So, you will notice there have been some changes around here. Firstly the site is fairly un-styled right now. The more important change is more hidden. If you glance up at the location bar, you’ll note the extension of the page is now html. That’s correct, old school, non-dynamic hypertext markup language.

You see, I’ve changed how I generate the pages on the site. I now statically generate them on my local computer and upload them. The articles are stored locally in text files which are processed by a ruby script into a publishable set of html files. The script also generates the home page, RSS feed and the archive page (a new feature!). The system isn’t complete or pretty, but I thought I’d get it live sooner rather than later.

The inside of the flat is still too chaotic to photograph and show you, so instead I took some photos of outside the window as it appears under the amber glow of streetlights.

I live just off one of the main streets of Bristol, Whiteladies Road, which is both a fairly major throughfare and the location of quite a few of Bristol’s numerous bars. This is both a benefit and a curse. On the one hand, it feels like you are really in the thick of things, with chatter from the street and cars whooshing up and down. It’s invigorating and feels very lively. In contrast, when you want an early night, it’s not the quietest of places. So far, however, the excitement of being in the thick of things is winning out by a substantial margin.

The second night in the new flat ending, I’ve started to settle in a little. There are still bags and boxes scattered around both the bedroom and the kitchen/living room. I now have three rooms to myself: the living room/kitchen, the bedroom and a squashed up bathroom. Dividing my things between two rooms is proving tricky; previously, having only one room has made the decision moot. I am currently splitting the bags and boxes between each room to see whether each room can fit its allotted bags; if the bags fit, my working assumption is I’ll be able to make the contents of the bags fit too.

Next weekend I’m moving into a flat on my own; a flat with just myself for company. This will be the first time I’ve lived on my own. I’ll have a whole two rooms and a bathroom to myself! Like a real adult person and everything.

At first I was a little worried about the prospect of living on my own. What if I got lonely? What if I find that I am an annoying flatmate? Will it all feel very empty as I’m used to living in a single, cluttered room?

 From: mike
 To:   world

Trying to fix layout of flickr badge stop Ended up poking whole page stop Probably broken in Internet Explorer stop Hopefully the flickr images don’t overspill on Firefox/win32 still stop

Pages other than homepage broken stop May fix stop

Not that happy with design overall stop

Perhaps it’s a grower stop