Via the magic of RSS blog feeds and the Planet aggregator I got hold of today, I’ve put together an afterlife blog aggregation (or ‘planet’) of all the blogs belonging to afterlife authors, as well as a couple of others. Hope you all don’t mind!

There’s still a few issues with the system – currently it only updates a HTML file on my computer when blogs get updated, and doesn’t yet upload this file to the web until I do this myself. In other words, it should update itself when people add new blog entries but it doesn’t at the moment.

There’s also an issue with Movable Type not providing me with the full blog entry in the RSS file, which requires editing the template for index.rdf to fix for each blog. Change the MTEntryExcerpt tag to MTEntryBody in the ‘RSS 1.0 template’ file if you want to change this for your blog.

I’m interested to know what people think of this system? Is it worthwhile? Can it be made any better? Comments in the box, please 🙂

Still not managed to put any photos up, but at least now I have a pretty banner at the top of the page, after some people complained about the new layout… It still doesn’t work in IE 5.5 on my work machine, but I figure most people are on Firefox or IE6 these days anyway.

The banner image is from the contemplative walk I went on at sunrise after the end of term disco, taken near the new Heronbank blocks. I’ll get round to putting the rest of the photos up sometime…

As with everywhere else in the country it seems, we’ve had thunderstorms here tonight. I was impressed when I looked down at the little weather applet in my notification area while listening to the thunder, and discovered it even has a cute little icon for such weather. GNOME rocks.

My sleep patterns are just about getting back to normal now after the weekend, which I’m glad about. This is despite my hour long conversation with Rik until 3am last night about email clients, blogs and RSS feeds.

I’m off to attempt to cook dinner in my dirty horrible kitchen now. Then I’m gonna attempt to integrate some photos into the new blog if I get time when I’m done. Then I’ll probably go to bed.

Normal sleep patterns are actually quite boring!

…Are a few of the words that sum up the last few days in London. Or more specifically yesterday, after I finally managed to start properly enjoying myself and stop being so tired, disorientated and moody.

Mary helped me do some lunchtime shopping in Selfridges and H&M, before we left for Michael’s barbeque in Surrey. We sat in Vicoria station and saw Kiara. We spent an hour sat in the sun at the end of Platform 3 of East Croydon station, while we waited for Laurie to arrive. We turned up at the barbeque a bit late in the end and left a bit late too. I left at half past five this morning to come back up to Cov for work and as far as I know the others are still there.

Why do things like that only seem to happen in London?

I’m sat at Mary’s computer typing this entry at the end of day 2 in London. Mary’s gone to bed, something which I intend to do soon too. I don’t think either of us was up to much else tonight after last night’s carnage at Noise, a new club night in Vauxhall at a venue that can best be described as ‘intimate’.

My thorough exhaustion combined with the heat today also doomed my shopping plans to faliure, only managing to try on one pair of jeans which didn’t fit. We’re going to try again tomorrow.

I took a few random photos which I’ll try and post when I get back to my computer. I need to start taking photos again.

This entry marks the start of a new era for me, as I finally abandon the half-written custom CMS that I’ve been using to manage my blog and my photo albums for the last three years. I really don’t feel it’s worth the time and effort maintaining the mass of code that’s there when there’s far better tools available that someone else has written.

I’ve been meaning to move over to Movable Type for my blog for a while, but only just got round to setting it up on MT. This is the first entry of the new blog that hasn’t been copied and pasted from the old system, and as such is a bit of a landmark entry for me.

As for the photos, I’ve been playing with gThumb on my computer for creating albums that I can upload straight onto the web. I put a few test albums up on my user area on our project server a little while ago and that proved *so* much easier than fiddling about uploading photos to the current system on wabson.

I’m hoping I can spend more time actually putting some semi-decent content up here now I’m using some proper tools to do the job.

I’m feeling slightly queasy this morning. I didn’t realise my milk was quite that rancid until I’d taken a gulp of the coffee which I’d just added it to. It was fine yesterday, I guess one of the pigs I live with must have left the fridge door ajar. Gah.

We went out in Leam last night to celebrate Cath, Gemma, Nicola, James and Tony leaving the country today :-), and spent most of the night sat in a really nice, but expensive new bar just behind House of Fraser. I really liked it, which I guess fits in quite well with Dave’s latest theory that I spend too much on things generally.

I got back at about half eleven and went (more or less) straight to bed, with the intention of reading another chapter of The Prisoner of Azkaban before I went to sleep. I don’t remember actually reading much of it, but I did wake up at 7.45 this morning with the lights still on and the music on my computer blaring away. I’ve really gotta stop falling asleep like that.

Working five days a week and travelling across the country at the weekend (Danny’s party rocked!) can mean you don’t get time to do much else.

I’m hoping that if I blog the list of things I need to do, then I might actually get round to doing them, so here goes:

1. Do some washing! I’ve now run out of clean decent T-shirts to wear, and this morning had to make a start on the collection of Dave and Giles’s clothing I seem to have amassed in my room.
2. Get a (proper) job! Kind of self explanatory really…
3. Sort my finances out. I’ll leave this one til last as it’s so mind numbingly boring.
4. Go shopping and buy some more jeans, as I’ve started to hate most of the pairs I own (again). Might also help with putting (1) off further.
5. Tidy up my room. (1) will help a lot, as most of the mess is dirty clothes.
6. Organise weekend trips to (a) Wales and (b) wherever we’re going for my Birthday. Perhaps Laurie might do the latter one? 🙂

I can’t remember feeling this tired and hungover simultaneously for a while. I’ve just been over to Costcutters and bought a litre of orange juice and a big bar of chocolate (smarties in while chocolate!) in an attempt to make myself feel a little better. I got four hours’ sleep in the end last night, and I could really have done with a bit more!

Last night did remind me that Bows definitely gets better the longer you stay away from it, though. A good night, but I’m really paying for it today!

…Went far better than I expected in the end, despite all the standing in queues in uncomfortable shoes and sitting in hot halls in about seventeen seperate layers of clothing. The weather turned good, it was good to see a few people who I hadn’t seen for a while, and everyone seemed generally happy.

Here’s a photo of me outside Viva after drinking my cappuccino, which helped a lot.