The second change that I have planned is to the design, once again. I still like the look of this theme but it's been here a long time and so needs to go. As there have been a fair few people in the past who have expressed an interest in using the theme themselves, along with some who didn't ask first, I've decided to make it available for download via Blog Themes Club where you'll find it listed as the Artemis theme. Blog Themes Club is operated by Kevin from Blogging Tips and Sarah from Stuff by Sarah. Themes are available after purchasing one of the selection of membership packages that are available, or by purchasing a single use license if you don't require any support, updates or access to other themes. The service hasn't been running for long but they've already got a good selection of great looking themes available so go take a look if you're in need of a decent WordPress theme.

Change number three is more of a personal change and involves me making sure that I post to this site on a more regular basis, so keep an eye out for updates and hopefully there'll be something of interest for everyone.

I have a little PHP set up to automagically strip my CSS links out of my pages whenever it's April 5th anywhere in the World, and that worked perfectly again this year. The problem is, CSS Naked Day is now on the 9th, so I'm going to have to do it all again. So, here goes …

It's CSS Naked Day – Go here for more information about why I have no styles on this site, and maybe consider joining in

For those of you wondering why some sites are doing it on the 8th – the script used checks to see whether it's the 9th 'somewhere' in the world, and if so it then turns off the CSS. It's automagic!

A few weeks ago I noticed an odd referrer in my stats, http://localhost/mazochova. Anyone that knows much about computers will know that localhost refers to the local computer – ie. the one that you are using is your localhost. So, someone had a web page on their computer that was being run on a local server and was directly accessing something on this site. My suspicion was that this person was stealing my design, or some component of it, and was hotlinking my images in the process. This isn't something I wanted to happen so I blocked their IP number as a referrer. Today I found that my suspicion was right, and found that they had put up their (part done?) version at http://evisions.cz/mazochova (it has now been removed). In case you're wondering how I knew that they had put it online, they are stupidly still hotlinking some of my images – and are even still linking through to my lastFM account, my SpreadFireFox affiliate account and even my GeoURL details; they didn't bother linking to my TextLinkAds account though.

They say that mimicry is the highest for of flattery, however I'm not particularly flattered that eVisions, a supposedly professional web design company, are intending to profit from my design. While I intend to contact them (and their hosts) and ask them to remove it, I'm not sure what else I can do about this – at some stage this is going to be passed on to someone else to use, and so I doubt they'll care too much if I post it on piratedsites.com (which I still intend to do). I'll probably have to hope that they do the decent thing and remove it, but my experience of Eastern Europeans on the internet leaves a lot to be desired, and doesn't fill me with too much confidence.

I can only hope that at some point in the future Anna Mazochová, the woman who is going to be ripped off by these thieves, gets to see this at some point and takes some action for herself. Unless someone has any ideas on effective ways to stop these people, If so, I'd be grateful for the heads up. In the meantime, here's a couple of screen shots:

As was pointed out to me yesterday, there's no obligation for any user-agent (UA) to send a user-agent string as a part of its request headers. I have no quarrel with that statement at all – except, on this site there is. Considering the vast number (several thousand per month) of attempts to directly access comment and contact forms, or to access non-existent files with random character file names by bots, spammers or hackers whose request headers lack a user-agent string, and the fact that it is very rare in my experience for a legitimate visitor to not include one, I decided that it was a requirement for visiting here and used the following code to block them:

The mod_rewrite code used to block visitors without a user-agent string

1. RewriteEngine On
2. RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} =""
3. RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Line 1 turns the rewrite engine on. Line 2 sets the condition to be checked for, in this case an empty user-agent string (denoted by the absence of content between the double quote marks), and line 3 says what should happen when the condition is met – with the F stating that the request should fail. In which case it returns a 403, forbidden, error.

