Category Archives: Admin

Normal service is resumed…

Well, that’s me for a fortnight. Two weeks in Cornwall seems just reward for the hectic blogging around these parts recently. So just so’s you know, if this site isn’t updated between now and the 10th of June it isn’t because I’ve given up, but more likely that I’m busy eating a Cornish cream tea, albeit probably not one using Rodda’s clotted cream.

So, see you in a couple of weeks!

And a bit…

What a surprise. If you’d asked me five years ago whether I thought this blog would still be going today, I’d have replied “What’s a blog?” But if you’d asked me an hour later, after my brother had mentioned blogging in passing during a phone call, and after I’d subsequently investigated www.blogger.com and almost accidentally written my opening post here, I’d have told you that I’d doubt my interest would last five months. Or even five minutes. Yet here I am.

Why do I bother? Well, if you are in any way a regular reader you’ll know that I rarely do. This thing called “life” keeps getting in the way a lot of the time, and I am usually perfectly happy for it so to do. Unlike some of those ridiculously prolific – and for some reason, usually right-wing – bloggers out there, who seem able to spend much of their working day writing on their blogs about, say, how inefficient the public sector and its work-shy employees are, I simply don’t have the time to write anything from work, and much to my chagrin work has recently taken up more of my time that I would prefer. Even when I’m not at work, the children’s shocking lack of self-sufficiency is still such that my potential prattling-time here is often curtailed, especially during the school holidays when I am usually engaged as a metaphorical plate-spinner cum referee. Add in an impending holiday to Cornwall, and other ongoing real-life events, and with one thing and another I’m amazed I’ve even found the time to write this over-long commemoration of my five years of being largely ignored in cyberspace.

Another reason for my infrequent output is, I guess, a running out of ideas. Up until five years ago I’d had a short lifetime of pent-up pet theories with nowhere to go. That all changed with this blog, and at first there were loads of thoughts that I wanted to air and get out of my system; but now, while I wouldn’t say the well is exactly dry, it more often seems less worthwhile for me to dredge up another bundle of opinions that aren’t too dissimilar to what the next blogger is thinking. I try to write only when I think I hold an opinion that I haven’t heard expressed elsewhere, or where I feel, rightly or wrongly, that I have a different twist or angle on a subject. Very often I don’t think that is the case, and so this place will stay silent for a few weeks or more, save for those Twitter updates. Sure, the odd flurry of posts may escape me from time to time, but whether that signifies a burst of inspiration or simply the fact that I’ve found myself with a bit of time on my hands and blogging on my mind, I will leave for you to decide.

I guess I’ve settled into a frame of mind where I view my readership as imaginary – as, indeed, it largely is – and that more and more I am writing for myself alone. A case in point is this post, one of my personal favourites, and so an almost perfect example of my current attitude. Were I to visualise a real, living and breathing person reacting to reading that story, I imagine it would be a somewhat tortured, bemused and befuddled “WTF?” So I don’t do anything of the kind; I just write the thing, occasionally re-read it, and my imaginary reader, being a mirror of myself, considers it to be a piece of some worth.

It is an illusion that I think best explains the secret my longevity. If I wanted a large and loyal following for this blog then I would probably write differently and more often, and to read and comment on more blogs than I do; but I gave up that ambition of popularity long ago, and I have since become accustomed to my niche in the blogosphere. It suits me fine. And anyway, show me a really popular and frequently updated blog and the chances are, with a handful of rare exceptions, that I’ll show you a depressing, steaming pile of shite that makes one despair of humanity. The blogs I am mostly drawn to are exactly those rarely updated, quirky and often less-popular blogs where I feel more of a personal affinity with the writer, where the arrival of a new post in my RSS reader is akin to the joy of receiving a hand-written letter through the post; I often approach those more prolific bloggers’ updates in Bloglines with a heavy heart, a feeling reminiscent of hearing the thump on the mat of another load of junk from a mailing list I keep meaning to remove myself from.

So charge your glasses if you will and let’s raise a toast: to all of those infrequent bloggers out there who for me make the blogosphere what it truly is; and to those rare beasts the prolific and popular bloggers who aren’t crap, the exceptions that prove the rule, and who are usually ignored by the greater media as a consequence; and to everyone who has never written a blog, or no longer writes one, but who would (still) write a fantastic one if they did. You know who you are. And while it is considered bad form to toast yourself, since I write under a pseudonym this is me, Andy, raising a glass to my alter-ego, Quinn, and to the past five years of his witterings hereabouts.

And here’s to another five years?

If you’ve nothing worth saying, then shut the fuck up, my parents always told me (I’m paraphrasing slightly), hence the general quietness around these parts recently. I’ve really had very little to add to any debate over the past month. No change there, you may reasonably interject, and with due and just cause. 

