I have no idea if any of your registered reprobates intend to actually use it or not.
But The Snug is back, see? It's there in the top-right menu.
So those of you registered to post entries might like to actually do so.
Otherwise just read the rich history of nonsense contained within.
My beloved wifey did say she never saw the point in blogging. But yesterday something rather strange happened. She wrote two blog posts in the same day.
How things have changed.
Do pay her blog a visit and encourage her to keep at it. Her early blog posts suggest that ultimately she's going to get a lot more hits than me.
My Mrs has gone and got herself a blog of her very own. One wonders if that means she'll post more than three times in a year.
We shall see. Why not go pay her new website a visit.
His and her's websites, enough to make you sick, eh?
Crikey it's been a huge day of changes here on the site. As you may have noticed the site is now harryneary.com not cartmel-bar.co.uk.
Why the change?
Well the old name has been less relevant for some time now. When originally set up this site was the home of our university reunion stories and mostly a place for uni friends to converse.
This is no longer the case.
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I do believe I'm finally getting the hang of this photography lark.
I'm certainly happier with the pictures that I've taken over recent weeks than any I've taken before.
The big change I think is decided how I want to take pictures rather than worrying how my camera seems to want to take them, or how I should use it. The camera is just a tool rather than the arbiter of what makes a good photograph.
Read More......at how many people read my little blog. Surely you've something better to do with your day. But no, my stats hover around one thousand hits most days.
But what brings you here?
I know friends and family read the site, but that's only going to count for a handful of visits. So too the number of people who read this blog after having a nosy Google of my name to see who their curate was marrying. Again numbers there would be too insignificant to alter my stats.
There's the legacy of the tragic events that befell my family in early 2007. I'm a member of various online communities that supported me during a difficult time - and they would often visit this site and communicate with me using it. Many of those are likely to have bookmarked this place.
In many cases though I expect much of my readership comes from people who have no idea who I am. Instead they Google searched on some topic that brought them here.
Read More...Of course I'm not closing the site. That was never going to happen. But the fact is that you can't be too careful online anymore as any anonymous user can (and did) misuse your site for their own gain. I've left the site fallow for a while, letting things cool a little while I decided what to do with the old place.
Having considered my options I've made a few changes around here. No more RSS feeds for a start and I've tried to make the place a little more discreet. Certainly no more use of our surname. I've been through the place with the search feature and removed each and every instance.
Perhaps the busy bodies who are forever tapping my name into Google to come and read this site will get a bit bored now. Especially as much of my more...shall we say controversial...postings will be for members only.
In the end this little hobby has become too precious a thing to give up lightly.
My apologies for the site downtime. There's something very wrong with the FTP system behind the site at the moment, though my hosting company says there is nothing wrong.
I managed to get round it (prepare to be bored by technical nonsense now) by uploading a zip of the site software via http, then extracted it on the server side and reinstalled.
So the actual problem that kept the site down for several days hasn't actually been fixed, but the site has at least been upgraded to the newer version of the b2evolution software.
For some times I've realised that this site - in blog form, doesn't really acheive what it was meant to do. Well not anymore anyway.
For those of you who've been here since the early noughties you will remember the site was created to share articles with a certain community. This was, in essence, a community site.
But the truth is that we've all got much busier lives since then. Most of us have become parents. And the community element of harryneary.com - it's original reason for existing - doesn't exist anymore.
I'm also rather unhappy with the output on the site. I've got really bored of it. I find myself writing posts just to keep the place ticking over rather than having a burning desire to actually post those things.
The heyday of the site was a couple of years ago, when the comments section buzzed with friends joking about the things we discussed. That doesn't happen anymore. And for me the essence of a blog - communicating in a two way fashion - has been lost.
So where do we go from here? Well harryneary.com isn't going to disappear but I'm planning to make the photoblog the primary page you'll see when arriving here. The section of the site you are reading now will disappear.
I'm not giving up on writing online. In addition to my job I've got the new project godhatesgames.com to get off the ground. But for now I just want to give notice that harryneary.com is changing and in a few weeks time - probably the week of our wedding - you can wave the Cartmel Bar Blog goodbye. I won't really miss it, I hope you don't either.
It's often interesting to see how people find this site. In most cases looking at the top ten of searches that brings folks here new visitors must be awful disappointed.
Meanwhile it's also quite interesting to see which pages here have been the most popular over the month of February.
Well maybe you might think he does, maybe not, or maybe you think he just hates games journalists1.
As videogames become much of a part of our generation's leisure time as cinema and TV for the last there's an increasing focus on the morality of games.
Mostly this comes in the form of criticism from the older generation who don't understand the medium, figures like Jack Thompson and Keith Vaz would have in the past have been attacking rock and roll, jazz, the hula hoop or short skirts.
Today though we need a more broader look at the place of videogames as an art form. An art form that looks here to stay. And like all forms of media/art it can be the conduit of good and bad.
Read More...I've just created a new section to the site called the Photoblog. The point is to have somewhere to show off larger versions of my photos here on the site - though they will still mainly reside over on my Flickr page.
You'll find the new section in the navigation at the top of the page.
As you can see the site does look a bit different today. That's because there was an error in the way the site navigation worked on the other skin and didn't look like a solution was forthcoming in the near future.
So until my preferred page template actually works properly I thought I would move to this one - which actually works. Longer term readers might actually remember the site looking quite similar to this a few design switches ago.
Yes I'm well aware the site isn't working properly. I upgraded the b2evolution software last night hoping it would fix an issue with the page number links (at the bottom of the page) not working properly.
This hasn't worked at all. In fact things seem worse as you can see from the error message that appears down there. Hopefully they'll fix it soon.
So which of my mad ramblings appealed most to you last month dear readers?
Here's the top ten posts for October 2007 based on page views.
Well done to Jimbo and Jo for getting a post in the top ten.
Well it's not that long since the new software that runs this place was installed and already the site seems to be coming together.
Today I created new header images and enabled the site to pick them randomly every time you hard refreshed a page.
You may also have noticed the large photos on the right from my Flickr account, cool eh?
Also notice the lack of advertising. I may leave that off permanently or return to having it invisible to registered users.
I know there are still some problems around the site. For some reason clicking on dates in the calendar doesn't work and the page links (numbers at the bottom of the page) don't work properly either.
I have no idea why this is the case. There must be something wrong with this skin but I haven't a clue what.
As you can see there have been a few changes to the site.
This is because there's a totally brand new version of the blog software available and I've just installed it.
I'm hoping to retain the old look of the site, but until that skin is converted for this new software, we'll have to make do with this look.
What do you think?
I have been pondering the issue of a forum folks. We had one ages ago and it was rather fun for a while.
Seeing as there's a much bigger readership these days, what do you think of having a forum once again?
Who says lightning never strikes the same place twice. I've just felt the uncomfortable hand of deja vu. Last night a light bulb in my lounge blew and took the whole lighting circuit with it. Not a major problem, just a matter of closing the popped circuit breaker.
But I'd no idea where the circuit breakers/fuse box was. And so there I was in the pitch dark with a very dull torch scrabbling around the flat trying to restore power. Afterwards, once the lights were back on, I cursed myself for not being prepared for this and not knowing where the fuse box was.
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