As I said above, that has worked quite well for some time and I've been happy with the effect that it's had on the amount of spam I've experienced. However, when checking my access logs on a couple of occasions recently I noticed that something had been trying to access a file relating to the Text Link Ads service; in order to check that their adverts are working properly their server periodically checks publishers' sites to make sure that the adverts are displayed. Whilst this is a reasonable, and sensible, thing to do it appears that their server fails to include a user-agent string in its request headers – meaning that every attempt to check my site was being rejected by the server, which isn't so good. Consequently, this meant that either I had to stop blocking them, or they had to include a user-agent string in their headers

As my attempts to explain the situation to their support people seemed to be met with misunderstanding it turned out that I had to stop blocking them. Though this wasn't as simple as just removing the code from my .htaccess as this would only result in my being bombarded with spam and hack attempts yet again. Instead I had to check for two conditions instead of one, with the extra condition being that the visitor wasn't them. To do that I also checked to see if the visitor's IP belonged to their server or not, like so:

1. RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^12\.34\.567\.89$

That line of code checks to make sure that the visitor's IP is not the one listed (nb. that is just a dummy IP address rather than their actual one). If both conditions are met (not the listed IP and no user-agent string) then the visitor gets blocked. When added to the previous code we get the following:

The amended mod_rewrite code

1. RewriteEngine On
2. RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} =""
3. RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^12\.34\.567\.89$
4. RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

While that snippet of code will allow them to access my site even when they have no user-agent string in their request headers, and while there's no obligation for one to be included (as mentioned previously), I personally feel that it would be wiser for them to fix their software to ensure that it identifies itself when accessing remote servers. Not doing so means that it's quite easy to confuse them with spammers and hackers who do their best to disguise their actions and methods, and so leaves them to potentially be blocked by many other users who might take similar measures. Hopefully the support person that responded to my queries will pass the matter on to someone who will understand the issue and be able to do something about it.

Simplifying the Interface

What I've tried to do with the new design is keep the important concepts intact – it's still, I believe, functional; it's still flexible, though now within a set limit; and, importantly, it's still simple. In fact I've made an effort to simplify it further. I found certain aspects of the old design were slightly cluttered, notably the links sidebar. In order to de-clutter the link heavy sidebar I separated the archives and external links section into their own pages, with them linked via a new primary menu. I've also used a little PHP and hidden the MyBlogLog widget from everyone but myself.

All in all I think the sidebar is cleaner and more useful while still sharing things that I want to share. Also, perhaps the most noticeable change is the dropping of the third column from the front page. My original idea for that was to allow the front page of the site to show the latest post in full whilst also showing the next 5 or 6 most recent posts, but rather than overloading the page with too much content these recent posts would just have excerpts showing on the front. The old design did achieve that fairly well, however the extra column meant that the front page would always seem a little cramped. It's also not necessary to have a third column in order to provide direct access to that content from the front page, so it got dropped.

New Sections

I've added a few extra sections to the site where I can provide supplementary information, such as an accessibility statement and privacy policy, including an about page. At the moment the about page is a bit bare; I do intend to put something in there at some point, hence its inclusion, however I haven't decided on what exactly I want to say. I've also extended the subscription page to include information about my feeds, feed readers and feed aggregators along with the original email subscription option that I've carried over from the previous version. There's also a contact form, just in case.

Ironing out the Issues

As with any project, there have been issues to resolve (I'm talking specifically about coding issues at this point).

PHP Issues

One of the things I wanted was for the archives page to show each category with all the posts for that category, to be able to reorder the categories, to be able to show the date of each post adjacent to the link to the post and to be able to structure markup how I wanted. One of the great things about WordPress is its ease of templating, and to that end the codex provides details of the variety of template tags available for this, however those available for templating category listings didn't quite meet all of my requirements. This is where Sarah came in with a bit of help, well a lot of help, providing me with the PHP needed to pull the required information from the database in the way that I wanted. She also helped me write the PHP for my contact form, in the process helping me to add in fields checking for spammers, and also code to check that those fields had been completed appropriately.