But on cold leather seats well it suddenly struck me that I was about to go a whole calendar month without posting anything here, something that hasn’t happened (but possibly should have) since this blog started up some four-and-a-bit years ago. And that would be intolerable.

Hence this hastily-tapped message to my dwindled readership, wishing you all a belated Merry Christmas, a just-in-time Happy New Year, and to warn you that I’ll be back here to see you in 2009, which is due in just a couple of minutes time.

After spending the week on holiday in Cornwall we arrived home on Saturday to the sound of rockets, Catherine wheels and bangers, the work of both the local kids and of the fireworks display at the nearby Bethesda school. While ferrying our stuff from the car into the house I decided to switch on our aged PC, to give it time to warm up so it would be ready for use once we were all settled in the house. Unfortunately it decided to join in with the bonfire festivities; clearly unhappy at having been left idle for the past week, once I had plugged it in it emitted a pop, a crack and a vaguely cordite-like odour.

Hence the reason why I’m currently sat in Cheadle library tapping away on a borrowed PC, and this post is my way of saying that The Obscurer will be undergoing an enforced hiatus until my computer is either repaired or replaced, and who knows when. I may still issue the odd update on Twitter – although I won’t be publishing those here, you’ll be glad to know – and if you are pining for your irregular dose of my ramblings then please feel free to browse those archives; there’s badly punctuated nonsense on all manner of subjects over there. More likely is that you and I will take a well deserved break from each other, and quite right too. But fear not, I will return. Eventually.

It’s that time of the year when I pointlessly inform you all that I am off on holiday so you should expect silence around this more obscure part of the blogosphere for the next fortnight or so; pointless, of course, because it’s not as if this place doesn’t go quiet for a couple of weeks or more anyway from time to time, and without explanation, when I can’t be arsed or inclined to write something spellbindingly original or other.

But this time it was going to be different. I was going to announce how I had set up my Twitter Tools plugin so I could clump my Twitter “tweets” into a daily digest here on The Obscurer and continue my ramblings even while lodge-bound in Saundersfoot, Pembrokeshire. I planned to explain how I had pestered Orange into arming my mobile phone with 300 free texts so to facilitate this endeavour. It was going to be such fun.

But my holiday has come just as I am in the middle of one of my periodic “jaundiced with blogging” feelings, and so a break from the whole silly business seems very much the ticket. This is how I feel now. But will I feel the same way in a couple of days’ time?

So here’s the deal; I’m on holiday until Saturday the 16th of August, so some sort of hiatus is in order. But occasionally the odd thought, banal micro-observations or nano-utterances may pop through whether I like it or not, and so a rogue “tweet” may appear here if I can be bothered. If you subscribe via RSS them be prepared for the worst, and it may be worth re-tuning in two weeks’ time if you don’t like the sound of what is on offer. If you do, and are on Twitter already, then feel free to stalk follow me here regardless. Now you can’t say fairer than that, can you?

Exciting times, huh? Well it’s make or break for Twitter and me anyway. Let’s wait and see just what happens, shall we? Who knows, or dares to dream?

As promised when I moved this blog over from Blogger to WordPress, I have done plenty of “tinkering and fiddle-faddling” with this website since, adding wee plug-ins and the like here and there that you probably haven’t noticed, and which I am happy to leave you to find for yourselves, and to make use of if they are of any use. But in lieu of having anything original to write about, and because I know many (many?) of you just read this via a feedreader, I’d like to just draw your attention to the new Recent Browsing section in the sidebar. In short it is a list of the last 10 posts or articles on other blogs or websites that I have added to my new del.icio.us thingy, and which I think may be of interest.

Dominating the list at the moment are three posts regarding the Craig Murray / Alisher Usmanov affair; if you don’t know what it is all about then Chicken Yoghurt is the best place to start, detailing the way the man hitherto known as “that fat Russian bloke who wants to buy Arsenal” has forced down a number of websites that were making allegations against him. In brief, rather than trying to defend his reputation, Usmanov’s lawyers, Schillings, have sought to crush dissent just by threatening legal action and without making any attempt to clear Usmanov’s name, a (apparently failed) strategy to starve their opponents’ allegations of the oxygen of publicity, which they boast of having used previously on their website, and which should be of concern to anyone with a vague interest in that old bauble “freedom of speech”. In addition to Chicken Yoghurt, I have linked to Unity’s post at Ministry of Truth regarding some tactics on how to deal with the UK libel laws (he is also excellent here on Schillings’ philosophy), and to Tim Ireland’s temporary Bloggerheads site (the original one being a casualty of the action) which details a timeline of what has happened, and what is going to happen next.

