Andrewj.org

So I’ve been invited to the alpha of the new Digg.

So far, it looks quite good.

Indeed, it has a feature which allows you to auto-submit everything in your feed to Digg, in order that it will appear in all the My News section of all your followers.

To activate this feature, you have to make a post to your blog with a key to verify in it, which is why I’m making this post.

If you have New Digg, why not follow me?

Quite a hard question that – not just because there are so many historical figures, but because I’m terrible at history and don’t know many.

If I did know many, by the way, I’d just give you a short answer telling you who and why, but – as it happens – I have to sit here and waffle while I make some attempt at coming up with an intelligent-sounding answer.

As a regular visitor (and, very occasionally) to Uncyclopedia (http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com) I must at least mention Oscar Wilde, despite never having read anything that he actually wrote. Although I could justify wanting to meet Hitler like this too. That said, meeting Hitler could prove interesting: you could find out (assuming he allowed you to talk with him, and that you can speak German – which I can’t) what made him tick, and exactly why he did what he did.

Other than that (very unsatisfactory) answer, I haven’t a clue, because, really, I don’t know anything about history and I don’t really want to find out. O_o

Also, hi to anyone reading this on my blog (or Tumblr), since I’m syncing these answers over there now.

Ask me anything

CC BY: This photo was filched from conner395 on Flickr, because I'm rubbish with cameras.

So I’m back from my holiday in “somewhere near Inverness”. I say “somewhere” because in the Highlands of Scotland, you don’t get fancy placenames for everywhere, you just get rough placenames. And you don’t get exactly where you want with a satnav either. Just roughly.

I was in a set of lodges called the Kiltarlity Lodges. The Kiltarlity Lodges are actually a good distance from Kiltarlity itself, where I use “Kiltarlity” as a name for Kiltarlity Village, which is (according to the Kiltarlity Community Council) just what’s written on the signpost, and the village is actually called Allarburn.

Kiltarlity is apparently in Beauly, because all of the addresses in the area have the line ‘Kiltarlity, Beauly, Inverness-shire’ in them. But drive several miles down the road and you will be confronted by a sign welcoming you to Beauly itself. Hang on, you ask yourself, wasn’t I already in Beauly?

And so where exactly I was for the past week is a complete mystery. It’s pointless trying to pinpoint it exactly, so the closest you’re going to get is that I was near Inverness. That works.

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I just upgraded to WordPress 3.0.

Unfortunately, I still have the default WP theme (only now it’s the new default theme). Fortunately, I like WordPress 3′s default theme more, and it might encourage me to post more often (though I will eventually make a theme of my own when I have the time).

Unfortunately, I will be rather busy soon, because – in addition to S6 in general, and some other stuff I’ve got planned – I need to create a website for a (recently founded) Young Enterprise company I’m part of.

Fortunately, this too shall pass. Or something.

It started as just a personal wiki for me to revise from. But then it expanded outwards and upwards, and got its own subdomain – revision.aorkwa.com. A little DokuWiki installation so I could share and collaborate on revision notes. But now it has become wikiRevision – a brand new home for collaborative revision notes.

Built on the same foundations as Wikipedia itself, the open-source MediaWiki software, wikiRevision hopes to offer notes specifically targeted to those taking one particular course. At the moment, obviously, it will only contain notes for courses that I’m studying, but the open nature of the website means that anyone can contribute and help others on their course – as well as providing themselves with a set of notes “in the cloud”: you won’t lose your revision notes when they’re stored on the wikiRevision server.

It has provided me with an interesting look at the MediaWiki software, and building themes on it. At the moment the site is running a beta theme that I crafted by modifying the famous MonoBook theme that Wikipedia uses – I’m currently working on getting a slightly better theme made up for the site.

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is an event held in November every year which challenges you to write a 50,000-word novel in the thirty days of November. And this year, I’m taking part.

Of course, NaNoWriMo involves a lot of writing, and a lot of not-doing-other-things. That does mean that Andrewj.org might (still) be buggy by the end of the month. Of course, I will install security updates for Drupal – because otherwise it’d be buggy in the bad way – but there are a few design flaws which I haven’t ironed out (yet). Though some of it’s just in the administration interface which you can’t see.

If you want to see how I’m going with my novel, my username is andrewj. And it’s nice to see they’re using Drupal, just like this site (update: I run WordPress now).

If anyone has been near my about page recently, they’ll know that up to now it has consisted of “(nothing yet)” on a white background.

Well, guess what? (And you know it must have something to do with the title)

It’s updated now! So you can find out all the things you never wanted to know about the person who writes these posts. As if you’d want to.

As if anyone reads these posts.

As if anyone really exists.

Anyway, more absolutely atrocious content soon, imaginary readers.

(See the amazing new about page here)