Tag: blog

New theme. Check it.

I’ve applied a proper professional theme here. Let me know if you think it needs anything else…

February 2, 2011

St. Eutychus: Now with (hiddenish) ads

So. I just thought I should make this clear. I don’t have ads on my blog (unless you count the occassional reference to my T-Shirt store on Cafepress (currently with one T-Shirt, possibly with more during the holidays), or the plugging of my coffee roasting services (I just got a fresh 10kg of Green Beans to roast – hit up the order form…).

Sometimes, if I remember, mentions of a book will also take you to Amazon in a way that would, if you purchased something, result in a small commission for me. I don’t do that often. Because Book Depository is cheaper.

Anyway, when I installed Google’s search thing in the header, it came bundled with adwords. So now, if you search for something, you’ll notice there are ads with the search results. Click them and I get a few cents. I’m still opposed to the idea of having ads all over the site. I don’t know why.

November 18, 2010

4,000

I did it. Hooray. Seven posts ago now. Sorry. I was so busy procrastinblogging that I missed the milestone. From the early days (launched some four years and six months ago) on blogger as nathanintownsville to this wordpress.org powered “St. Eutychus” multi-polar iteration spamming RSS readers all over the world with whatever I find, this blog has been a blast.

How does one mark such an occasion? I could do a K-Rudd and let you all know that I’m “proud of the fact…” I could do a “best of release”… I could urge you to search the archives instead (maybe start with the tagcloud at the bottom of the page). I could launch a week of festivities. I could hold a Roman triumph, walking the streets while tossing handfuls of coins bearing my image, and the blog’s logo. And of course, I could offer a series of thank-yous to those who have undertaken the journey with me, I’d like to thank God, my wife, and you, humble readers… but that would be cliched. I could ask you to pause, and reflect with me, what it actually means that I’ve written 4,000 posts. That’s bigger than a novel. If you printed out my blog it would use hundreds of pages, it’d probably kill a tree. Wow.

If each took post took an average of 5 minutes to write (ignoring research and commenting and the like) that works out at 333 hours of my life, or almost 14 full days.

Or I could just post something to mark the milestone, and get back on with the job of reading the Internet so you don’t have to.

October 25, 2010

Bloggernation

Ben likes making up portmanteuas to describe blogging. See his latest work here in this handy post about not letting the lack of blog love get you down. So here’s mine. Bloggernation – it’s where a blogger appears to go into hibernation.

I don’t think I’ve ever written one of those “I’m sorry I haven’t posted here for a while” posts. And I don’t really plan too start now. But if I were to not blog so much in the next three weeks (or if I were to blog exclusively about boring stuff like what I’m studying) please understand it’s not because I hate you, but because I love my fellow students and like the idea of passing (and possibly the idea of helping others pass to).

I’m also still playing around with the design. Bear with me on that too, and no doubt I’ll be procrastinating here in the coming days and weeks. And I’ll try to comment on your blogs occasionally – rather than just arguing with atheists for the sake of arguing, or perhaps more correctly, for the intellectual stimulation (even though I said I wouldn’t do that any more).

I do love a good procrastinargument. Anybody got a topic they want to thresh out?

Expect a lot of blists (blog lists) and blictures (posts almost entirely made up of a picture) to tide me over.

October 20, 2010

I’m bored

With my theme. Time for a change methinks. Perhaps something colourful.

What do you like/dislike about the current setup?

July 5, 2010

Commenting Rules

Commenting rules on blogs are generally pretty passe.

Mine can be summed up as:

  1. Please do, unless you’re a spammer.
  2. If you disagree with me prepare for me to argue my case. For a long time. Making sure I have the last word. Unless your name is Andrew.*

There are times when I wonder how Christians should be governing their behaviour online. Justin Taylor had some good guidelines. He took the high road and used the Bible.

  1. I hope this can be a place where we “seek understanding” before critiquing, where we are quick to listen and slow to speak, where we judge others charitably not critically, where we encourage and build up each other rather than tearing down and destroying each other.
  2. I would encourage commenters to consider carefully the following commands and principles regarding our speech:
  3. “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt” (Col. 4:6).
  4. “By your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matt. 12:37).
  5. “Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor” (Rom. 12:10).
  6. “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” (Eph. 4:29).
  7. Speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15, 25).
  8. “If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless” (James 1:26).

Those are great if your commenters are Christians… I like these ones (via Gordo) from Triablog (they expand on each point in this list on the post).

These are the first five, of ten.