The site used to use an old version of the Subscribe2 plugin which I held off from upgrading to the amount of work it would have taken to get a newer version to work with the existing theme. A new theme has meant that was no longer a consideration, and so I upgraded to the latest version of Subscribe2. It was only when I uploaded, and set live, the completed theme and upgraded plugins at the weekend that a few issues came to light. Basically the plugin only partially worked on the live site, with new subscribers receiving an email containing a link to confirm the subscription, but the link going to a blank page and the subscription not being confirmed. After a lot of reading through the plugin code, and with Sarah doing a number of tests, we found that there were three functions responsible for the confirmation process – commenting out the call to one of these functions allowed the confirmation to go through and the appropriate confirmation page to display – just in a very broken state as a number of scripted components failed to work on the page. It had, by that time, occurred to us that it was an issue with using customised permalinks on the site along with the way the plugin takes over an existing page that it rewrites with the confirmation – instead of doing this successfully the page was being redirected to the real permalinked page, causing the confirmation to fail. Once we had tested that this was the case, by resetting permalinks to the default method, it didn't take much to discover the real cause – a conflict between Subscribe2 and the Permalink Redirect plugin. This issue hadn't existed with the previous version of Subscribe2 that I'd been using, so something that has changed caused the conflict – the process of taking over an existing page from the database, rather than using its own dedicated one like the old version did. It's probable that the new method makes it easier for the plugin to be integrated with a theme and so it's an acceptable change in the grand scheme of things, but unfortunate that it results in a conflict. To fix it I dropped the other plugin.

CSS Issues

While differences in browser rendering continue to exist there are always going to be display issues when switching between those browsers. The star browser was Firefox, getting things right first time and according to standards. Internet Explorer 7 had a few minor issues, and IE 6 a few more, however these were relatively simple to fix with a few changes in margin, width and position settings in their own respective style sheets linked via conditional comments. In Internet Explorer 5.5 it looked like a bomb had hit it; that browser couldn't handle a fair bit of the CSS and rather than spend too much time on an obsolete browser I changed a number of things and fixed the width. I basically just wanted to make sure the site would be usable rather than trying to precisely reproduce the design.

Quite surprisingly I had a few strange problems in Opera 9.20, surprisingly because Opera is at least as standards compliant as Firefox if not more so. However there were several oddities that didn't seem to have an easy fix, or at least not a fix that could be achieved simply by tweaking the CSS without those tweaks affecting other browsers. Those issues included:

• displaying the sponsor links at the correct size until the page finished loading, then the text mysteriously shrinking. As these used the same markup and CSS as the other links in the sidebar there was no easy or logical way to fix the problem without affecting the other links.
• text marked up as paragraphs within the content area would magically jump to the right once the page loaded, leaving a small fragment of text behind (a few characters from the last line of each paragraph, chopped off at the top). Again, there was no simple fix without it affecting the positioning in other browsers.
• text link styles were overridden with the browser default ones, again without any logic that I could see. It's possible that one of the settings in my browser profile caused this issue, but I'm not familiar enough with the browser to track it down – so I needed to find another fix.

It's likely that the first two issues were caused by the combination of scripts used on the page, for example the sponsor links are generated by scripts. However as it wasn't feasible to remove those scripts anyway I decided not to test the theory by disabling them on a live site (the issues weren't apparent in my local testing copy). Due to the prospect of a CSS fix affecting other browsers I had to find a hack or filter for Opera, much as it pains me to use them now that it's clear we can control the real problem browser (Internet Explorer 6 and under) using conditional comments. However these issues needed an Opera specific fix and, after a bit of searching on Google, I found a way using an @media declaration to target Opera:

1. @media all and (min-width:0px) {
2. head~body p {
3. margin-left : 0;
4. }
5. #content a, #content a:link, #content a:visited, #skipper a:link, #skipper a:visited {
6. color : #00303e !important;
7. }
8. #content a:hover, #content a:active, #content a:focus, #skipper a:hover, #skipper a:active, #skipper a:focus {
9. color : #870000 !important;
10. }
11. #sidebar #links55315 a {
12. font-size : 11px;
13. }
14. }

