Paul Annett

My baby boy is now 5 months old, and the fact that I haven’t blogged since his birth is almost rude. He’d be offended, if he knew how. Truth be told, life is far too hectic to be blogging when there are nappies to change, babies to feed, and sleep to catch up on. But 5 months in and I’m ready to write again.

I had thought of creating a “new father’s blog” to document the first months of Toby’s life, but the first two I clicked when I Googled for others were abandoned, probably also through lack of time. At least that makes me feel less bad.

Andy is always talking about blogging as part of my job, so that’s now how I intend to justify the time I spend on it.

My next few entries will cover some of the things I’ve been meaning to blog about but haven’t had time.

*IMPORTANT NOTE FOR FEED READER USERS* - I’ve moved my RSS feed to Feedburner, and all the necessary redirects are in place so you shouldn’t really have to do anything. Fingers crossed that this reaches you OK!

Big changes are afoot, and amongst other things I made a hasty return to blogging last month. Please avert your eyes from the many things which are currently a bit shabby about this blog. I’ll get around to fixing them soon.

UPDATE: Feb 2007, moved to Wordpress.

Here’s a list of things I should get around to changing. If you spot any other imperfections please leave a comment and I’ll add them to the list:

• The design was rushed and overall I’m not happy with it. It’s not well thought out good design, and it’s not deliberately simple. Needs attention.
• I’m keen to try MeasureMap to track traffic around my blog, but it seems to be delayed into Beta. I hope to install it asap.
• Comment textarea text is too small to read it as you type. Looks like the same can be said of code text too!
• The ‘post’ and ‘preview’ comment buttons have a ? either side of them for some reason.
• Why not just have a live comment preview?
• When you post a comment you need to refresh your browser to see it on the page. Is this a known issue with other MovableType blogs? It happens on my wife’s and my brother-in-law’s too, both of which are on the same installation as this blog.
• Comments aren’t well formatted.
• Enable Gravatars on comments
• strong text shouldn’t be a different colour to plain text.
• Perhaps a search function. Live search?
• The main nav is too spaced out in Internet Explorer.
• Links to category and date archives have .html on the end. I’d like to get rid of this unneccesary cruft.
• I should put section headers within the main nav.

My recently acquired Wife has been a little neglected of late - not through choice, but simply through the sheer volume of work which accompanies running one’s own business. With that in mind, it’s with some relief that I’ll soon be returning to a more ‘normal’ working pattern where I’ll actually get to spend more time with her.

I’ve been approached to become Online Manager for an online consultancy firm near Oxford, UK, and today I accepted their offer.

And so, I’m also making my third attempt at starting a blog (the first was on Blogger in 2000, the second with Movable Type in 2003). What better use of my new found free-time than blogging! Errr… oh yeah, the wife…