Pterodaktyl…

I’ve just moved the site from the old K2 based theme to Mandigo. K2 is a very powerful theme with some neat AJAX features, but it took a whole load of customisations to get the site looking the way I wanted - customisations which then had to be migrated to every new release of the theme.

Mandigo is rather simpler, but looks good (I think so anyway!) and beyond a new header image and a couple of colour tweaks it worked right out of the box.

The only thing I still have to sort is the Twitter Tools plugin - I have it installed, but the sidebar widget refuses to show up.

Constructive (or even destructive if you’ve had a bad day!) comment on the new theme is always welcome!

Yesterday I finally proposed to Lil, who I’ve known for 2.5 years and loved since the moment I met her! We were planning to do it on the commons, which are one of the most beautiful areas of East Devon and our favourite place to spend a weekend, but the weather was rather unpredictable so instead it happened in the bird hide overlooking the Otter Estuary (luckily the rain had scared all the other birdwatchers away, and it was just us, a Kingfisher, a Raven and a Mandarin duck!).

I’ve very glad to say that she said “yes”, so now I feel like the luckiest guy in the world! We are so very much made for each other, and I’m looking forward to spending the rest of our lives together!

Reading through the Slashdot news this morning, I spotted a link to DesignTechnica’s “The Best of Web 2.0 Guide. Most of the applications they discuss are ones I’m already familiar with - Flickr, Del.icio.us, Bloglines, Google Maps - but there we a couple of things I hadn’t seen before that caught my eye. One is Vimeo, descibed as being “like Flickr for videos”. Admittedly, I don’t have a lot of videos I’d want to post, but the idea sounds cool and I plan to check it out.

The second thing I discovered was Netvibes, a customisable “start page” similar to Personalised Google or Windows Live. For the last month or so, I’ve been using FeedLounge to keep track of all my RSS feeds. It’s certainly a very powerful reader, with a nice way of organising feeds, but even after recent upgrades I find it too slow to use as a start page. Then of course there’s the $5 a month subscription - not a lot, but it still comes to around £40 a year.

Before switching to FeedLounge I’d been using Personalised Google both as a start page and to keep track of feeds. The interface and options were fairly basic, but it allowed me to glance at all the latest news every time I started my browser. Well, after about 10 seconds of trying out Netvibes I was sold - it’s Personalised Google on steroids! You can pick feeds from their directory (quite sparse at the moment, but I’m sure it’ll grow) or add your own. It has gadgets to display weather, Gmail and POP inboxes, a to-do list and a bookmark manager. For me though, the best bit is that when you click on a feed item, it opens it in Netvibes own reader pane instead of taking you straight to the site. Here you can flick through all the current feed items, and mark them all as read or unread (the start page shows the number of unread items in each feed, so it’s easy to tell when new stuff arrives).

Screenshot 1 - NetVibes Start Page

Screenshot 2 - NetVibes Feed Reader

If you track a large number of feeds, or want to group your news items by tagging, then Netvibes probably isn’t for you. If you want a fast, smart looking homepage for you browser with some decent feed-reading capabilities, it could be worth a try!

After umming and ahhhing over it for ages, I’ve finally decided to get a hosted site and set up my own blog - so here it is!

It’s powered by WordPress 2.0, and uses a modified version of the K2 theme. I’m still working on getting the layout how I like it, especially the sidebar - so you may find things broken occasionally.

Criticism of the layout and functionality in various browsers would be welcome; I’m still finding my way around WordPress and theme modification in general, so I need to know what I’m getting right and what I’m getting wrong!