Archive for the ‘impworks’ Category

I’ve had a little fiddle round with this site to add Google +1 button, Tweet Button and Facebook like. Not because I exepect anyone to use them but so I can use all three in anger. The formatting needs a bit of work still but all three seem to be working.

…You’ll not like him when he’s angry.

My avatar was mistaken for a goblin’s mugshot and he really isn’t happy about it.  First he’s never been in trouble with the law.  So they don’t have his DNA, clawprints or photograph on file.  Secondly he’s not a goblin:  Goblins don’t have tails or wings – at least not the goblins he’s come across.

Just finished an under the hood (no visible changes on the surface yet) rebuild of impworks. The big bonus being this site is now clean of a couple of years of junk messing around and I have a separate development site I can mess up to my hearts content.

It doesn’t feel like five years ago today that I started my Too Many Ideas blog after being persuade it was a good idea by Kim Knox on a writers night out at the Everyman.  To celebrate I could have baked a fruit cake or a chocolate cake but instead I had a look to see what the most popular posts over the lifetime of Too Many Ideas.

Vue posts dominated the successes in the early years with Vue Python for Beginners, Vue 6 Tutorial: Cloud Layer Sculpting, Punching Holes in the Sky, V5I: Vue Dynamics 0.3 – Now with Added Particle, XFrog animation in Vue 6 Infinite, Object Sequence Importer Version 0.2.4 and Things Going Boom in Vue 5 Infinite all doing well.  I only really started posting photographs last year – the stand out attraction to date has to be Liverpool’s Pyramid – William Mackenzie Tomb although I’d put that down to the subject mater and not the photograph.  Reviews have always been a part of Too Many Ideas Face Shop Pro – Just Not Ready for the Big Time while The Expendables surprised me with the level of interest it got last year along with my RED – Retired Extremely Dangerous and the stong ongoing performance of my Yes, Prime Minister review.  I was pleased to see my Doctor Who: The Big Bang fighting for a place in my top posts. Of my gaming posts Paper House for Gamers Updated was the most popular – maybe I should be a little less niche or obscure in my topics in future.

Last but not least was one oddball post that these days would probably be a quick tweet instead of a post… Modern Mime.

Google may want to organise the Web – I just want to organise my website.  So since I had a couple of freebies for Vue floating around on Too Many Ideas without a proper home and I think I may have some more on the way I’ve made a new home for Free Vue Objects downloads.

Back in October I did some fiddling with the Vue sites search engine that uses Google custom search to let you search the sites in my Vue links directory. Each time the list of sites changed I had to manually upload a file listing the sites to be included that was generated from the database behind the directory.  Not particularly time consuming but in theory it could be automated.  I tried to set up the automation but for no readily apparent reason it just didn’t work.

In December my 404 error log checking picked up hits on one of the page that I’d made to automate this.   So I republished that page and now through the magic of the Internet the automation seems to be all systems go.

I’d somehow managed to knock out the redirection of my old blogspot blog to the one integrated here.  I hadn’t realised just how many visitors were coming through from there still so breaking / fixing it has had a surprising impact on the impworks visitor statistics!

I was also seeing occasional 404s on the directory page for tags that didn’t exist so I’ve thrown in a simple tag cloud page to give visitors to that page something to chew on.

Here are my personal top films of 2010…

Since journalists are doing this why shouldn’t I

1. Inception
2. Monsters
3. The Town
4. RED – Retired Extremely Dangerous
5. The A-Team
6. The Expendables
7. Solomon Kane
8. The American
9. Salt
10. Clash of the Titans

Biggest missed opportunity:
Burke and Hare

Since its the time of year when people post lists here are the top 11 most visited of my blog posts for the year.

1. The Expendables

2. Yes, Prime Minister

3. Stephen Fry at the Royal Albert Hall Review

4. RED – Retired Extremely Dangerous – Review

5. Chavasse Park Ride

5. Lime Street Station Uncovered

7. Liverpool’s Pyramid – William Mackenzie Tomb

8. Doctor Who: The Big Bang

9. A Town Called Eureka – Season 2

10. Rotating Yates’s Wine Lodge Building

11. Pancetta, Chorizo and Broad Bean Risotto

Reviews have done well and some of the pictures I’ve been posting have picked up a healthy number of eyeballs too

I’ve been fiddling with my pictures pages because it gets quite a lot of visits when there is snow and in the run up to Christmas. I’ve found a jQuery lightbox that doesn’t seem to be cursed with lots of problems with bad paths. I’ve also written a little display plug-in to add a thumbnail from each page to the pictures page so it’s not so bare and boring. Now all I need to do is add some new pictures.

I’ve moved the Too Many Ideas RSS over to Feedburner mostly to get a better idea of what Feedburner has to offer. The existing feed is still there and will carry on working but if you want to try the new feed you can subscribe to it on:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/impworks

The first added extra using feedburner lets me offer is subscribing to the feed by email.  I’ve added the form to my site – its a bit ugly but changing the design breaks some of its functionality.

I’ve also added a tweet this link to my blog.