The combination of the "@media all" and the "and (min-width:0px)" in line 1 of the code above targets Opera fairly specifically – apparently it has also been shown to target Pre-release versions of Safari too. I had no way of testing this, however I felt it was safe to use the method as I was just emphasising already existing styles rather than trying to impose different ones. Line 2 very specifically targets all paragraphs, overriding any other rules that may be conflicting. Line 3 sets the left margin for all paragraphs to zero (even though this had already been done in the main style sheets), while Line 4 closes the rule set opened in line 2. A quick test in Opera showed that the method worked successfully. Lines 5, 6 and 7, and lines 8, 9 and 10 were used to fix the link colour change, while 11, 12 and 13 were used to fix the resizing of the sponsor link text – using a pixel unit instead of ems was what was needed there. The final line closes the whole thing. That discovery came courtesy of the Tanrei Software blog where there's a useful article on using media selectors for browser targetting.

Other Issues

Rather than use a mass of extra markup and images I chose to use Alessandro Fulciniti's NiftyCorners Cube script for the curved corners, so users without javascript enabled will see the site with square corners. Users with javascript may also have some issues, there's a slight lag in the page load time as the script runs through the targeted elements in order to set the curved corners. It's also possible that the script contributes to the paragraph jumping in Opera, though I've never seen this happen in other sites that I've used the script on.

I use a plugin that dynamically adds classes to various links in order to add an icon to identify the target type (such as an arrow pointing away from a box to indicate external links). One of the icons used was for links to Wikipedia which consisted of a small icon of the Wikipedia logo. However it was hard to distinguish that icon from the surrounding text, so it was removed.

I wanted to use an image of an upwards pointing arrow for my back to top links, but without all of the images being background images (otherwise there would have been no actual content for the links). I achieved it using a combination of foreground and background images with the following markup and CSS:

The HTML

1. <div class="up">
2. <a href="#skipper" title="Back to top">
<img src="http://www.ap4a.co.uk/wp-content/themes/mannequin/images/up.png" width="16" height="16" alt="Up arrow" /></a>
3. </div>

The markup simply creates a div as a container element for the image used as the default-state up arrow and the actual link back to the top of the page.

The CSS – part 1

1. div.up {
2. float : right;
3. margin : 5px 10px 0 0;
4. padding : 0;
5. width : 16px;
6. height : 16px;
7. }

The first part of the associated CSS sets the dimensions of the container div to match the size of the image it contains and positions it where I want it on the page (relative to its own container).

The CSS – part 2

1. div.up a, div.up a img {
2. display : block;
3. padding : 0;
4. margin : 0;
5. }

Part 2 of the CSS sets both the image and the anchor around it to be block level. This corrects Internet Explorer 6's behaviour of adding a 3px space beneath inline images (which is the space preserved for text descenders). It also allows the full area taken up by the image to be a clickable part of the link.

The CSS – part 3

1. div.up a {
2. background : url(images/up2.png) no-repeat center bottom;
3. position : relative;
4. width : 100%;
5. height : 100%;
6. text-decoration : none;
7. cursor : pointer;
8. }

This code sets the link to 100% width and height of the container div to complete the process started in the previous rule set, which allows the full area of the image to be clickable. It also sets the positioning to relative to allow the contained image to be absolutely position within it, and the first line sets the background to be the hover state version of the image. The final 2 lines turn off the underline added to links and ensure that the proper cursor style is used.

The CSS – part 4

1. div.up a img {
2. position : absolute;
3. top : -5px;
4. left : -5px;
5. border : none !important;
6. }

Part four positions the foreground image within its containers so that it precisely and completely covers up the background image. It also makes sure that no border is added.

The CSS – part 5

1. div.up a:hover img, div.up a:active img, div.up a:focus img {
2. visibility : hidden;
3. }

The final rule set is responsible for removing the foreground image when the link is hovered over, revealing the hover state background image. It works as intended in Firefox, IE 7 and Opera 9. In IE 5 and 6 the change in state doesn't work, and IE 5 also needs a slight change in the positioning to cover the hover state image.

No doubt there'll be other issues to find, and they'll be fixed when they are. I'm expecting there to be one or two in Mac browsers, but as I haven't been able to test in them (the Mac testing services I normally use have been broken when I've visited recently) I haven't been able to find them. If you're a Mac user and do find issues, please let me know and I'll do my best to resolve them, thanks.

