Pressing Question

Looks like Blogger has got a bit bored with supporting externally-hosted blogs (like mine) over FTP. According to the press release:

"FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only 0.5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that."

Understandable I suppose, but which way forward? Probably a good opportunity to have a look at Wordpress publishing (I've also got a Tumblr thing running with a feed from here but that's a whole different kettle of ballgames).

However, Solveig's used to the Blogger way so I guess we will port hers to be a Google-hosted 'Custom Domain' - she'll also then get access to the fancy sidebar widgets which might be a boon.

Anyway, between now and mid-March, expect to see some changes around here, not least with the RSS feed, the commenting system and probably the design.

Ah well, any excuse for a tinker :)

Overheard #101

This might be one of my favourites, one end of a telephone call just now:

"Your brother's birthday?"
"..."
"Oh, both brothers!"
"..."
"What do you mean, semi-identical?"

You Do The Math

As a kind of antithesis of the rap Excel charts, I really like these: All New Math

Have A Wordle

This is just beautiful.

"Wordle is for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, alpha priority and color schemes. It will work from any text, blog or other web page that has an RSS feed."

And this is mine from here (click to enlarge, obviously):
It also has a randomise button which is mesmerising.