A while back my blog decided, in its infinite wisdom, that allowing access to the control panel was in fact not what I wanted to do, despite my many attempts to do so.  I would go to the login page, enter my details, hit the ‘go’ button, and be instantly redirected back to the login screen.  Helpful.  I did some digging around, and it appeared that as far as WordPress was concerned I was actually logged in, it just wouldn’t show me the control panel itself.  That meant I couldn’t approve or reject comments, I couldn’t add new posts, I couldn’t update the templates, I couldn’t add or remove any plugins, and I couldn’t spend time tinkering with my blog.  Maybe it thought it was doing me a favour.

In any case, it’s taken me until last night to resolve the matter.  I had previously tried copying new files across to upgrade to the latest version, but that didn’t work.  So last night I took a full backup of everything, deleted all the core files from the server, and uploaded a fresh load of files.  And as if by some deep and powerful magic, my command over my online presence was finally restored.  With that liberation still fresh, I jumped on the opportunity to make a few changes.

The most obvious change you’ll see is that I’m now importing my Twitter feed.  When I post a new tweet, it’ll get displayed here on my blog too, appearing like a little speech bubble.  This is actually a category in WordPress too, so I can non-Twitter mini-posts too.  Like for those times when I really feel the need to say something to the world, but Twitter doesn’t give me enough characters, and a full-on multi-paragraph post isn’t necessary.  Of course, I understand that you may not want my Twittering to come up in your RSS reader, so if you want to continue reading my blog by RSS but excluding these micro-posts you can now use this new RSS feed URL: www.minipix.co.uk/?feed=rss2&cat=-342.

Other changes I’m bringing in include a mobile-enabled view of my blog, so that you can read my posts from your phone.  I’ll hopefully also figure out a way of updating my blog from my mobile too, so that I can blog on the move.

I shall also be adding a new ‘Family’ category, as I seem to be writing an increasing amount about our son Samuel, and it feels appropriate to recognise his significance with his own category.

EDIT: If you’re seeing the Twitter micro-posts but they’re unformatted (i.e. not in funky speech bubbles) you probably need to refresh your browser to reload the stylesheet.  To refresh your browser, click the refresh button in the toolbar.  Or press F5.  Or press CTRL-R.  Or CMD-R if you’re on a Mac.  Or ALT-CTRL-SHIFT-TAB-R-X-N-SPACE if you happen to have that set up as a custom keyboard shortcut.

I love living in the countryside.  There is warm sense of satisfaction in seeing tractors parked in the Co-op car park, of hearing cows mooing in a nearby field early in the morning, of the pungent smell of fresh manure wafting from the farm down the road, of knowing that rush hour traffic consists of maybe 5 cars.  However, it’s not entirely complete.  There are a few things missing.  The friends we’d made in Colchester.

So this weekend we made the journey to Essex, the car packed with all sorts of bits and pieces, mostly for the baby, to stay a couple of nights with some dear friends of ours who are still in Colchester.  Saturday was indeed the highlight for me.  We saw Phil and Jenny in the morning, we spent the afternoon in Wivenhoe with Phill and Phil and Anne-Marie and Sarah, and watched Doctor Who in the evening.  That in itself would ordinarily be enough, but in honour of this being our first visit to East Anglia with our baby, and having not seen people in yonks, Anne-Marie decided to make the barbecue one to remember for all time.

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I was taking some photos of our son Samuel the other day, and one of them reminded me of a photo I have of me when I was his age.  So I looked it up and compared them, and just couldn’t resist sharing the result with you all.  The attached picture shows me (top) and Samuel (bottom), both in a similar pose.  Can you tell we’re related?

As it happens, my Dad did a similar now-and-then comparison on his vintage bus blog, showing a photo of him as a lad in the driver’s seat of an old bus, and a more recent photo of him in the same position in a similar bus.  Actually, his blog is worth a read, in a geeky sort of way.  If you like old buses.  Or reading about my Dad.

I remember when I first started blogging.  My friend Phill was responsible for starting me off, back when we were at uni together.  He had a blog, and said that I should have one too.  So I registered a free domain name – www.minipix.cjb.net – and pointed that at some free webspace that came with my Dad’s dial-up internet connection (with permission… I think), and wrote my first blog.  If memory serves, it said something along the lines of ‘hey, I’ve got a blog, not sure what to write here, but we’ll see how it goes’.  Once the bug had bitten, there was no stopping me.

That first blog was a straight HTML page.  I edited the HTML, probably in Notepad, put the latest post at the top of the page, and re-uploaded the file.  Simple but effective.  But over time it became a little unwieldy.  So Phill got me to beta-test his PHP-MySQL blogging system that he’d been tinkering with, and that opened up a lot more options.  Before long though I felt it necessary to migrate to something more substantial, made the move to WordPress (importing my old blog posts), and have been a blogging sensation ever since.  Well, maybe not the sensation bit.

But now, an ominous cloud hangs on the horizon.  A tiny ripple out at sea that has the potential to grow into a tidal wave that will rip through all that once was safe and secure.  My wife has a blog.

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Life is full of stages.  History, experience, science and society have, through their own varied means and with very little co-operation, dictated to us how our lives should develop and when each milestone should be reached.  In the case of babies, these stages are closely packed, and a by-the-book baby can be expected to learn new things and reach new levels of ability according to a tried and tested timetable.  Throughout childhood, those milestones get further apart, but they’re still there, telling us how intelligent we should be, how our maturity should show itself, and so on.  The preset stages don’t finish at the dawn of adulthood, of course – we have achievements to attain here too, like owning a car, buying insurance, taking out a mortgage, attending jury duty, voting in the elections, paying into a pension, even retiring.  All these things are expected of us, not necessarily in a particular order, especially later in life, but we are each of us judged by what everyone else reckons we “ought to be doing by now”.

And then there are those of us who tear the rule books into pieces and feed the bits to the next door neighbour’s dog.

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There are few things I like more than taking photos.  There are plenty of things I like equally, like drinking tea, having friends round, washing the car and so on, but on a sliding scale they are all pretty near the top.  And recently I have had a plethora of occasions to dust off my camera and capture the passing moments, each one with its own shade of significance.

The week before Easter we went to Torquay to visit my family.  My little brother was in the annual school musical – an adaptation of Guys And Dolls – and it was superb.  That was on the Friday evening.  We left Samuel with my parents while we went to the theatre, figuring that neither audience nor cast would appreciate the addition of his vocals to the performance.  It was only the second time we’d left him with someone else while we went out, so it was at the same time exciting and worrisome.  Thankfully my Mum has had plenty of experience of looking after children, with three of her own children and a career in childcare, so all was well!  And all of that is by way of introduction really, because I didn’t take any photos that whole day.  That started the next day.

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