  1. You can say pretty much anything you please about the team. Attack us with impunity. We don’t care. We can take it.
  2. It is not, however, equally acceptable to turn the combox into a free-fire zone whereby one outsider can heap personal abuse on another outsider.
  3. Dialogue is a two-way street. If someone comments on what we say, we reserve the right to respond.
  4. By the same token, we reserve the right not to respond. You don’t pay the bills around here. We choose where to put our time.
  5. Expletives, abbreviated or not, will not be tolerated. Ad hominem invective, as a substitute for reasoned argument, is unacceptable.

*He sometimes gets the last word.

June 5, 2010

Some changes

Well, by pretty popular demand I have killed IntenseDebate. It’s back to no-frills commenting. Hopefully that brings more of you out of the woodwork.

Facebook is trying to take over the internet – they announced some new toys for web developers and bloggers last week – I’ve included one (though haven’t quite got it working yet – it should be fixed by the time you read this though…) that allows you to “like” a post both here and on Facebook with the click of a button.

I’ve also finally (and I’m pretty ecstatic about this one) managed to rewrite the code of my blog so that if you go to page 2 you don’t get page 1’s “Curiosities” you get the next ten. That was really annoying me.

If you think this post is largely pointless be sure to check out the tags (on the site) and you’ll see why I’ve posted it.

April 29, 2010

You know what’s sad…

Staying awake until 2am writing website code trying to fix a little bug that nobody will notice anyway.

Sadder still is posting to tell you all about it (and to clear my cache so that the changes will happen).

April 29, 2010

IntenseDebate

So I’ve been using IntenseDebate for my comments for a while now. And while it allows cool features like giving you the ability to post YouTube Videos and pictures, to log in using various online accounts (like Facebook or Twitter) or as a guest, a pretty good spam filter, and the ability to vote comments up or down – it can be a little bit slow and annoying.Plus, nobody uses those features anyway.

I’m thinking about canning it. What do you reckon? If you’re hanging around wishing you could comment but put off by complexity just “like” this post and I’ll assume that’s your indication that I should kill the system.

While you’re telling me what you think of that system feel free to raise any other things that annoy you about the design or technology behind this blog… I’m always interested in fixing those issues because it gives me a chance to play with code and design stuff.

Over to you.

April 28, 2010

Sharing is caring

Because I like experimenting with just about every feature you can add to a website (this may well come in handy one day when someone asks “how can I get people to be able to share my stuff on Facebook without copying and pasting a link”) I’ve added a little “share on Facebook” button to the top right of each post. This is pretty cool. It lets you post stuff you like straight to your profile so that all your friends can also read it. And it keeps track of how many times something has been shared. If there is no little speech bubble above the button with a number in it it’s because nobody has shared the link.

Here are four reasons you should click the “share on Facebook” button.

  1. It will make me feel better about myself.
  2. It will make the number change.
  3. It will get more people coming to this page who will then click the button to make me feel good.
  4. Those people will think you’re brilliant and capable of finding all sorts of funny things on the Internet. You can vicariously benefit from my dedicated procrastination.

I don’t know how long I’ll keep it. But I haven’t culled any of the other plugins or things I’ve installed to get more people here – even if I’m the only person who clicks and shares my stuff. It’ll be depressing if things only ever get shared once (especially if that once is by me) so at that point I might remove it. But seriously, without trying to clamour desperately for your attention, how hard is it to click on a star (you don’t even have to like the post to do this), and click on a button once in a while?

If you are reading this, and you have a Facebook profile (which you need to be able to share the post on Facebook), and you’re not a fan of St. Eutychus yet – then do yourself me yourself a favour and get on board the juggernaut.

January 20, 2010

Eutychus in the Brick Testament

Pop quiz. You know that a figure has reached sainthood when a) they complete two miracles, or b) they are featured in the Brick Testament…

I’m going with b.

January 16, 2010

A list of posts from the Christmas period

While the rest of the blogosphere seemed to take the last couple of weeks off (Simone excluded), I ploughed on.

Here are some posts that I thought were a bit of alright from that period.

January 6, 2010

To those stuck in the past…

Hey you. Yes you. The 50 people a week who still come here via the old nathanintownsville.com domain – stop it. No seriously. It’s going to stop working in about a week. I’m not renewing it.

Update your bookmarks. Seriously.

November 26, 2009

Like totally

I’ve finally found a plug-in that does what Simone wanted… a simple “like” plugin.

The star rating thing hasn’t really taken off, but I’m keeping it for now. You can “like” a post by clicking the little plus symbol down the bottom.

November 16, 2009

St Eutychus coming soon to a language near you

By the power of Google Translate you are now able to read this blog in whatever language you are most comfortable.

There’s a box in the sidebar to help. And if you want to do this to your own site you should read how here…

You can add it to any website you want. It’s easy.

November 16, 2009