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By TheSupercargo
 he original blog entry under this heading, Upgrading TheSupercargo.com, has just slipped out of the top eight list on my front page. At the same time we have moved into a new month. It seems time to start a new entry with further developments.
As before, I’ll update this with new information as I go along.
A couple of friends have commented on the absence of “Weblog” (the catagory under which I’m writing this) in the Catagory list up there in the banner. The reason is I really don’t want this home page to be about the work of creating a homepage. If past history is anything to go the Weblog catagory will go quietly to sleep again once I’m more or less happy with the way the site looks.
Till then, though, here’s a further timetable of events:
- 1st Mar – Apart from writing this I’ve also uploaded a file of GIF icons of the letters of the alphabet. I’m going to use these as decorative drop capitals in short blog entries – principally under the Articulations catagory and especially for entries that have no other illustrations. I tried out some plug-ins which offered to create drop capitals but wasn’t satisfied with them. This way I have full control over how the letters are presented. Later: updated the links between static pages in the right-hand column.
- 2nd Mar – Learned a lot about Search Engine Optimisation and eventually installed All In One SEO Pack as a plug-in. It seems to be working: TheSupercargo has become Text, Images and Speech by TheSupercargo. Good!
- 4th Mar – Spent the day a) recording the first of a new podcast series to be called Norðings; b) installing the podPress plug-in for WordPress – lots of tinkering with the player settings.
- 5th Mar – Installed (reinstalled) Google’s Feedsmith Feedburner plug-in and am now in a screaming fury. Feedburner won’t let me burn a seperate feed for my podcast. I cannot see how to make this work and all the “help” I can find on the net just sends me in circles. In other news, turns out WordPress doesn’t like “Norðings”. Must decide between calling it Northings or Nordings – plump for Nordings.
- 6th Mar – Published my first Nordings Podcast and (finally) managed to get an RSS feed URL to give to Apple’s iTunes store. No thanks at all to Google’s Feedburner.
Most recently updated on 6th March 2011.
By TheSupercargo
On their front page, WordPress state Code is Poetry. I can accept that “poetry” is a subjective concept, but if the code WordPress profs write is poetry, sadly the code I write is not.
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After what seems like an eternity in limbo, but is really only about a month, my homepage has now moved from the cheap and cheerful web hotel One.com to the 10 times more expensive but (supposedly) so much better Binero.com. Both of them are Scandinavian – One is based in Denmark, Binero is in Stockholm.
About 3 weeks into the move I was quite ready to give up on Binero and go back to One. So many problems! But by then Binero had long taken my money for a year’s subscription, and I had little hope of getting it back again without a major struggle. Besides the original reason for moving remained: One doesn’t allow their servers to be used to store large downloadable files such as voice recordings. You have to choose your battles, and the struggle to get the site working seemed preferable to a struggle for a refund.
I really don’t want to spend time and energy writing about the move, but … This blog entry gives me a place to record developments and relieve my feelings with the occasional virtually scream of frustration. Rather than write several entries, I’ll just update this from time to time.
Here’s a timetable of events:
17th Jan – I posted a message “Road Closed – Under Construction” on my front page. Initiated the move … I thought. (Binero say this usually takes between one and two weeks. Ha!)
12th Feb – My site at One remains on-line, and people visiting me there cannot be aware of any developments. Behind the scenes though … Every Internet site has a ‘backend’ and a ‘frontend’; the frontend is the part that’s visible to visitors, the backend the part where you the owner work to make the frontend look good. I now have two of each, but I can’t change the backend at One, so the frontend at One is static. As long as my frontend is at One, I can (theoretically) tinker with my backend at Binero making the site ready for launch, but because Binero are pointing visitors to TheSupercargo site on One, getting into the back end at Binero is diffcult. I keep getting timed-out. Did you follow that?! 
13th Feb – Maddeningly, moving the database has reset to gobbledygook all the apostrophes and all the non-standard ASCII characters I’ve used. Suspect I’ll have to put that right manually.
18th Feb – I was finally able to update the front page after the move had taken place.
19th Feb – Catagories for texts henceforth will be The Quill (for writing about writing) Articulations (for creative writing of all sorts) Reviews and Round-up (for the Artwiculate game). Updated the About and added the Text static pages.