1. I have a degree in biochemistry from the University of Liverpool.
2. I like weird films that no-one else ever wants to watch, like Rawhead Rex and Brain Damage. I like other films too.
3. Despite my youthful appearance, I'm 40 years old. I'm still a handsome devil though.
4. I left school at 16 without any qualifications and went back 10 years later to start again, and was 28 when I started at university.
5. I found it very difficult to think of five things that people who read this blog wouldn't know about me, and I'd like to share. I tend to be a bit reticent about sharing information with strangers on the interweb – who knows what those crazy people might do with the knowledge?

Five people who I'm going to tag with this: no one, as I think it'd be as hard thinking up 5 people who'd thank me for it as it was thinking up my own answers.

It hasn't been all work though, we managed to fit a short trip to Paris in a couple of weeks ago, which gave us a much needed break from the daily grind. I have to say, there's some spectacular scenery over there and it was fascinating to visit places that I've heard about before but never considered visiting. There are a few carbunkles in with the jewels, though, chief among them being the Pompidou Centre which looked like a scruffy mass of scaffolding to me. Maybe if we'd stopped off there before visiting Notre Dame Cathedral I might have been more appreciative of it's industrial appearance, but I doubt it.

Speaking of Notre Dame Cathedral, it was while straining to see if I could spot it after crossing the Pont Neuf that caused me to not see a couple of steps, resulting in me spraining my ankle. At that point the best thing to do was to carry on moving, rather than stopping and letting it swell up like a water melon and cripple me. So we carried on, took a few pictures of the cathedral and then went looking for a pharmacy to get some tubigrip. Instead of tubigrip we came away with my ankle in a splint that cost about 35 euros, but considering the support it provided it was money very well spent. After getting my ankle strapped up we went for a rest in a little Cuban bar about a quarter of a mile from the Cathedral, where we shared a plate of meat tapas and, more importantly, I had a few medicinal cervezas. We did about another four miles worth of working after lunch, and at least another ten the following day, visiting the Bastille, the Moulin Rouge and Sacre Coeur amongst other places, so that splint more than paid for itself.

A couple of days after returning home (to Sarah's parents', which is our stopping off point on the way to our own house) we went to the local hospital to get my ankle checked out. We left with my leg in plaster after an X-ray showed that the pulled tendon had ripped a chunk of bone away from my ankle. So now I'm trying to get around with a plaster on my leg that is giving me less support than the splint I was using did, not to mention getting in the way of everything. I have to go back to the hospital in a couple of days to get the plaster off and have the ankle X-rayed again. Hopefully that'll be the end of it, or at least the end of having to wear the stupid cast.

Despite that, Paris was great and I had no intention of letting a sprain stop us from enjoying the city. I'd recommend it to anyone who wanted a short break away.

Over the past few months I've played a very tiny part in a VERY special auction which is now live. Some facts that might bore a few of you but:-

"In 2005 Lancasters armourie were contracted by the BBC to build a number of prop swords for the Christmas special episode of the hit revival of Doctor Who.

Used by Doctor Who actor David Tennant and the leader of the Sycorax race the swords were seen by 10 million viewers.

Now Lancasters are auctioning the prototype of the sword (above) in aid of London's Great Ormond Street Hospital.

And, as if owning this unique piece of television history wasn't enough Lancasters have been aided in their fundraising effort by the generosity BBC Wales and actors David Tennant and Sean Gilder who have provided their signatures for engraving on the blade.

The sword will be auctioned via ebay. Clive Lankford of Lancasters tell us they "are not shy about the fact that we want this to make as much money for GOSHCC as possible".

More information is available at Martin's "MayorWatch" website, and the charity auction can be found on Ebay. The auction is set to end on June 19, so if you want to get a bid in you still have a few days to do so.

