Recreating the look and feel was also pretty simple. Writing Wordpress themes isn’t as daunting as it first looks. So long as you have a clean XHTML & CSS layout, it’s a simple case of marking up the required header, footer & sidebar layout templates.

Any other BlogCFC specific functionality (like CF syntax highlighting) I managed to cover off by installing a few Wordpress plugins. Finally, I have Apache 301 redirecting any BlogCFC / CF URL’s, so hopefully my search rankings wont be affected too much!

So why the change? In the main, it’s due to wanting a new challange and something to rekindle my motivation for software development, which has been waning over the past year. I also wanted to get some solid experience of another programming language as a sort of career protection thing.

I’m not planning on giving up CF programming entirely, I’ll definately be checking out CF 9 but I’ll be trying to post more about Java related stuff in future.

Tis the current fashion in London to read a newspaper or book whilst walking along. While this does allow one to finish a chapter or complete the crossword whilst on the move, it does have the minor drawback of not being able to see where one is going.

This behaviour usually exhibits itself on crowded streets, busy tube platforms and station concourses. The effect of this is demonstrated thus…..

The unfashionable non reader walks by using the standard method of looking where he is going and thus avoids others:

The alternate method of reading whilst walking along produces the following effect:

So absorbing is the book that the reader weaves from side to side while others take avoiding action until the inevitable collision occurs.

My wife Sophia and I had a fantastic day. We were married at Romsey Abbey in Hampshire which proved to be a spectacular setting for the marriage service and a great backdrop for our (many) photographs.

The reception was also really enjoyable and my speech seemed to go down well with everyone, which was a relief considering I wrote it on the morning of the wedding!

There were some slight hiccups. Closer inspection of my marriage certificate revealed some embarrassing spelling errors on my father’s, Sophia’s and my occupation description. Not sure who the illiterate person was who filled out the details but I’m trying to get it changed.

Then there was the debacle over our (rather expensive) wedding cake. The staff at the reception cut portions of the cake so everyone could have a piece. Overnight it transpired that the reception venue staff had dumped the remainder of the cake in the bin, without any consultation with our parents or Sophia and I! Even worse, I recently found out that some of the staff had been helping themselves to bits of the cake while the evening party was going on.

For honeymoon we decided to go to Paphos in Cyprus for two weeks. The first five days were quite relaxing and then Sophia fell ill with a nasty stomach virus. Things got so bad that she ended up in hospital for three days. When she was released there was a strict diet for her to follow, so we were pretty much confined to the hotel for the remainder of the holiday. I didn’t expect to be tested on the ’sickness and in health’ vow quite so soon!

Problems aside, we still had a great time together and there’s still a day or so for us to enjoy together before we head back to work.

I’ve tried to keep everything CSS and XHTML valid but the blog has issues with IE versions less than version 6. I will at some point address this.

I’ll be adding and tweaking various bits and pieces over the coming weeks. And if anyone knows why this happens:

on the last post in IE 6, please let me know.

I’ve noticed a few weird things happening, random null pointer exceptions and some other issues. It’s probably time I started using the latest and greatest version of BlogCFC, which I plan to do soon. More on that next month….

I’ve been having to write a fair amount of documentation of late so I’ve spent many hours hammering out line upon line of text in Word 2007.

Can anyone explain how the ribbon toolbar is UI improvement over previous versions of Word?

I find it baffling, where the hell has half of the stuff that used to be a couple of clicks away gone?

Amusing that there’s software out there to bring back the old Office 2003 look and feel!

The del.icio.us service seems to be regularly unavailable of late and it’s starting to get annoying when I want to tag stuff or hunt through my bookmarks.

Converting everything to Ma.gnolia is a piece of cake. I simply exported all of my del.icio.us bookmarks to XML and imported them into Ma.gnolia. The Ma.gnolia interface is going to take some getting used to, for instance, your tags aren’t listed down the right hand side which makes searching slightly trickier.

There’s a few other quirks that I need to work through, I’ll see how it goes, I may even switch back if del.icio.us becomes more reliable.

Domain Driven Design

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Refactoring to Patterns

Beautiful Code

Once I’ve finished with Fowler’s Refactoring, I’ll make a start