20th Feb – uploaded and activated the following plugins: YARPP, Widgets on pages, Subscribe to comments, Broken link checker, Nice quote, Lightbox plus, My catagory order, Catagory to tag converter, Contact form 7 … and probably one or two others I’ve forgotten.
22nd Feb – Today I have added a two new catagories for my images: Momento (which will be the photoblog); and Optico (which will be the common place for all images. (I’ve also added Illustro for illustrations, but there’s nothing to show there yet.) Have also added a Copyright page, updated the Contact page and (at the very end of the day) added text to the top of each of the important catagory pages.
23rd Feb – After sleeping on it, decided that “Optico” was just one pretension too far, so now it’s called Gallery. Installed plug-ins: Easy Twitter Links which converts all Twitter at-usernames into links to the appropriate Twitter profile (where they still exist); Tweetbacks, which supposedly adds tweets which refer to a blog entry to the blog entry’s comments. Excerpt Editor which should help me to write exerpts for my posts and pages. Added a new social bookmarker to the foot of all posts and pages (see below).
24th Feb – Problem with Nice Quote Options – of itself it’s added the site’s footer text to the set of rotating quotes. Why?! Overwhelmed with spam for Prora, Rügen: Kraft durch Freude blog entry from March 2009. Don’t know why Akismet isn’t blocking that (it should trash all spam on posts over 1 month old). Perhaps I’m “re-opening” posts when I edit them to correct the gobbledygook? Have added new plug-in, One Click Close Comments, and closed comments on the offending entry. If the re-editing process is the reason for Akisment not junking spam automatically, I might need it more in the future. Mind you, Prora, Rügen: Kraft durch Freude is my hands down most visited page. Can it be all those nazi keywords!
25th Feb – Problem with Nice Quotes Rotator solved – my own fault. Added Images Static page.
27th Feb – Working backwards with Excerpt Editor. Completed December 2010 (27 entries). Also trying to put right the spelling, quotes and accents that were messed around in the database move. Correcting the same entries as I am writing excerpts for, so now I’m back to November last year. This will take a long time. Beyond this: installed and activated Google XML Sitemaps, installed WordPress Database Backup and backed up the database. Finally, I have added the Speech static page and updated the Front page.
Most recently updated: 27th February
By TheSupercargo
Just a word of warning!
This site is in process of moving from one Web Hotel to another. I’m not sure if that will make any difference to visitors, but I won’t be posting again till i’m sure the move has been successfully completed.
By TheSupercargo
If you once post a sequence of seasonal banners to rotate on your homepage, you are sooner or later going to have to update them with a new batch for a new season. And so I present my Autumn Banners for 2010!
The banners are set to rotate randomly everytime you refresh the page so you may not see them all for a while, but here they are below in miniature and if you click on one of them, you should be able to see them all full size in a slide-show.
They are mostly taken in September or October, though not necessarily this year. in fact, I think only five are from 2010. I’ve doctored a few of them in Photoshop to bring out the colours more vividly.
This first I took last year or the year before in the Botanical Gardens here in Gothenburg. The tree is a Japanese acer.
This is a recent picture at the time of writing. A duck framed by ripples on the pond in Hisingspark near where I live.
Taken at more or less the same time as the duck photo. I love the almost abstract quality of the rippled reflected birch trunks and turning leaves.
In London this September, walking around the city, my wife and I were surprised to find this bus stop. And there, we thought it was a fictional place in a TV comedy show!
These hands are picking up flower petals someone has thrown as confetti at a wedding. The owner of the hands intends to recycle the petals. Over her mother’s head.
I took the photo in November 2007, I think. Autumn frosts have already bitten this year.
At the Globe theatre on London’s south Bank. Taking pictures of the interior and the audience before a performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor in September 2010. When I came to look at the pictures I found this face. I wonder who she’s waiting for.
I’ve used this picture before. It’s a sun-spot-lit lighthouse on one of the skerries off the Swedish west coast. It’s an autumn picture because I took it on a photo safari with my photo-friend Lena sometime in September or October a couple of years ago.
My most abstract banner. This is from a photo taken in the receptiona rea of a hotel in Sundsvall a few autumns ago. It was a bit blurred. I have used one of Photoshop’s “artistic” treatments on it.
Which one do you like best?
