Caboose

I’m doing some rearranging of this site starting today, some parts might not work properly for a while.

Update: Should be finished now, although there may be some parts that I’ve missed.

Since I got back to Scotland I’ve been gradually preparing for my upcoming trip (itinerary in this post). This has included finalising the itinerary, paying for it, shuffling money around, filling in forms and buying equipment.

I’ve now added some features to show maps of where I’ve been writing from recently, courtesy of the GeoPress plugin and Google Maps. I can also easily insert a map showing the location of individual posts.

Actually the plugin only worked erratically and eventually completely gave up.

A couple of years ago I went on a trip to Barcelona and posted some pictures, including a panorama of the Sagrada Familia church:

That picture ended up in Google image search among others and lots of non-technical bloggers seem to have chosen to use it if they want a picture from Barcelona. The only problem is that they don’t save it to their own website, they link to the copy on my site.
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My lovely IBM ThinkPad laptop seems to be dead, it suddenly turned off last night and won’t come back on.

This means that I’m temporarily without access to my saved emails and most of the rest of my personal stuff. I’m hoping the hard disk is still OK and I can get all the useful data off it but until then I won’t be checking my email very often.

Looks like it’s just as well I’m taking a holiday back to the UK in April, the laptop is still under warranty and I’d rather have IBM/Lenovo’s UK people deal with it than send my laptop to the “service provider” in Lagos.

If you tried to use one of the “Contact me” links on this site recently you might not have got a reply. I set my spam filtering a little too aggressively and all incoming comments were filed as junk.

I was getting huge numbers of junk comments, people thinking that the links they typed in would appear on the site. That’s not the case, it just annoyed me. I’ve now adjusted the way the “Contact me” form works, it should allow real people to use it but block computer programs.

If you want to be notified of updates to this site there are two ways:

• RSS: this is part of most modern browsers (even Internet Explorer if you have version 7), the browser will automatically check for site updates and give you an excerpt and a link to the full post. The address should be automatically detected, you’ll see an orange icon in the address bar that you can click on to subscribe. For manual configuration the address is http://www.caboose.org.uk/feed/
• Mailing list: when I add some significant updates to the site I usually send an email to my kevinnigeria mailing list. To subscribe send an email to:

  kevinnigeria-subscribe at caboose.org.uk

  Don’t worry, you wont be bombarded with email, it’s usually one or two a month.

I’ve just upgraded WordPress, the software the manages most of this site for me. There are a few quirks I’ve noticed since the upgrade but most things seem to be working. If you have any problems let me know (one of the problems I know about is that the per-post “Contact me” links are broken).

Update (18 January): The problems were due to another bit of software (EzStatic), I contacted the author and he had an updated version of it ready in about four hours. Well done! As a result the “Contact me” links should be working again and the other static pages, such as the Nigerian glossary don’t look odd.

I’m leaving for Cameroon on Sunday, the rough itinerary is:

Sunday 18th – Abuja to Calabar
Monday 19th – get Cameroon visa from the consulate in Calabar
Tuesday 20th – travel to Limbe, Cameroon, probably by boat
Sunday 25th – spend Christmas on the beach at Limbe
Monday 26th – head for Buea and Mount Cameroon
Friday 30th – return to Nigeria
Sunday 1st – in Opobo for New Year

I probably won’t be checking email or updating this site much while I’m there, you’ll have to wait until I get back to Abuja, around the 4th of January.

I’ve had a few emails from people complaining that I’m too negative about Nigeria. Here’s the most recent one, with my reply below:

Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by arcalad@yahoo.com (Peter) on Thursday, November 24, 2005 at 02:35:04.
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Name: Peter

email: arcalad@yahoo.com

Page title: Parents’ visit

Comments: Hi,

I have been going through your blog for a while now,and i guess you are not in any way enjoying your stay in Nigeria.Your comments and observations actually show this.You seems to complain too much about the situation at hand,and i guess you dont like virtually everything you see in the country from the people,culture down to the foods.You forget this is a developing country and i think you didnt do your research very well before coming over on what to expect.
Please try and post some good things about the country you discover to give a more balance look to your blog..i wish you will open up and have a relax mind while you enjoy your stay in Nigeria.
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My parents are arriving tonight and will be here for a week so I probably won’t be updating this for a while or checking my email very often.