The more attentive amongst you may have noticed that entries to this site have been a bit scarce lately.  The super keen-eyed will also have noticed that the layout of this site has changed completely.  The reason for both of these changes is actually the same; it all went horribly wrong!

I had previously been using the Apple iWeb application which was supplied with my Mac, and in fairness it is was all very easy to use and made life very simple.  Sadly, and for reasons that I still can’t explain, it suddenly stopped working.  The error messages that I got from iWeb were not even funny, to say nothing of unhelpful, and it’s the one and only true calamity that I have ever had during my period of Mac ownership.  I remember feeling genuinely shocked and dissapointed, and I described the experience to friends as being “not very Apple”.  I called their support hotline and a very helpful Apple person did his absolute best to remotely coax iWeb back to life.  It wasn’t a half-hearted effort either, because he really did seem to know what he was doing.  I’m a techie, and some of the manual file edits that he guided me though were scaring the life out of me.  But in the end it was all declared a complete failure, and seeing as it was an inexplicable one I decided that it should not be repeated.

I thought about giving the whole thing up as a bad job, but in the end I opted for a slightly less drastic alternative.  So you are now reading “It’s not a blog – Rev 2″, all powered by a very clever open source widget called “WordPress”.  The installation for the beginner can be a bit daunting because it requires some knowledge of how to set up SQL databases, but the instructions are good and there are plenty of people on YouTube who have made tutorials.  And here is the result, and it’s bloomin’ wonderful!  For me the most impressive bit is that it’s all “up in the cloud” rather than being on a my home machine, and now that it’s up and running I can write endless amounts of drivel from anywhere in the world provided that I have an internet connection.  And frankly that’s a good thing, because in my job I quite often find myself in very odd parts of the world with absolutely nothing better to do than to write complete drivel.  (Those of you who travel on company business will doubtless understand!)

So if you’re looking for a way to write drivel to the masses, I can highly recommend WordPress.  You can find it at http://wordpress.org/ and it’s completely free.