Failure is the Key to Success

Quite a while ago, I tried to integrate Blogkomm commenting with this blog and didn’t really succeed. I was looking on the Thingamablog forums a few days ago and saw a post that pointed me to the Notes from James blog. The author has written his own simple commenting system that he has integrated with Thingamablog.

It looked really good, so I tried it out on a test blog earlier today. It worked really well and I was able to adjust the style sheet to blend it in with the rest of the blog. I have only added comments on the entry pages with links to the comments from all other pages.

Flush with my success at getting this to work, I thought that I would revisit Blogkomm. The new version is really good with captchas (text /numbers in image) to stop spam bots from wrecking the comments. I installed this on the test blog and was able to get this working as well. However after playing around with it for a while, I concluded that I liked the simple comment system much better.

I have modified the add comments page so that it more closely matches the rest of my site and added it to the main blog.

Tags:blog comments,thingamablog

I have just checked on the census petition that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago [link] and it is now up to nearly 13000 signatures. It is currently the 4 largest petition on the site. The deadline for signatures is on 8th March, so I shall have to look out for the result and the government response.

Tags:uk census

We had snow this morning when we woke up. It was only about an inch and it has gone now, but we may get some more tonight. The forecast has been for cold days since the beginning of the week. Other than our road, the roads were just wet by the time I went to work this morning.

Tags:snow

The washing machine arrived this morning earlier than expected, which was good. It took them less than 5 minutes to deliver the new one and take away the old one. It was wrapped in bubble wrap, which kept the kids occupied for hours popping the bubbles.

I had disconnected the old machine last night and capped off the un-needed hot water feed. There was an in-line valve, but I decided not to rely solely on it long term. I didn’t want it to start dripping sometime in the future as I had already experianced that with the cold feed last year. Several weeks after laying the laminate floor in the kitchen last year, I found that the cold feed to the washing machine was dripping. I found this out when the water was squelching up between the boards in front of the old washing machine. This meant that about 3/4 of the floor had to be lifted and many of the boards replaced, not what I was expecting when I got a call at work.

The new machine is all fitted and working, its going to be a bit of a learning curve as the controls are different from the old one. It is extremely quiet compared to the old one, but then after 12 years it should be. It is also much more efficient than the old one and indeed many of the modern ones. This is good with the rising costs of electricity. It is a faster spin (1400rpm) than the old one which means that the clothes are drier when they come oout, reducing the drying time if we have to use the tumble dryer.

Tags:laminate floor,washing machine

I subscribe to several RSS feeds for information and news, the list also includes a couple of blogs.

The Dilbert Blog by Scott Adams. Scott has a interesting outlook on many things. Some of his posts make you sit there nodding in agreement, some leave you wondering what planet he’s on. Well worth a look.

The other blog that I read is John Chow’s. I found John’s blog in November when I followed a link from Digg about someone who had been banned for providing a link to John’s blog, supposedly because he is a spammer. What I found was a popular blog with a lot of useful information. I subscribed at the time and have read every post since. John has some very good advice regarding advertising and blogging in general. Todays’ post was about getting RSS readers to visit the blog. John has on average 1261 readers who only read by the RSS feed, and I am one of them. Because the full post is in the feed, I do not need to click on the read more link to get all of the story.

However, John’s tactics have finally worked; he has been at 2007 CES in Las Vegas and collected a selection of freebies from companies and is planning to give most of his haul away to blog readers over the next few weeks. So for the simple task of adding John’s blog to my Technorati Favourites (UK spelling!), I have entered his first competition. It might only be a pen and USB flash drive, but it’s the chance of winning something and the link back that finally brought me to the site and reading the comments.

Tags:dilbert,john chow

Went back to Curry’s this morning to buy the machine we chose last night. I don’t normally buy extended warranties on things, but it’s such a pain if the washing machine fails, so I got a 5 year one as well.

It will be delivered next Saturday and the old one taken away. Hopefully it will be a straight forward swap. I will need to cap off the hot water feed as the old one has both hot and cold, but the new one only has cold.