Friday, July 31, 2020
Today is my Birthday and also the 20 year Anniversary of this blog which was started on 31st July 2000. I believe I was possibly one of the first magic blogs on the internet, given that the term 'weblog' was coined in 1997 and the term blog in 1999. It is fun to look back over 20 years of archives and see what was around back then, I was collecting links not just for magic, but juggling, origami, circus and other allied arts.
Monday, June 9, 2008
You may have noticed we have been down for the past week or so (or you may not!) To cut a long story very short, my database crashed, in particular the table holding all the blog posts! This was marked as in use and I couldn’t repair it. After struggling with my host I have gone back to an old backup and restored all the posts up to the point of the crash.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
If you read this blog via the website (rather than the feed) you’ll notice I have added some widgets to the right hand column, along with the obligatory blogroll and links, I now have my flickr badge, technorati search/profile, twitter updates and the two latest my lifestream widget which uses profilactic and shows you all the other sites I have a presence on, and also builds a mashup of my latest updates.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
WatchingMagic: is my new baby, I registered the watchingmagic domain a while back after seeing the explosion in internet video and how that has crossed into the magic domain. After wondering what to do with it, finally a few days ago I decided to set up what has become known as a Tumblelog also known as a Linklog. I think one of the reasons I don’t post here too often (other than time restraints) is the necessity of having to structure a blog post, around something which may be just a quick link or snippet or video clip.
Monday, July 24, 2006
As you may have noticed I have been absent from posting for a couple of months, again life is getting in the way and other priorities take over, I have been saving up the magic links I have come across however and basically posted them all today in one fell swoop, so at least that should clear my backlog. Obviously the next big thing is FISM which starts on the 6th anniversary of this blog (and also my 29th birthday… I feel old!
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Rumours of our death have been slightly exaggerated, but thanks to Tim for the prompt to post at least a holding message. Once again life has taken over and posting hasn’t happened for a while, I refer the gentle reader to the about page and plead guilty to neglecting my duties. So whats been happening and whats coming up, without boring you too much, I am now a CIW Associate which meant quite a bit of studying culminating in a week long study session down in Wolverhampton, followed by an online exam… so my brain is a bit fried… I now continue on to hopefully become a Master CIW Designer :-/ Then I had to finish up publishing the next issue of The Oracle including extra tribute material to Arthur.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Its taken a while for the update to manifest itself, due to my lack of time at this busy period! The change over to the new server was very smooth thanks to the guy’s at Xcalibre I now have a sparkly new up-to-date version of PHP and GD, so you should notice that now you have to negotiate a CAPTCHA form for any comments or feedback you send me. Sorry that this has had to be done, but hopefully it will cut down the stupid amount of SPAM I was getting, I have already noticed a difference!
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
Just to warn you there might be pending downtime whilst my account is migrated to a new server on my host, one running an up-to-date copy of PHP and GD so hopefully I can get a contact form and a comments form with CAPTCHA ability to stop some of the SPAM that has been coming in that way… will keep you updated.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
I am trialling Flickr mainly for use over at the HMC site, but I thought I would add the badge to this site, as if it stays I plan to use it to add some of my general magic photos. Anyway you can check out all the latest additions over at My Flickr Page.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Just updated to version 3.2 of Nucleus shouldn’t be any major worries, hoping it might let me add a few new things, looking to maybe add TrackBack and possibly Captcha for the comments to finally stop the spam once and for all… Also looking to test Flickr very shortly for the HMC site along with another lot of posts over there, so thats whats keeping me busy atm… Oh and just checked my referrers and looks like we made it into the Guardian NewsBlog linklog, which is amazing!
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Just to let people know that I have hopefully implemented a few of these ideas to stop some of the referrer spam I am getting, hopefully now we have stopped that and any comment spam, its a real shame when it comes down to this, but I won’t let them win damnit! So if you are legit and are seeing some errors or have problems getting to the site, then let me know.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Just spent a couple of hours being driven loopy trying to get my feeds to work… past the old 0.91 RSS Feed its never worked, now after digging around on the nucleus forum for ages, I find out its the fault of the plugin I use to GZip the page output! Installed the latest version of the plugin, bingo all my feeds start working! Which means you now have the choice of a 0.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
So we are back, after a slight hiatus… if anyone is still reading and cares! We have a new look, an updated version of nucleus and still some work to do to finish things off. If anyone noticed we suffered a slight hack, so for now the various external scripts (media, guestbook etc) are gone probably won’t return. Also we have comment control installed as I suffered a few thousand comment spams, and they are still coming in now, but get blacklisted automatically I hope!
Friday, August 1, 2003
Well we passed the 3 year anniversary of the blog, and to mark the occasion I managed to get my FISM report plus photos pulled together… don’t want to say too much except I plan to keep posting as regularly as possible, thanks to all my readers, regular or those that come in via search engines. I finally managed to finish off all the little bits of the site design, although I do have a few new ideas up my sleeve, so keep watching.
The Magic Cafe Forums - http://www.magician.org.uk/: looks like I’ve been magiccafe’d (the equivalent to ./’d I guess!) thanks for the link Joe 
Apologies for the lack of posts but its been a bit hectic around here lately, just getting ready to go to FISM 2003 which is going to be unbelievable, I have added a media section to this site, the first thing to go in it will be photos from FISM… the plan if it comes off will be for me to write-up the highlights of each day, if I can find an Internet point I will post from FISM if not it will be when I get back.
Also this week I have my Sister’s graduation, doesn’t seem five minutes since she went. Congrats Jo!
Will try and post a bit more before I go, I plan to actually finish the new design by adding an about page which is the only thing missing, and a proper contact form.
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
Wow… it has come around again, today the blog is 2 years old, and I am cough..25..cough.. As you can see the blog has a new template which I have been testing for the past couple of days, and it now runs on the Nucleus Content Management System. Please let me know if you have any problems with the template or the new system. I’ve been very happy with Blogger, but I just felt that having a PHP host and not running my own CMS was a bit of a waste, and it also gives me better control, and more flexibilty, and in a months time Nucleus will also run the HMC site.