Write me a comment!
By TheSupercargo
I was in leisurly process of assembling some new summer pictures to use in the title banners or headers for this site when my friend and fellow WordPress Wrangler Kristina S (aka Chefstomaten at Tomatsallad.nu) beat me to the draw. Her blog now has a fine new set of banners (I particularly like the jelly-fish.)
Spurred on by Kristina’s enterprise, I got my finger out and with this entry I present my own set. The banners are set to rotate randomly everytime you refresh the page so you may not see them all for a while, but here they are in miniature for your delictation and delight.
I came across this set of dolls in the window of a basement secondhand shop in Söderköping.
The son of a friend of a friend. He was drinking through a straw and watching me very seriously as I took the picture.
This whale advertises the Natural History Museum in Gothenburg and is usually a dull rust-red. A graffitti artist has given the whale a summer holiday – complete with a cone of ice cream.
Stepping-stones  in the Botanical Gardens. I took this picture at the beginning of June. [And now have removed it from circulation - see comments.]
The shadows of fern fronds cast by a strong summer sun.
More of a late spring picture, this one, but I like the lilac flowers and the little fists of the lilac buds.
This almost abstract picture is water reflections on the side of a boat, tricked about a little in photoshop. I took this picture last summer when I was visiting Waxholmen in the Stockholm archipelago.
This is the setting sun on (Swedish) Midsummer’s Day.
And finally … a snip of the brick and whitewash facade of  St Laurentii Church in Söderköping.
Which one do you like best?
By TheSupercargo
This is my Twitter home page: http://twitter.com/TheSupercargo
It’s nearly a year since I first started using Twitter. When I began, I wasn’t at all sure what it was for, but, especially since discovering the daily word-game Artwiculate, I’ve made much use of it and “met” a deal of really interesting people.
Since the beginning of April, I’ve been making extensive use of Twitter’s search functions. In particular, the search box on twitter’s front page, but also the Advanced search function at http://search.twitter.com/advanced
The last couple of days, searching has become more difficult. I don’t know if it’s because Twitter has been over capacity (and I’ve certainly seen more of the “Fail Whale” recently), but I think it may also have to do with changes Twitter is introducing to try to start making money out of their service.
Yesterday evening, I found two different and new-to-me pages. I took the screenshots reproduced below. In one case I’m getting a return which tells me my search is Forbidden, in the other, I’m getting an advert which has (so far as I can see) nothing at all to do with my search term.
I wonder if anyone else has found similar pages? (Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.)
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Advert
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Advert detail
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Forbidden
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Forbidden detail
By TheSupercargo
 In between keeping up with the British elections and Artwiculate, I’ve also been working on this site.
I’ve posted enough content, old and new, that I thought it worthwhile to install YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin). This little widget means you’ll now see (I hope) a few “suggestions for further reading” at the bottom of each blog entry.
I’ve also added a rolling list of links to other people’s blogs and sites. These are places that I am currently dropping in on, reading, viewing, or that otherwise interest me. I actually have about 20 links in the list at present and I can see it growing exponentially, so this is a way of sharing without overwhelming. Each time you reload the page, you’ll get a different list of links in the righthand column. Neat! (The plugin is called Better Blogroll)
Do go and visit some of the sites I link to. They’re fun and by interesting people too.
Today I added an RSS button and a “subscribe by e-mail” form in the right-hand column under my welcome note. Not really happy about the design or placement yet, but there they are if anyone wants to use them.
Adding past material, I’m trying especially to include my scrimshaws (videos and games, mostly). These will eventually be nicely linked from my Scrimshaws page. (See the link up at the head of the page above the banner.) Nothing of much interest there yet, but coming soon.
Ah, and as I mentioned the banner, there are now 5 or 6 banner pictures that rotate randomly whenever you refresh the page. Just for a little more variety.
Enjoy!
By TheSupercargo
 Spam ad for Spamalot … is a palindrome!
Akismet, the e-mail filter I have running on the site, is really great at catching spam. When I choose to visit Comments from my WP dashboard, I get the option to review all the comments that Akismet has filtered out. Â Some of course are just adverts and chains of urls and I scrap those straight off.
Others, though will have a line or two of positive comment and an URL. I don’t have a lot of real people writing comments (yet), so I’ve taken to Googling exact phrases from the comments in the hope that they may actually be honestly positive. Few so far have turned out to be.