• I AM: a bit lax at posting here.
• I WANT: to get better at this web development malarky.
• I HATE: the stupid petty things that I should be able to ignore.
• I MISS: my parents.
• I FEAR: being eaten alive.
• I HEAR: a lot more than appearances indicate.
• I WONDER: for a while, then I examine.
• I REGRET: pretty much everything I did from 1978 to 1984.
• I AM NOT: able to change those things.
• I DANCE: almost as well as I sing.
• I SING: incredibly well when incredibly drunk.
• I SEE: amazing things.
• I CRY: when no one appreciates my drunken singing.
• I AM NOT ALWAYS: impatient.
• I MAKE WITH MY HANDS: clicking noises.
• I WRITE: occasionally.
• I CONFUSE: now and then.
• I NEED: motivation.
• I SHOULD: learn javascript.
• I START: with good intentions.
• I FINISH: and want to redo it.

The other poor unfortunates that I'm inflicting this upon are:

• Granty (link removed as his blog no longer exists)
• Maz
• Paul

Some of you may be wondering why I started early – well I haven't really. You see I used the PHP function provided by Luke Wertz to disable my CSS automatically and, as mentioned by Dustin, this will turn the CSS off as soon as it is the 5th of April anywhere in the World, and keep it turned off until it's no longer the 5th anywhere. In other words it's an annual CSS 2 naked days.

To find out what it's all about have a read of the announcement, however it's summed up quite well here by Håkon Wium Lie, the creator of CSS:

This is a fun idea, fully in line with the reasons for creating CSS in the first place. While most designers are attracted by the extra presentational capabilities, saving HTML from becoming a presentational language was probably a more important motivation for most people who participated in the beginning.

Håkon has pledged to take part, along with several hundred other mental people

In a little under 48 hours my CSS will return in a blaze of glory, in the meantime you get to see a more attractive ap4a.

When I first began to create my own theme for this blog I began by modifying the default which, at the time, seemed like a good idea considering how clean and simple it appeared to be. Looking back it probably wasn't the best idea considering that Kubrick is a very feature rich theme which has a lot of associated template files. What I should have done was either read up on the designing WordPress themes for public release documentation in order to learn how to do it from scratch, or chosen a simpler theme to develop the basic look from and then added features to that as necessary. That aside I've still managed to learn a fair bit about how the back end of WordPress works as a result of my tinkering with Kubrick, so it's all good in the long term.

Anyway, as mentioned, a few changes have been made to the CSS. Overall this hasn't had much impact on how the site works in modern browsers, I've tested it and am happy that it looks as intended in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, Opera 8.52 and Opera 7.23 for Windows, and Firefox 1.5.0.1 for Windows. According to iCapture it also looks right in Safari 2.0.3, so I'm happy with that too. There are a couple of issues on Internet Explorer 5x for Windows however, and possibly IE for Mac – but I have no way of checking that.

In IE 5x for Windows there were, previously, a couple of very minor issues whereby the column side borders didn't quite meet the column headers, being separated by a one or two pixel gap. It was never something that I had bothered to correct as I chose not to use hacks for those browsers to fix a very minor issue in them – considering that they are very old, and very obsolete browsers, and this is a personal site. After the CSS alterations, however, there was slightly more of an issue. In IE 5.5 the third column on the front page dropped down beneath the second column – not something that would cause me any worry by itself, as the site is still fully functional and the drop doesn't detract to much for me to need to fix it for less than 1.5% of the visitors (sorry). In IE 5.01, however, the right-hand column borders were separated by 10 to 20 pixels from the column headers (ie. they were positioned 10 to 20 pixels too far to the right). This was an effect that I'd seen early on in IE 6, and was one that wasn't acceptable. So I've made a couple of minor changes, and even an IE5 stylesheet, to fix the worst of the issues – and after testing in both IE 5.01 and IE 5.5 it seems I've achieved that, with the only outstanding problems being:

1. The Google ads aren't centred. This is easy to fix by using text-align: center; to align them, but I would have to realign anything else that is affected by that and there's a lot that would be affected. All in all it's not enough of an issue to worry about bloating my style sheets in order to fix it.
2. A slight issue with the column headers in IE 5.01 only. If I get the time I may do something to fix that, but it isn't any kind of a priority for me as less than 1% of my visitors use that browser (and those that do could well be me using it for testing, not something that I care to go looking through my raw log files to check on).

