Tynemouth Priory and Castle,
originally uploaded by me.

I promise this is the last photo of the day 🙂

This is a picture of the grave yard to the read of the priory at “Tynemouth Castle.” (An English Heritage site at the mouth of the river Tyne, oddly enough :-))

Most, if not all the graves with readable details on date to the 17th or 18th centuries – some from the early 19th but not many. Despite this, apparently King (later Saint) Oswin of Deira and King Osred II of Northumbria are supposed to be buried here. All I can say is I never found their gravestones.

Apparently the priory / monastry did well until the disolution under Henry VIII. During his reign, the Monks here surrendered the site to the king, and he apparently decided it was more suitable for a costal defence fort – and the castle was built.

It is a strange site – it has lots of early medieval parts (the priory for example), is ringed with a sixteenth century artillery fortress, has WW1 and WW2 gun emplacements and, best of all, a 1960’s tower building (looks like an Air Traffic Control tower) which now appears to be home of the CCTV monitoring site. All very amusing.

Well, as I was feeling somewhat photogenic I thought it would be appropriate to share some of my own flickr photos with the world!

This is one of sunlight coming through the trees at Belsay castle. Well, I liked it 🙂 You can see more on the flickr pages.

Warwick Castle 01,
originally uploaded by jj_mac.

An excellent photo catching Warwick Castle from an amazing angle. In this picture you can clearly see the well designed, and well laid out, gardens that surround the castle.

The distance in the photo is implied by the fact the castle (which is reasonably large) looks like a toy model!

evening sky over reculver,
originally uploaded by adrians_art.

This is also a photo I couldnt help but add to the blog 🙂 This is the evening sky over Reculver Roman fort.

For info – the fort was originally built as part of the Saxon Shore defences and, after falling into disuse, found a new life as both a Saxon settlement (ironically) and then a medieval stronghold.

Scotney Castle,
originally uploaded by Bri Williams.

Gorgeous photo here – very nice colours and so cute it is unbearable! 🙂

Couldnt resist sharing this with every one.

Well, the ongoing quest for excellence continues 🙂 Here are some web sites relating to CSS I have been looking at today. All quite interesting and well worth checking out:

• http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/slantastic/demo.html
• http://www.infimum.dk/HTML/slantinfo.html
• http://www.456bereastreet.com/lab/equal_height_ii/ – View in both IE and FF to see the differences
• http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/xhtml-faq
• http://www.autisticcuckoo.net/archive.php?id=2004/ 11/ 03/ content-negotiation

You may have already found some, but these are interesting enough to be worth looking at. If you have any others – let me know.

Ok, following recent months we, here at Why Dont You have been quick to berate the various PC / Internet magazines available in the UK.

Whilst remote, there is a chance that this month things have changed. The latest .net magazine has arrived and (very) early indications are it is an improvement over previous poor showings.

This will be backed up with some more depth over the next couple of days as each bit is put to the test, but from the early scans it actually seems like a useful edition of the magazine.

Dont be too complacent though, there is a LOT of fluff in it – like several pages re-hashing old info in the guise of 150th issue celebrations. It is sad when a “cutting edge” magazine has to dedicate so much space to history…

Today, I have been wasting most of my life on the sitepoint forums. Not wishing to be some one who encourages others to while away ten hours reading about things they will never put into practice I am loathe to suggest you visit them yourself.

However, being someone who likes to encourage others to idle their lives away – I have to say, check them out yourself if you dont believe me 🙂

I know I have complained in the past about the poor standard of web design “IDE” software (see the sulk about NVU for more) and sadly in the intervening week very little has changed.

This is a shame because I really do like linux and much prefer working on the SuSE machine to any of the others. (I will try not to let this become another anti-Ubuntu rant :-)), I am sure that if anyone could proprerly reproduce the functionality and capabilites of Dreamweaver for the *nix platforms they would be on to a winner.

However, until the day when nirvana arrives, the best alternative I have come across so far is Bluefish. (http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/) While this doesn’t have the capabilities (ie. site definitions and inbuilt ftp etc) that dreamweaver offers it does provide an excellent set of text editing functions. It deals with a variety of formats including C, HTML, PHP and SQL. It has good, useful, syntax highlighting and is generally an excellent bit of software. I really cant recomend it enough!

Sadly this software is only available for POSIX compatible operating systems because, from what I have seen of it so far, it would be great even on a Windows PC.

While there still isn’t (currently) something I can use to totally replace DW and the Windows PCs, this is certainly “the next best thing.” If you know of any other good *nix web design IDE / HTML editors please let me know.

Well, having recently come accross the Feed Digest block of RoR links (see RoR Post), you can imagine my surprise when I found the link pointing to “Ruby for Rails book now available.” Now this was apparently posted “2 Hours ago” so it cant be a book I have ever found before.

