The cloud at the top bottom of the page shows what searches people are using to get to this site. It’s a cool plugin from Whoo. I wrote a little Widget wrapper for it to pop it on the theme, but I think I’ll probably move it to the bottom of the page.

Something I noticed though is that it uses a TOTAL count for search terms, so if you have something topical that drives the count very high it will hang around forever. So, I have added a little cron job that runs the SQL statement “UPDATE wp_zeitgeist SET count=count*8/10” once per day to decay the popularity of search terms over time.

All Drupal and Wordpress related posts will now be in a seperate blog. This is because the two subjects of home life and software musings don’t really belong together and have a seperate readership.

The old software related posts will remain here for archive purposes, all new entries will appear in the new home.

Here is the software that I regularly use for my home computing and web sites that I am responsible for…
Freeware

• SSH – Putty


• File Transfer – WinSCP3


• Sync – Unison


• Password Manager – Keepass


• Torrents – Azureus


• System Cleaning – Crap Cleaner


• Registry Cleaning – RegSeeker


• Blog – Wordpress


• CMS – Drupal


• Image Gallery – Gallery 2


• Worpress/Gallery – WPG2


• Disk Space – SequoiaView


• Media Player – BSPlayer


• Web Server – Apache


• Web Scripting – PHP4


• Picture editing – Gimp


• Mind Mapping – FreeMind


• Video Conversion – VirtualDub

• Picture Management – Adobe Photoshop Elements


• Video Editing – Adobe Premier Elements


• Music Management – Itunes


• CD/DVD Writing – Nero 6


• PDF reading – Adobe Reader

Red Lion Books today – it sort of lept off the shelf at me. I must be a sucker for minimalist covers or something. It had the feel of older science fiction. If I have the confidence I’ll write a little review when its finished with.

About…

me (the husband)

I am Alison’s husband, we have been married since September 2000, and already on to our third (and hopefully last for a long time) house! I have dragged Alison around the country from job to job, she has stuck with it and we have settled in Essex quite quickly.

me (the father)

The father of 4 boys and 1 girl, Thomas (1986), Robert (1989), Tiffany (1991), Christopher (1993) and James (2000). So, with the eldest I get the pride of when he got his first pay packet, or went abroad on his own for the first time. With the youngest the pleasure of seeing him swim his first width of the pool, or read a book on his own for the first time.

me (my boss)

I am currently freelancing as a contractor – it makes a pleasant change from the management politics over the last few years. I am able to focus on a single project at a time, not a dozen eggs in the air. Cool stuff.

me (the open source developer)

When I can squeeze in a hour or two I work on some bits and bobs for Drupal and Gallery2. I once developed PalmFuellog, a fuel tracking system for PalmOS, but having not had a development platform for a while have ceased work on it. There are several derivative projects around that have taken my work and built on it.