(Last blog entry tonight - promise...)

To say I'm a bit slow on the uptake of certain fairly cool/handy/important things is like suggesting that I'm a bit grey, grumpy and fat. I am all three, by the way... ;o)

Del.icio.us - a site with a really odd web address - is billed as a "social bookmarking" site. The idea is that you can keep a (private or public, or a bit of both) list of your website bookmarks on the site. You sign into your del.icio.us account and there they are. Adding new ones is dead easy, and it means you can get to your bookmarks wherever you go. Very handy if you have a desktop PC at home and have to use the library PCs to do some homework.

The best bit about the site though, is that it also tracks the most popular websites by category (aka "tag"). One of these categories is humor - largely full of predictably American gumph, but there's also a humour tag, and the majority of the sites recommended here have probably come from Brits. At least, I like to think so, 'cos there's some good stuff in there.

Like this - Moronland.net's Philosophy of sex. Well, I liked it anyway...

Find out more about del.icio.us here, visit the homepage here, or take a look at Flickr's interesting photos pages for something totally different in a Web 2.0 stylee...

/al

... I'm trying a little something with Southampton Uni (@soton.ac.uk) e-mail address holders and our registration system.

There's a prize of a fluffy toffee from the tumble dryer to the first person to spot what I've done. Little hint: it's to do with UPSU.net guest accounts... ;)

(Don't read this - it's just another rambling stream of consciousness from me again...!)

We've just taken on board a new advertiser. Laterooms.com let you find hotels at short notice in pretty much any place in Europe (and beyond I think).

While I admit I'm not a huge fan of advertising - you create a website to serve a purpose, in our case to provide information for students and (hopefully) to get students chatting to each other, and putting adverts about things which the Union doesn't actually do kinda goes against that idea in my mind.

That said, like all of the UPSU.net advertisers, I'm glad that what's on offer is likely to be of some actual use to our students, so I'm happy to see them on here.

More importantly from my point of view, it gives me a chance to try some new things when it comes to working with pages on UPSU.net. If you're not familiar with the idea of a content management system, it's basically a way of creating pages which live on a database - rather than actual pages - and are only turned into a web page when they're requested by your web browser.

The benefits of this include being able to control your pages a lot more efficiently - I can change one setting and, voila, all pages on the site reflect that setting without having to update each and every page. There are loads of other benefits as well - one of the main ones being that almost anyone can, with a little bit of time, create web pages that are made from valid HTML and which are consistently created and laid out - but there are also some down-sides.

The biggest of these downsides is that you lose some flexibility in creating web pages compared to just creating an HTML file. This is most noticeable when people ask, "can we have a page that's X pixels wide, and put some PHP (a programme that runs on the server and can do many wonderful - and dangerous - things) code on it, and we want it to do X, Y and Z too?"

Often it's a case of saying, "No, we can't do it exactly like that, but I can do this, this and this which will work just as well" (or they're simply told to bog off if they're asking for the moon on a stick... Not that's not a regular occurrence... Honest!).

To put the Laterooms advert on UPSU.net, they wanted a web page on our site which lists their adverts. This is a good thing for advertisers for two main reasons: people reading their advert will tend to associate their brand with the Union, a name which they are more likely to trust, and because of the implied endorsement, people will be more inclined to trust the advertiser.

The second reason is purely that search engines like Google will see the advertiser's page on our site, and index the page - with all its links back to the advertiser's own website - and this should, in theory at least, increase the number of visitors to the advertiser's website.

The nature of the page meant that we had to add custom CSS styling to the page, and to be able to monitor links to and from the page to see which ones are working well and which ones don't receive as much traffic. We also needed to be able to adjust the META tags - used by search engines - to include keywords relevant to the advertiser's content.

With the original UPSU.net content management system - which we introduced last September - this would have been hard work to do and would probably not have been possible. Today, it was just a few clicks to build a very solid-looking, attractive page which did everything the advertiser wanted (at least, I hope it does!).

At the very least, it wouldn't have been as easy to do as it is now; since last September, we've worked hard to increase how much control people have over the pages they crea...

(Another very off-topic, slightly ranty entry...)

My hands ache. I've skinned three knuckles, crushed one finger, managed to put a sizeable hole in our concrete doorstep, chipped the wallpaper, put a hole in my sofa bed, left an oily handprint on the recently-painted doorframe, and - best of all - I haven't actually achieved anything with my shiny new bike parts.

Y'see, this evening, having watched the penultimate second-to-last (*) episode of Spooks tonight, I decided to get on with fitting the new parts to my bike to turn it from a wannabe trials toy (which doesn't go at all fast) into a long-distance cruiser I can use to get my cardiovascular fitness up to a half-decent level over the winter.

The only problem with that idea was the new parts reaching a group decision - without telling me - that they weren't going to fit on my bike: first the new stem turned out to be too skinny to fit over my forks, and then I spent half an hour trying to hammer my new cranks onto my old bottom bracket before I realised that the old kit had 10 splines, and the new kit had only 8. Use your imagination - there's no way that's going to fit. It's like trying to get those square bricks you get at the Early Learning Centre to go through the round holes...

Bugger.

"Ok," thinks I, "Let's rescue my pedals from the old cranks. This shouldn't take long - they've only been in there for a year or so."

Ha ha, yeah... Uhhm, no. I could almost hear my pedals laughing at me as I wrestled in several different positions, one of which I'm sure has given me a minor hernia, trying to unscrew the pedals. No happy ending here either - those pedals are never coming out of my old cranks.

At this point it crossed my mind that my bike and I might have upset a Witch Doctor somewhere, and all this trouble's happening because of a curse placed on me.

The alternative doesn't bear thinking about - that I actually made a mistake. Oh hell no, not possible - I'm male... Errm...

So, while I spent literally minutes choosing the new bike parts, it wasn't enough to make sure all the new kit would fit the old kit. Still, I have a plan - tomorrow I'm going to chuck some motion lotion (**) in the Shed (a term of endearment for my Fiesta... What a manly car... ;o) and take a wander up to Halford's. So far I need the following to get the bike up and running again:

• Tyre levers (can't get the old rubber off the wheels without damaging them otherwise)
• Foot pump (flat tyres don't go so fast)
• Bottom bracket (bit that holds the pedals together in the middle)
• ... and a tool to remove the old bottom bracket
• New pedals
• A chain whip (surprisingly, not something that can be found in Ann Summers. I think...) to get my cassette off.
  

... and I've still got to post my stem back to Evans Cycles and beg for one that fits.

... and I still have no idea if all the other new bits actually fit yet - I just can't bear to try and do anything more with the bike again tonight. If I do, I'm positive the little git will kill me. Please, all of you out there in Reader Land - wish me luck. I'll definitely be needing it...

(By the way, the seven "P"s in the title refers to the "Seven Ps" acronym - "Prior Preparation and Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance").


* I'm hereby declaring the Campaign for the Reduction of Unnecessarily Posh-Speak to be open for business.

** Petrol. Not some other lotion...