Looking at what is on the blog (and its subsequent links), it seems quite good. I am not 100% sure it is worth US$22.50 for a PDF version though, so I will almost certainly wait until it is on Amazon (and / or Ebay… :-)) before I give it a try.

Hopefully this will go some way towards changing my opinion of Ruby (and Rails) – at the moment it strikes me as an interesting toy and not really much use for 99.9% of “real world” applications. I can’t think of anything Ruby on Rails can do, which cant be done better and easier with a different language. The framework (so far) is (IMHO) far from an enhancement and certainly doesnt add rapid application development.

Still, I have been wrong in the past. Time will tell 🙂

On an unrelated quest (regarding RSS) I came across this excellent little RSS feed (converted to HTML via feed digest). Well worth investigating:

http://feeddigest.com/digests/ruby-on-rails.html

For info (remember, we like lists…) , and to save people the problems I seem to have had over the last 24 hours or so the following are an excellent place to start adding repositories to YaST:

• http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/10.0/
• http://ftp.opensuse.org/pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS/inst-source/

(if you use a version of suse other than 10.0 ammend the number as appropriate)

A big list is available at:

• http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories

When it comes to updating YaST the fastest way to do this is by entering:

installation_sources -a your source url

And then wait for it to do its thing.

If you know of any other places worth using please let me know.

Not wishing to completely alienate the last two posters here 🙂 (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/04/14/experts-on-the-internet/ and http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/04/14/web-design-articles/) I still feel the need to defend .net slightly and possibly play devils advocate.

As a magazine, .net has no pretences of being a scientifically rigourous journal and there certainly isn’t any peer review process…, so it is a bit unfair to critise its articles in that light. The magazine is a “trade journal” and as such is supposed to be targetting its articles in that direction. The e-commerce competition was (IMHO) more a case of seeing what can be done to the standards and requirements of in-house judges – not a test of cold, hard, customer service. I am not saying they are right in doing this, but you would hope any website which was planning to introduce an e-commerce application would conduct extensive customer research, not simply rely on the opinions of three “ivory towers” types.

I agree with heather’s comments that the internet using public dont really care about what backend technology is in place – all they want is to achive thier goals (find information, buy things, play games etc) with the minimum of hassle. The fact a site is open or closed source is largely irrelevant. However, .net magazine is aimed at other Web Builders (webmasters, web designers etc., whatever you want to call them). This means the back-end matters. The update process matters. The ease of construction matters. The ease of update matters. And so on.

In my mind, this is what .net magazine was targetting and, to an extent it has achieved it’s goal. Now, the important question is “should it change its goals?” Personally, I think so. It is trying to be all things to everyone and as a result it is failing badly in some respects.

This months magazine has a section where it tears Tesco.com’s website / user experience apart. This is all done from the “fellow expert” point of view but it is couched in “customer-focus” terms. Now, I am not disagreeing with the comments .net has made (tesco’s website certainly could be improved) but the resounding fact of the matter is that despite its “failings” this is one of the biggest online grocery sites there is. That certainly means more than Gareth Knight’s judgement on its style and system.

I think there is a very real risk that dedicated net-geeks may get snared up in a circular self-fulfilment, where the opinions, judgements and criticisms move further and further away from the mainstream (and therfore “public” opinion). That is ok if your website provides a service to nothing but other geeks, but if you are selling to the public make sure you get their feedback!

Well, it seems that despite the linuxquestions site giving great and helpful information – and my YaST apparently having installed Apache 2 and PHP 5, I still cant get the thing to work.

My love of Linux is rapidly running out. This is very frustrating, especially as setting up Apache/MySQL/PHP/CF on a Windows machine took about 10 minutes top and worked perfectly out of the box.

I will perserve but any advice / tips welcome.

Well, the longstanding diatribes against Ubuntu not withstanding, I have spent a fair amount of time on this in the past few weeks. To such an extent that when I came back to the SuSE machine (which I am using for this), I had pretty much lost the ability to do anything.

The shame will never end.

In short, the SuSEbox has been largely untouched for the last month or so, so when I came to it today it needed a fair amount of admin doing – packages updating etc. I also decided this was a good time to bin the old apache 1.3 it was running and install apache 2 with php5.

What a mistake.

In the last month or so, it seems like I had forgotten how to do the simplest of admin tasks. I couldnt add new repositories to download up-to date software and had to resort to installing (often followed by repeated uninstall, reinstall farces) the software from a CD burned months ago. It was a nightmare.

Fortunately the wonders of Google saved the day and I got to http://www.linuxquestions.org/ – which fortunately had pretty much the answer to every question I was suffering.

Sadly, for some reason (and even though CF, MySQL, Perl, Ruby, Python etc are all fine) I cant get apache to serve PHP pages properly. It still sends them with an unknown mime-type. (And yes, I have edited the config files by hand…)

Oh well.