The rest of the links are a bit of a mish-mash; from the deadly serious (a link to a petition supporting the Burmese protesters, via Nosemonkey) to the hilarious (Andrew Collins showing a toe-curling corporate video for the free magazine ShortList); from more “old media” absurdity (Digital Spy report that UKTV G2 is being renamed Dave. Yes, Dave! How did that get past market research? Who do they speak to?) to “new media” brilliance (SBALB on being head hunted), I like to think that there is a little something for everyone there. There’s even a feed for my del.icio.us links to subscribe to if you want, but I know you don’t.

For how long I bother to continue updating the list only time will tell, but it is certainly a neat way of putting new content on the blog while expending next to no effort on my part. Whether anyone bothers to read it is another matter entirely, but it’s there for now anyway; check it out, ignore it, the choice is very much yours to make.

The Turgenev play? The film featuring Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh? No, just a post explaining what I will be up to for the next four weeks or so.
It’s Cornwall from Friday, taking advantage of the twilight days of my wife’s maternity leave and my own current bizarre part-time shift pattern which affords us the opportunity to spend three weeks in that gorgeous sticky-out bit of England way down there without ballsing up our entire annual leave entitlements.

Then it’s a further week with extended family members in the land of my forefathers (or rather my one mother) up Perthshire way; more specifically at Rumbling Bridge just south of the beautiful Glendevon. Don’t worry; we won’t be making the Cornwall-Perthshire trip in one go. That would be madness. A stop at home en route will be very much in order.

When I get back I will endeavour to update this site a little more often than I currently do – after all, there’s nothing I like better on a hot, sunny day than to be sat in front of a PC tapping out nonsensical crap – but that is something I know you have heard before. Time will indeed tell.

So, set your alarm clocks for June as that will be then next time when I will rant, moan or talk gibberish; at least via the hereby means of the world wide web. See you then.

On Monday, Blogger finally got back to me about my permalink problem. They had looked at my website and said that “the problem seems to be resolved already”. And indeed it had been, because I had moved to WordPress the day before. So credit to Blogger for finally trying to sort out the problem, but I’ve moved on now and I can’t be bothered to go back.

So; without going all “Oscars” on you, a few thanks are in order regarding the move.

• To my brother for installing the files and creating a MySQL database, whatever that is. He insists that what he did was very simple and only took a few minutes; I am certain that had I attempted it we would have been talking hours, and then it still wouldn’t have worked. Cheers our kid.
• Ady Romantika for his Blogger RSS Import plug-in, which made importing all my Blogger posts and comments while maintaining my existing permalink (and fixing the broken ones) so easy that I might have done this ages ago had I known.
• Owen Barder and Tom Sherman for their scripts that, with a few amendments, even mean that all my old obscurer.blogspot.com permalinks now re-direct to the correct posts on obscurer.co.uk. My life is complete.

Now that everything has been set up don’t be surprised to see some tinkering and fiddle-faddling here over the next few weeks until I get things “just so”. I’ve installed the veryplaintxt theme which I have subsequently butchered amended to keep some of the look of my old site, and taken advantage of the move to ditch some of the JavaScript bollocks such as the BBC NewsBox that no-one read and the Google Ads that earned me no money. I’ve also replaced all the little buttons and logos with simple text links which for the time being makes thinks look clean and uncluttered; if I start thinking it looks stark and dull I may change things around, but not yet. I’ve also felt the need to squeeze each post into an ill-fitting category that I may change over time, if only because being in an unsuitable category seems preferable for the moment to being condemned to being labelled “uncategorised”. I care for my posts.

Finally, for my feedreader friends, it looks like the redirect for the atom.xml and rss.xml feeds has worked so you needn’t change your feed settings after all. Mind you, if the redirect doesn’t work, and you haven’t changed your feed, you won’t be able to read this anyway. So there.

That’s enough introspection. Any suggested improvements, or questions regarding the move, feel free to get in touch. Until next time.

Over the next few days I’ll be moving The Obscurer over from Blogger to WordPress. If you read this via a feedreader such as Bloglines, NetVibes or Google Reader then you may want to set the feed you subscribe to as feeds.feedburner.com/obscurer if it isn’t already, as that will survive the change. That will guarantee that you still receive this nonsense, although I will also be setting up a redirect so that hopefully the atom.xml and rss.xml feeds will also work come the day.

Otherwise the only real change you should notice will be a bit of a redesign of this site. The URL will remain the same as www.obscurer.co.uk, and all the old permalinks should still work, although the archives will be in a different format. Even better, the recent permalinks that have been broken in Firefox should be fixed; and indeed it is Blogger’s abject failure to make any effort to resolve this problem, or even to acknowledge my emails on the subject, that is the only reason I feel forced to make the move.

So, if over the course of the next few days you visit here and either the site is down or there is a strange error message, it will be because I will be hard at work, scratching my head and wondering what has gone wrong. It won’t be because I have jacked this whole thing in, and if you pop back the following day all should be as right as rain.

I hope.