Caboose

I got a very nice email today from Donn Patton, who describes himself as a home recording hobbyist. You can find some of his work at MP3.com.

He’s recorded a track called “Kerguelen Islands”, inspired by that tiny dot on the map and wanted to use one of my pictures, the email was asking for permission to use it.

This has prompted me to go to Creative Commons and use one of their licenses for everything on this site. I’m hoping it will make things clearer for people wanting to use anything.

It also reminded me about Satan’s Penguins, the other users of my pictures.

I’ve started using a couple of Brad Choate’s plugins for Movable Type, the system that maintains this bit of the site for me. I got the idea from dive into mark.

Now I can casually drop in TLAs such as XML, RSS or mention the BBC and the <acronym> tags are sorted out for me. All I have to do is maintain a list of abbreviations.

After months (years?) of the North American part of Journeys consisting mostly of placeholders I’ve actually done some more work on it.

The North America page now includes a brief outline of the route we drove, with links to some of the places we visited.

I also reorganised the files a bit, the Slovenia section was almost completely content-free, so it has gone now. The addresses have changed a bit as well, probably breaking some links but my clever new 404 error page should point people in the right direction.

The next step is to get round to rescanning some of the pictures. Quite a few of them are a bit too dark.

One, less noticeable, change is that <link> tags have been added, this makes navigation easier for people using text mode browsers and other non-graphical ways of using the web.

I’ve been looking through my site stats again, most of the visitors are search engines. Which means my site must be indexed all over the place, but few people are actually looking.

If you’re a real person feel free to leave a comment, or use the email form to let me know you’ve been.

I’ve added a page with my GnuPG public key. So if anyone feels like sending me encrypted emails, give it a go.

I’ve been fiddling around with some of the template for this site, to try split things up a bit more. It’s now easier for me to add links (have a look in the column to the right).

The next thing will be some serious thinking about how to integrate the Journeys section of the site with this part. A good start would be including it in search results… tricky…

I occasionally check my webserver stats, and sometimes find odd things such as the weird referrers. Recently I’ve noticed a few improbable search strings.

For example “german influence in argentina”, “toga party photos” or even “planning a 60th birthday party” (don’t know what search engine they used!).

Some are a bit worrying, “little girls peru” for example (what were you looking for?). Others just never should have led people to my site, why on earth would somebody looking for “second hand petrol go-karts” be interesting in this site?

Search engines are very odd things, even the good ones…

I tried to fix the problems with Opera and the BlogSnob box, but I couldn’t work out what was going wrong. Instead I’ve moved the box to the bottom of the page, until I can sort it out.

I’ve just upgraded to version 2.5 of Movable Type, the software that makes this part of Caboose work.

The main improvements are the search box on the right and making the site more accessible. See Dive Into Accessibility for more information on accessibility issues.

Let me know if you notice any problems.

Looking at the stats for my site I’ve come across some very strange referrer strings.

Why are what look very much like porn sites referring to my site?

Very odd. My pet theory is that it’s some kind of weird advertising scheme, using fake referrers. Anyone else got any ideas?