Policy Statement

Ok, so I've been lured into the world of blogging, which I have been loathe to do ever since blogging took off.

This was partly - perhaps mainly - a result of working for a while on my brother's blog, which was set up to allow him to keep his friends updated about his progress on his trip round the world. While working on it I became enamoured of Wordpress, because it is relatively elegant to use.

However the codebase for Wordpress is a mess. I found an outstandingly stupid bug/feature the other day on my brother's blog: no thumbnails are generated when uploading photos over 3 Megapixels in size. There's literally a test there that just checks the dimensions, compares to an arbitrary 3 Megapixel value, and if not, you're silently handed back the full-size image. It also defaults to simply embedding a thumbnail, without a link or anything. And there's no option to change that. You have to hack the code. And the particular hack needed to change the default (which is a tri-state toggle option) isn't just reordering an array or assigning a different initial value - it requires hacks to the PHP code, the HTML code and the Javascript!

Anyway, this will not be a stream of consciousness blog about life but a blog focused on software development, primarily web-based because that's what I do for a living. We will probably discuss the problems I've encountered and/or solved, interesting ideas, and shameless plugs.