newspapers. That way you can go straight to the main articles of life in Geneva, to articles written in French and to others on more technical subjects. I’d also like to use the WordPress pages more efficiently for longer illustrated articles that you can get to via the front page. Any ideas?

Un Spectacle deux articles

Je lisais les journaux ce lundi et deux articles dans deux journaux ont attiré mon attention. Il s’agit du concert de Jenifer à l’Arena la semaine passée. Pour ceux qui n’habite pas la Suisse ou même la France je dois ajouter que Jenifer est une gagnante d’une de ces émissions de télé-réalité ou un artiste est sélectionné au fil des semaines de participation. Je déteste ces émissions donc je n’ai pas plus (et pas envie non plus d’en avoir) de détails sur l’artiste.

Notes from the field

I’ve been a member of Plaxo for 9 months now. I have a complicated calendar setup and wanted to synchronize them all.

I was using Google Calendar at home and Outlook at work. I also have an iMac (I love my iMac) so iCalendar is available. If you add Linked-In and mobile access it all leads into something complicated but reasonable (I thought).

Well I’m sad to report that although these services do synchronize I get regularly many duplicate entries and worst of all a lot of my birthdays show up (in multiple entries also) the preceding day of the anniversary.

I think I’ll be cancelling my Premium membership but will have to try and sort it all out soon. It’s becoming a mess.

I don’t want to have to simplify my multiple calendars just to be able to synchronize them!

Shorts

Here are some notes for today:

“The Rule of Four” (Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason)

I finished my book. I’ve been reading the “Rule of Four” by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason. People Magazine said of it “If you loved The Da Vinci Code … dive into this” well I did but can’t say that I was overly ecstatic about it. Don’t get me wrong. It is a good book. It isn’t a great book. Have you read it?

I found a good scanner last weekend. The HP ScanJet G4050. It scans 16 slides without reloading. It takes about 5 minutes to scan all the slides but the result is not bad at all. I’m discovering and reliving a lot of memories of holidays, birthdays, weddings and extensive family memorabilia.

Here is an example.

Chaud-froid

This is a short post to test blue text, to remark on the arrival of Spring, to worry about my bank and to be astonished that people are willing to pay now for a gig that won’t occur before autumn next year!

Enfin en français! Il a fait froid ce matin attendant le bus à 7h00 devant chez moi. A midi je suis allé chercher à manger et il faisait nettement plus chaud. Le printemps se fait attendre mais va surement arriver d’ici quelques jours voir semaines.

Les déboires de notre Banque (l’UBS) me perturbent. Comment est-il possible de perdre autant d’argent? Je persiste à penser que nous devrions reformer les pratiques dans les banques.

Troisième sujet est les billets de spectacle. Si je vous proposais de me payer 100 francs Suisses aujourd’hui pour un service que je vous rendrerai dans 18 mois, seriez-vous d’accord? Pourquoi alors sont vous d’accord de payer chers vos billets aujourd’hui pour voir une artiste l’année prochaine?

J’ai de la peine à comprendre. J’espère que l’argent récolté sera placé intelligemment et que les organisateurs vont bien choisir leur banque!

Practice what you preach

I came to Switzerland in 1978 and was surprised to learn enough French to get by with in the course of 4 months. Ever since that era I have perfected my French and consider myself bilingual. I often calculate, think and dream in French but of course make many errors most of which are more visible in written form. Then there is my accent, but I’m trying to keep on topic here

Many people ask me how I managed and I always tell them that the only barrier to learning is in holding back and failing to try, because the person you are trying to communicate with wants to understand you and the errors you inevitably make aren’t as important as the message you are trying to convey. You always have to “Go for it!” and leave your inhibitions behind.

How come I don’t practice what I preach then? I’ve been mulling over this for a few days.

I have quite a few visitors and family members that are more comfortable in French and each attempt I have made to write in French and in English has “lost steam” after a few days or weeks due to lack a perceived lack of interest.

A good webfriend reminded my lately that it wasn’t because there was an absence of comments that people aren’t reading what I am writing. This must of course be true when I write in French too.

I’m going to try again and to hell with my faults in French (which incidentally is a lot harder to write than to speak, in my opinion).

I won’t even try to do too much spell checking and grammar sifting. I will only have one rule. Black writing for English and blue writing for French. (Once I work out a comfortable way of accomplishing that)

If I’m successful at it, I’ll consider adding a plugin and doing it as professionally (well almost as) Stephanie does on her perfectly bilingual blog.

Localisation woes

Two things that have bothered me today.

First off I log into MySpace only to be greeted by a welcome to the Swiss MySpace and in German! The login screen had mention of French so I chose that in order to understand what was happening. Once I had logged in I was directed to the UK MySpace.

Problem is I live in Switzerland but in order to ‘benefit’ from Swiss Groups or happenings I would have to accept MySpace in French. My Web language however is English. Why can’t we have a Swiss English Speaking Group ? I’m sure that Stephanie would have something to say about this over at Climb to the Stars as she has extensive coverage of language problems on the Web on her blog.

My mind has gone a complete blank for the other item I wanted to post here but I am sure it had something to do with a site assuming that because I am living in Switzerland I must speak Germann.

I get “junk mail” from Nero, Filemaker and Iris in German and there is no way to get them to change languages so all these messages get deleted.

I’m not an exception. A recent ethnological survey lists 12 living languages in Switzerland.

Websites should bear this in mind but at least leave English (as it tends to be a common language for many) when they are localising.

A major pain is EBay that directs Swiss customers to their German website or more subtly Swiss (French speaking) sites that direct their customers to French Websites. I’ll stop there or I’ll start ranting.