Just back from a great weekend away – which I will mention later. However, on my return I quickly read my stats for August (not sure what prompted it) and I am confused. August 2004 has had the most number of pages visited (although not the most number of actual requests) but is, nonetheless, counted as the busiest month by my log analysis tool. I have no idea why as not much really happened in August. Ah well, maybe all those spiders are reading my site! I see Movable Type has now released 3.1 which I think I will look to upgrade to and then who knows what wonders I might add. One of the new features is the ability to schedule posts for the future which will – I hope – allow me to develop another idea I have had for a site.

On this day…

2003: Stephen is Man of the Moment
2002: Confusing, Image-Saturated Culture

Eric posted a comment about my entry Camp and I have just noticed there has been a problem with the template that displays the comments. It should be fixed now – although I guess the spam comments will now show alongside the the real comments.

I too rushed out and bought the Camp CD soundtrack which I got in the mail yesterday and it will be my soundtrack home in a few minutes! I got it from a cheap place in Canada – which was cool (although I guess it’s only cheap to me used to paying overpriced UK CD prices.

On this day…

2002: Fast Lane on Foot

Well it would appear that some malicious spammer is using a mailing address @musak.org to mail people. I know I’m not the only one affected at the moment but there’s very little I can do about it.

On this day…

2007: Read The Manual
2005: My Idea Changed
2003: Buffalo Soldiers
2003: Another Russian Birthday
2003: Not Another Teen Movie
2002: How do you say Happy Birthday in Russian?
2002: Marry Me

I know y’all won’t care but I’ve said before that the primary reason for the existence of this site is for me and a kind of diary/journal. The fact it is online is probably the incentive that makes me keep it up. The fact that you occasionally comment makes it feel more worthwhile. Ever since I introduced the ‘on this day’ link against relevant entries on the homepage I’ve found a great memory jogger. I end up re-reading entries from this day last year – or the year before. It certainly doesn’t seem like twelve months since I was sitting in Helsinki for the first time and listening to an afternoon, outdoor Jazz concert. It wasn’t what I expected of that city at all. And it looks like we may be doing more business in that part of the world over the rest of the year. I hope so.

On this day…

2004: Internet Domains
2003: Helsinki Jazz

Just in case you are reading this via a feed/rss reader of some kind – like bloglines – then you might be seeing you reader marking a whole stack of entries new when they are, clearly, not. I’ve made some minor code changes to the site to have the feeds validate with the Feed Validator as well as link to the comments from the feed. Additionally, I’ve added a couple of Movable Type plug-ins that will help me keep the rest of the site validated. Nothing major but it does mean some of the entries have been marked as updated when it’s just the background code that has been amended.

If you happen to use a web-based feed reader or aggregator you may see that images are broken. I’ve prevented images being called if the referrer is not this site because some of the images from the Man of the Moment section were being called by external sites and I don’t want to end up paying for that bandwidth. It’s not intended to stop people reading the site from seeing anything so let me know what reader you use and I will try and open images up to the relevant domains.

On this day…

2004: Junk Mail Is Now 70% Of All Mail

So, I have finally done it and had another re-design of this site. The grey is the new green (sorry Jase) but green may become the flavour of the day again as I am not *sure*. I’ve tried to reduce the amount of effort Movable Type needs to make this site happen and I think I have succeeded in that bit. All the same stuff is here for now but I want to add some new ‘features’ by playing around with Movable Type so now is the right time to do it. Although I have not updated the templates for Justin, Andrew, Dermot etc. in the Man of the Moment section. That will come too.

While working through the final stages I discovered that this wasn’t the third version of Listen to Musak as I had thought but it was about the fifth. If you use Mozilla on the main page of the site go to ‘View’ –> ‘Use Style’ where you can apply the older style sheets. As I have tweaked the templates a little bit they do not render exactly as they used to but it was interesting to see anyway. I have decided that you can not have too many IDs or classes in style sheets and re-using elements where it isn’t the same content is a very, very bad idea.

One downside of this look is that the individual entries really do look better if they are of the lengthier format. Ah well, I really wish I was a designer!

On this day…

2004: Mayor Of London
2003: Music Industry Hysteria?

Last night, while pounding the treadmill for thirty minutes and trying to avoid watching about crime and disaster on the news, I got to thinking about a couple of things I have written here over the last few days.

In Tuesday’s Link Dump I noted that I thought I was lacking some passion. I don’t believe that’s true. I am still passionate about many things and, particularly, personal publishing online. I just don’t get to write about it nor discuss it. I do seem to write a great deal here though.

In yesterday’s post about Portion Distortion I mentioned something about re-designing this site and, after some consideration, I have decided to do a little bit of housekeeping here. This site has started to get a little out of control. I need to rationalise: keeping it simple will involve removing pages that I don’t think serve any worth and getting rid of some sections. I will also re-work the design. I suspect for some time there will be things in several layouts but I don’t think anybody will be too upset.

The first casualty will be the gallery section – it’s hard to maintain and it’s not where I store pictures that I want to share with people anyway. Perhaps Movable Type will incorporate some new image controls in a future version which will allow me to bring it back.

On this day…

2005: Your Search For Philip Olivier Returned Results
2004: Britain’s Railways
2003: Trackback away
2003: It was fun – no need to search my site anymore

You may have noticed that at some point last week a couple of pictures arrived in the top bar of Listen to Musak. For a while I have felt that the front page of my site is a little dull so I have been thinking of ways to add some images. The lovely bodies pictured are intended to be temporary. They will get replaced with images from my gallery or photo selection soon. I have, however, troubled over the layout.

The Mozilla layout engines makes the front look like this

I believe this to be incorrect layout but my style sheet knowledge is limited. I think it’s the better look. Internet Explorer and Opera look like this

which I don’t like as much but I think is technically correct.

If you know that I am wrong and have just done some obviously bad coding then please let me know.

On this day…

2005: Prevention of Terrorism Bill
2003: Spend Spend Spend (Online)

You may notice that the colours on the site have changed. I’ve lost the duller beige/brown/gray colouring in favour of something a little more colourful. I am not sure it really works at the moment but I will play with the colour settings over the next few days. As you can probably tell, I do not have an eye for colour so I used quick colour to help me. It’s quite useful to find colours that are supposed to work well together but I wish it could find a greater range of colours. I’ll see if I can get used to it. I am pleased to have lost the harsh, bold red that was used for the links.

On this day…

2005: On Microsoft And Windows Digital Media
2004: Janet’s Malfunction
2004: Alcohol Free
2003: Online Advertising Technology Issues
2003: An Email From Space

Traffic to this site in January 2004 seems to have taken a little bit of a leap. I see that Justin Timberlake was the most searched term. Unfortunately, dear Andrew Kinlochan hasn’t scored any comments. February is supposed to see the release of the new Phixx single so I’ll wait to see if traffic to the Man of the Moment section follows other trends where the visits raise with some outside public event concerning the individual. It’s not science but it is interesting to watch.

On this day…

2004: Scrabble Name
2003: Shuttle Lost