Beyond the reorganising of the site's CSS there have been a few other minor changes. A little while ago it was mentioned that the stark black and white colour scheme was a little hard on the eyes, so I softened that with shades of grey. I've also responded to comments by Sarah and Paul, that the site lacked colour, by using colourful versions of new elements that have been added to the site rather than imposing the greyscale colour scheme on them.

I've also overtly linked, using nice colourful icons, to the different versions of the site's feeds to make subscribing easier. I've also included links to various social bookmarking services to the archived version of each post, to make linking individual posts via those services easier on the odd occasion that someone chooses to do so. I will at some stage revise the selection to better target what I consider useful services – which may also include the addition of new services as they become available to the plugin used. I've also expanded the metadata aspects of the site by the inclusion of links to aspects of the Technorati service that apply to this site, as well as the inclusion of a Friend of a Friend profile.

Finally there's also the addition of a couple of features to benefit commentors, such as the inclusion of gravatars on the site to enable them to have a more personalised/branded look to their comments. Also to benefit commentors with their own blogs/sites, I've removed rel="nofollow" from links to their homepage. This is in response to the YesFollow Project that I first read about on Barefoot Boo's blog earlier today. I haven't, however, implemented fully. Firstly, all new comments will have rel="nofollow" in place for the first 3 days in order for me to have time to review the linked site if I feel it necessary, after that initial period it will automagically remove the nofollow from the rel attribute. Second, I have a plugin that adds rel="nofollow" to all links located within the body of comments. I'm leaving this in place as I'd rather not provide endorsements by proxy to third party sites. If I think a site has value to my readership then it's likely to be found in the sidebar links at some point in time – which I'm currently in the process of updating.

So that's pretty much it. Hopefully the changes will prove to be of benefit to some and I'll continue to make changes as I see fit and when time permits, and as the above, hopefully, demonstrates in response to visitor feedback too.

Where was I one year ago?

Working full time as a hotel manager, and part time doing a few freelance web jobs. It was around this time last year, shortly after returning from a 3 month absence following surgery, that I decided I didn't like that job any more and so packed it in and went to work somewhere else for several thousand a year less. Other than that I was spending far too much of my time on web design and internet forums, and drinking beer.

Where was I five years ago?

Happily doing the job mentioned above, along with the (very) odd bit of web work. I was also doing a bit of student tutoring on the side.

Where was I ten years ago?

Spending most of my time being a student at Liverpool University, in the second year of a biochemistry degree, and the rest of the time being a layabout working at a holiday camp in North Wales.

Fascinating stuff, huh?

Apparently I'm supposed to inflict this on 3 other people. I choose Martin Paling, Kev Leitch and Toxie.

In the meantime, has anyone else noticed that Firefox has a display bug when resized to 800×600 pixels? My vertical scrollbar vanishes (irrespective of the site I'm on) at that resolution and doesn't appear until it's resized to at least 900px.

Amended: looks like upgrading to WP 2.01 decided to break my sidebar headers oh what joy. I suppose it serves me right for hacking the functions files

Amendment 2: Sidebar fixed

Tribal Tattoos is the road to riches being taken by Sarah and I. It's also a road that we've put a bit of effort into – laid a few paving stones, dug a trench here and there, planted some shrubs. You know, tidied it up a bit. Amongst other things we've researched the market, sourced a supplier who's happy with the concept and the opportunity to have another outlet for his artwork, restructured the generated template with standards compliant markup and CSS, built a simple shop, and so on – in other words we've invested a little time, effort and money into the venture and, most importantly in my opinion, we tried to make sure that we offer something of value to any visitors that drop by.

We've also got a number of ideas that will mean we continue to work on it from time to time – including improving the site's accessibility (getting rid of the pixel widths would be a good start); adding links to the directories from the 600+ sites that we have to sift through; adding more flashes to the tattoo shop and sourcing other products, such as the ebook we currently have under production.