(Example: ”I’m so glad I randomly found your blog. It rocks!” has 60+ hits on Google)
So these people are writing to me in the hope I’ll be flattered and let their spam through (with attached URL) to maybe suck in other visitors?
No, no! That’s not on.
I suppose I ought to bin them all, but I can’t bring myself to do that, so I’ve been editing the comments, removing the URLs (and in some cases, changing the name of the author) and letting them through. I’ve also been replying with what I fondly believe to be wry or slightly sarcastic comments.
Will this result in more spam? I don’t know.
Will it encourage real people to leave comments? Well, that would be nice.
Time will tell!
By TheSupercargo
 - Padlock & wristband – pink-ish
The last 36 hours have been a bit of a rollercoaster.
As rollercoaster rides often do, it started out well enough.
I went swimming, did my 40 lengths, sat in the sauna, weighed myself after. Lost 800 grams! (Yes, I know that was almost only sweat, but it bolsters my determination.) Of course, I started off by forgetting to take my padlock (for the clothes locker, which doesn’t without one). So I had to buy a new one at the reception desk. The guy sold it to me and apologised. I wasn’t sure why till I realised the rubber wrist band that came with the keys was pink. That’s what he was sorry for. Apparently my manhood may be called into question because I have a pink wristband.
So much for gender equality in this most equal of nations.
Home again, I started to build myself up for the evening by Googling for Alan Bennett quotes.
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
(From the play Getting On)
Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
(From the play Forty Years On)
(I was able to get both those into tweets and posted them on Twitter.)
The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
(Diary entry for October 13, 1984, from Writing Home)
That was too long. And so was this:
One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute-drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county.
(From “Instead of a Present” from Writing Home)
After that there was bit of a dip when I was witness to the distressing sight of a couple of my fellow players on the Artwiculate word game having a slanging match. I wanted to pour oil on troubled waters, but also felt the urge to say: “Oh come ON guys! It’s just a game.” I resisted both urges and got on with my novel. Elin’s Story has been unpicked (again) and I am stiching it back together (again), but I was feeling quite cheerful about my progress when I went to switch on my main computer.
That was when the rollercoaster took a real drop.
 No, it didn't look like this. The computer wouldn’t boot properly. Everything stopped. Error messages, exception messages. No matter what I did I couldn’t get it to work. Using my wife’s computer I searched for anyone with similar problems, but I couldn’t find anything. One blog entry from half a year ago was the closest I got. That person had received two of the same error messages I had, but there was no solution.
Back to the main computer again. I could see my desktop, I could open files, but I couldn’t move anything ro copy anything. By trial and error I discovered I could open some files and then save them as new files to my USB memory stick.
Clearly, I thought, I’ve managed to install a virus of some sort. But how? I keep the virus protection updated and do a scan once a day.
It never crossed my mind that the virus protection was actually the culprit.
 Kudos to www.artmiks.nl In a very low state of mind and spirit, I traipsed off to meet my wife for a meal before we went to Bio Roy here in Gothenburg to see the broadcast of the National Theatre’s production of Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art. (Link)
What a great performance! If the computer crash was the rollercoaster’s dip, then the performance was the subsequent hill. It raised my spirits enormously. But on the tram home, I kept thinking of all the time it would take to copy laboriously each file I could open, one by one to the USB memory before I would dare to reformat the hard disc.
I didn’t sleep particularly well.
In the morning, though, what joy was mine to read in the paper that it wasn’t just me and my computer, but hundreds of thousands of others here in Sweden, and millions world-wide. And the relief when I found McAfee’s fix actually worked and was simplicity it self to apply.
And I tweeted:
Hallelujah! The #McAfee knowledgebase fix works & is straightforward. Just download and follow the instructions. http://bit.ly/dDeoMi
Or if you prefer the full URL: https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=KB68780
Good luck!
By TheSupercargo
 Spam ad for Spamalot Having erased four items of spam in comments this morning (and adjusted one I’m not sure about), I have now activated Akismet on this site. I am interested to see whether it makes any difference.
Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.
It promises well.
[And it delivers, too. Has sieved out four new pieces of spam since I activated it. (Writing on 23rd April.) ]
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