I've no excuse now.

Hi,

after following Ciber's advice, I now have an rss agregator. I haven't got everyone's blogs on there yet, but will have in the next hour or so.. if they are suported of course. Min-Data, Blogger etc. are fine, as is blogware.. but for some reason blog-city is a few months behind??

I've also put my Haloscan comments feed on there as well, so I won't miss a reply there now. I'll have to read up on how to implement it for my sites. I have a feeling that I may have to rewrite Liamsworld for that. That's okay though; I've had the domain for about 3-4 months now and really need to develop it soon. Unlike other sites that I've built, that have a fair bit of thought into the design, but little content, my own site suffers from the reverse.

It's not exactly packed with galleries yet, but there are some in there, plus the makings of an educational game. I'm sort of getting there.. just need a full day to really get stuck in to it. I haven't put much in the way of explanation into it yet, but it's basically drag and drop spelling for kiddies.. or anyone in the second year of their 3* McDonalds degree in food preparation. It needs some new tiles knocking up (they're all my own work) for blends as well. A friend at the club is a teacher's assistant at the local primary school and has said that when finished (or a close approximation) that she'd test it out on her charges. I'd also like it to read out the letters eventually, as they're dragged. That's going to get complicated though.. we'll see.

At some point it will also include some sort of basic numeric games.. counting apples and stuff, adding the contents of one pile of stuff to another pile of stuff; that sort of thing.

I'll be doing something with the gallery presentation as well. I haven't taken enough good quality pictures yet, but when I do, I'll have to sort them into categories etc.

Right.. I'd better finish loading up the rss feeds.. I just noticed that on my browser (Avant) that there is a drop down for feeds. So I had an agregator all along so it seems. Still, I like the one I downloaded, so I'll stick with that for now. To Ciber, SEF or whoever.. what's the feed url for the comments on Min-Data? I get a flag that a comment has been added, by the post going bold, and a count being added, but I have to go back to the site to read it. If this bit of the post dissapears soon, it's because I've found it. :D

Cheers

Liam

Edit: I've added NatSci to it, so I can keep up with that now SEF. And unlike the site, I get the pictures via rss, so have now seen them. :)

A little photography

Hi all,



I've been trying my hand at macro photography for the last day, the results of which can be found here. The flowers are Mahonia japonica, and to give a rough idea of size of these images, the frame itself covers around 15mm x 9.5mm. The little flower buds are a little less than 4mm in height, and the flowers themselves are about 8mm across. That's fairly close up.. but I'm sure I can get closer. The depth of field (the bit that stays in focus) is down around the 0.25mm to 0.5mm area, which makes for an interesting challenge with manual focus. Especially when you're as blind as a bat like me.

I needed a flat surface to put the objects on, and just grabbed a CD. Then I saw the effects, which I thought helped in some (and didn't in others). It's a handy thing to use as you can move it slightly and get different colours for your background. All those oranges, greens and blues are the result.

Anyway, off to work now.

Cheers

Liam

Happy New Year

Hi all,

Well, that's that out of the way for another year. Back to normality.

It's been 2 months since I've blogged. That's laziness, nothing else. It's not like I don't come here often either. I visit all the blogs I link to several times a week via this one, so there really is no excuse.

I'm not going to recount in detail the last two months, as to be honest there isn't much that springs to mind worthy of a tome of this quality.

Well, I got a new camera last Friday. A Pentax Digital SLR. You can see a small gallery of photos of the Hanworth Social Club's New Year bash by clicking here. I've also put a version here with smaller main images for those of you using a lower resolution display on your monitor. They've been reduced in quality as some of the original images are over 2.5Mb in size.

Not bad for a first attempt though, and now I've worked out which setting I needed to change in order to use my collection of manual Pentax lenses, I'm set to go. Due to the relative size of the CCD compared to the size of 35mm film in the camera, the optical length of my lenses is bumped up by 1.5x. This means that my 300mm and a 2x converter gives me an effective 900mm lens. That should make wildlife photography a breeze. I'll be trying that out over the weekend, so look back then.

I may even get around to doing something with my site soon as well. And I really need to do something to the HSC site to make it more modern.

Anyway, that'll have to do, as I have to go to work now. It's nice to be back.

Cheers

Liam