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Arundel House Hotel

The Arundel House Hotel is a decent, clean, tidy and reasonably priced hotel in Cambridge. The hotel is ideally located adjacent to Jesus Green so you can easily walk into Cambridge for sight-seeing. In addition, it has a large car park which is free to residents.

However, one unfortunate incident at breakfast means that I will probably never return there or honestly be able to unreservedly recommend it.

I am grabbing some fruit and yogurt and returning to our table in the light and airy conservatory. As I pass the ‘Please wait here to be seated’ sign, I am surprised to see Norma standing there, waiting to be seated as she already has a seat allocated. With me. In the conservatory. Was it something I said ?

kids of today

Over the weekend, I was helping Norman Junior III with a C programming exercise (a wordsearch puzzle). I had rather hoped purchasing him the original and definitive text ‘Kernighan and Ritchie (Second Edition)’ would enable him to become a C wizard without any further intervention from me but no.

In a flash of inspiration, I had introduced some symbolic constants for each of the eight possible directions.

When I asked him - ‘Can you remember how to specify a constant in C ?’, he replied ‘Oh yeah - I know, I remember. Hashtag define’.

Amazon customer service

I am currently hosting this site on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). For the first 12 months I am eligible for the Free Usage Tier pricing.

The Free Tier isn’t completely free but includes ‘5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests’.

Initially, I had to test, review and deploy the entire site a few times before I got things right and Google’s crawler was busy re-indexing the site so I wasn’t wholly surprised when September’s bill was a measly 15 cents.

Octopress versus Drupal performance

One of the main advantages of a statically generated blog (like Octopress) over a blogging platform that uses a database (WordPress, Drupal) is performance.

My humble blog doesn’t get enough traffic for performance to be a consideration and I thought I wouldn’t be able to discern any improvement.

This graph is from Google Webmaster Tools. Can you guess when the blog migration from Drupal to Octopress was done ? Yes - that’s right - the middle of September (17th to be precise).

Diamond Geezer's audience

Diamond Geezer recently posted his annual analysis of how many blogrolls he appears in. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the number is steadily declining and he finds it harder to find new blogs to add to his list.

I thought it might be interesting to look at the blogging platforms used by the 98 blogs listed. Here are the results:

• Blogger 60
• WordPress.com 11
• WordPress.org 11
• Typepad 4
• MovableType 3
• Livejournal 2
• Canalblog 1
• Drupal 1
• ExpressionEngine 1
• Nucleus CMS 1
• Serendipity 1
• Guardian (journo) 1
• Custom 1

The dominance of Blogger/Blogspot didn’t surprise me that much. I have noticed before that it’s very popular amongst UK bloggers; particularly veteran bloggers who maybe had less choice available that the plethora of options available today.

back to basics

Frustrated at the inability of Google to provide a simple sync process that works for disparate versions of Chrome and Chromium browsers, I decided to adopt a pragmatic approach, return to Victorian values and go back to using a Web based bookmarks service.

Way back, in 2005, I evaluated three different bookmarking services and dismissed Delicious, mainly on the grounds of the user interface design of the home page which, according to me, ’looks like an undergraduate knocked it up during a lunch hour’. This was a little rich from someone with no design experience whatsoever but still.

speeding up Octopress generation

My site has 966 posts and 70 categories.

By default, Octopress re-generates the entire site - every single post, all the category pages, the archive pages

On my Acer Aspire One (Intel Atom 1.66GHz) netbook, the regeneration takes around 10 minutes.

There are a couple of options that can significantly reduce this time and make the write/preview/edit iterative process more tolerable.

Firstly, you can use ‘rake isolate’ to move all other posts into a ‘stash’ directory and simply process the newly created post.

left back

‘Is that Evra at left back ?’

‘Yes. Ferguson said he would play his strongest side in Europe after last season. Why are you so surprised ?’

‘Oh nothing. I just can’t believe it’s not Buttner’.

migration complete

The last ever migration of this blog is now complete. This blog is now powered by Octopress and is a statically generated site hosted on Amazon S3.

All posts have been migrated from HTML to Markdown and every single permalink (all 954 of them) have been painstakingly checked, rationalised and consolidated.

To achieve this, I simply generated a sitemap of the Drupal site and compared this with a sitemap for a test site using Octopress after the data migration.

the awkward second post

Octopress is great

• Uses Google to provide site search
• Archives builtin
• Tag support
• Draft posts
• Local preview
• Markdown markup
• Google+, Disqus, Google Analytics support
• Incremental deployment
• Deployment to Amazon S3
• Fast as lightning

Wish I’d bitten the bullet earlier.