And welcome to the new look ZX81.org.uk! This time I decided to go “back to basics” with a relatively simple, low-graphics theme. Having said that, it’s not quite as basic as things were back in late 1999 when the site first went live¹. It’s less fussy than the old version and should load more quickly for those people not yet on broadband.

The boring details are: I’m using a slightly modified version of Dagon Design’s NightSky theme for WordPress. Other than a fairly extensive set of plugins, changes were to bring the theme in line for tags and to allow a daringfireball-style “linked list” rather than the rather more static del.ic.io.us list I had previously.

If you came to look at ZX81.org.uk a couple of hours ago you may have noticed that it wasn’t here. I’m pleased to announce that we’re back, and better than ever.

The reason for this outage was an upgrade. I generally find it easier to stay with the current version of WordPress but with the big jump to 2.1 I chickened out. Until this evening.

And, honestly, it wasn’t too tricky. I did a test upgrade on my laptop using the webserver and MySQL database in MAMP. I found that the template I use needed a quick update (as detailed on GFXedit) but otherwise the upgrade script seems to have done the job without any trouble. Please let me know if you do find anything wrong.

Some would say that it can only mean that I have far too much time on my hands. I claim that I’m merely interested. As is often the case, the truth maybe somewhere between the two. But the fact is, I do like to keep an eye how many people are visting ZX81.org.uk and what they’re looking at.

There are also some oddities, I think anyway. My most popular picture is just of a tea leaf! (From when I was in the tea growing region of Sri Lanka.) It’s basically just a standard record shot, and even has a horizontal line across the middle where the lab scratched the negative. Not my greatest photograph. Some day I’ll invest the time to clean it up in Photoshop.

If you’re subscribed to my RSS feeds you may well have noticed already, but I have started, as an experiment, adding interesting links to my del.icio.us account and syndicating them from here. Is that a good idea? What do you think?

If, on the other hand, that first paragraph made no sense, read on.

First, let me explain terms. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a way to get your web browser¹ to tell you when a website changes. If you have Internet Explorer 7 you should see the feeds icon (an orange square with white lines) next to the home icon on the top right, just below the search text box. In Safari the bar with the URL will have a blue RSS icon to the right. And Firefox has “Live Bookmarks” which do the same thing. Simply click the appropriate button and see what happens.

The day has finally come. As previously discussed my other two websites are finally going away. Very shortly, links to darlingtonphotography.com and stephendarlington.com will no longer redirect here so please update any links you have. Pretty much all the content available on those sites is now here. A quick search should turn up something useful but let me know if something you liked has gone missing in action.

As I mentioned previously, I am in the process of reducing the number of websites that I need to support. To that end, some time ago I moved the content from StephenDarlington.com to here with the intention of decommisioning the old site. That day is coming shortly. The actual domain isn’t going away for a while yet, but soon it will redirect to www.zx81.org.uk/blog/.

If you can read this, you are accessing my new web server. As with all of these things, there is no such thing as a completely clean transition, so if you notice anything amiss please do let me know.

On a similar note, moving my domain from my ISP to another provider has also affected my email. So if you have sent me email in the last day or two and it bounced back (or I’ve not replied) that is why. Please try again!

If you’ve been to ZX81 before you can’t fail to notice that we’ve had the second major redesign in our history. This time we’ve moved over to using WordPress, the unfortunate consequence of which is that some of the old links might have stopped working. I’ve tried hard to maintain things, but there may be some problems. Let me know if you find them!

[ Edit: Some people are using my pictures on their web pages, in most cases this is both uncredited and without permission. This is an infringement of my copyright. As you might imagine, I have made no attempt to maintain links for these people. For a short time this may also inconvenience people coming from Google Images. ]