Dear Sir,

My blog has more recent entries than yours.

Yours truly,

RJ Mottram

The shame of being out­blogged by a silver surfer!

To make up for my long silence, I will be weblog­ging seven shades of shit out of the Edin­burgh Art Fes­ti­val, which opens tomorrow.

Update: I did, if one can define ‘weblogging’ as ‘writing arti­cles in the newspaper’. See here.

I haven’t had a system like this in place for years, and was quite sur­prised this morn­ing by the stats. Many more people visit the site than I thought, and cer­tain posts — the one about casu­als, the one about col­lapsed lungs, and any­thing about how to do stuff on a com­puter — actu­ally get a decent number of hits each day, from real live humans, as best as I can tell.

So, I thought I’d try a little exper­i­ment and… add some adver­tise­ments to the site. You know, so I can profit from foot­ball hooli­gans arrang­ing fights and unwell Amer­i­cans with­out health insur­ance. Might as well go the whole hog, eh?

Of course, this is wrong and bad and I should kill myself at the first avail­able oppor­tu­nity, so, to salve the ter­ri­ble guilt, if I make more money than it takes to pay my host­ing and domain reg­is­tra­tion fees (around £60 a year, I think), I’ll give it to charity.

I don’t want folk who actively read the site to be trou­bled by these ever-​so-​discreet tex­tual intru­sions of Mammon, so, just in case you’re not already block­ing them, adverts will only appear below entries a week after they’ve been posted, and will never appear in RSS feeds or on the home page.

Here’s what they look like:

What do you reckon, then? Sen­si­ble plan, or revolt­ing act?

If past expe­ri­ence is any­thing to go by, the entire site will break hor­ri­bly, at least once.

Update: it seems that my old tem­plate was so rid­dled with elderly Word­Press code that the new ver­sion point blank refuses to use it. This theme will have to do until I summon the energy to redesign the site.

Update II: Huh, I seem to have fixed every­thing. Which is almost a shame, as I quite fan­cied flex­ing my puny HTML and CSS mus­cles on a new design.

Update III: Instead, I’ll be flex­ing my puny meta­data entry mus­cles: Submit Response now has tags. Well, eight posts do. Only 1,242 to go! Don’t worry, I won’t be enter­ing them all man­u­ally, thanks to the rather clever Simple Tags plugin.

Update IV: You can now use OpenID to leave com­ments on the site.

More impor­tantly, the prob­lem extended to my email, so if you sent me any­thing impor­tant between the 14th of Sep­tem­ber and today, please do send it again.

So, instead, here are a few little notes:

• The site is now pow­ered by Word­Press instead of Mov­able Type. This means I’ll be spend­ing less time smash­ing my head off the desk in rage when post­ing new entries. It also means you can leave com­ments with­out wait­ing for them to be moderated.
• The site design is based on Hem­ing­way, with a lot of mod­i­fi­ca­tions, because I couldn’t face learn­ing enough about Word­Press to write a theme from scratch. The result is rather messy tem­plates, and even messier CSS. Hey ho. I’ll fix it all up at some point.
• See the wee ‘about’ bit at the top of the page? It’s an hCard. hCard is one of sev­eral micro­for­mats, which are clever ways of pre­sent­ing infor­ma­tion on the web so that machines can do stuff with it, with­out get­ting in the way of the humans read­ing it. There’s other micro­for­mat stuff going on too, using MicroID and xFolk. Some future posts will be micro­for­mat­ted using hRe­view, geo and the like. Micro­for­mats are really rather excit­ing—if you want to see them in action, try installing the Oper­a­tor exten­sion for Firefox.
• If you have a look at the bottom of the page, there’s a little bar chart, or ‘sparkline’. It shows activ­ity on the weblog over the last six months or so—the darker and taller the bar, the more stuff was going on. Dinky, eh? I should prob­a­bly put it some­where more vis­i­ble. It’s pow­ered by the Spark­Stats plugin.

That’s about it, I think. Non-​meta post­ing will resume as soon as I remem­ber how to weblog.

As you can see, Submit Response has risen from the dead with a brand new look, like some crazy hyper­text phoenix. Assum­ing I didn’t cock up the DNS thingy when I changed hosts, that is. Some things may well be hor­ri­bly broken, or look hideous in your browser—if you spot any­thing amiss, do leave a com­ment on this post and I’ll try to fix it. Screen­shots from Inter­net Explorer users would also be appreciated.

Tumble is back too, though I still have a bit of tin­ker­ing to do before var­i­ous other sec­tions of the site are ship-​shape and Bris­tol fashion.

Apolo­gies to my tiny band of read­ers for going quiet for so long. To be honest, I could’ve had the site up and run­ning back in Sep­tem­ber, but… I couldn’t be arsed and decided I fan­cied an extended hiatus from wit­ter­ing online.

Since last we spoke, I got a new job, as art critic for The Herald (the world’s oldest continuously-​published English-​language news­pa­per, fact fans), which is prov­ing to be great fun—look­ing at art and writ­ing about it are two of my favourite things, and I’m get­ting to do a lot more of both. I’m hoping to be able to post some of that writ­ing on Submit Response, but since The Herald keeps its con­tent behind a pay­wall, I’ll have to con­sult the powers that be. Whether or not I can re-​publish reviews from The Herald, I expect Submit Response will be a bit more focussed on visual art than it was before.

A not-​particularly-​interesting post about the redesign of the site fol­lows shortly.

As far as Google is con­cerned, the only Jacks more famous than me are Mr. Daniel and his sickly ‘whiskey’, pop­u­lar singing sen­sa­tion Mr. John­son, and the perma-​grinning leather-​faced star of such films as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

How very pecu­liar. I can only assume it’s some sort of tem­po­rary glitch in the system (I’m nowhere to be found in the first 50 results for ‘jack’ on Yahoo! or MSN search).

Note: I wasn’t on a deranged ego­surf when I spot­ted this, honest—I just checked the logs for this site, and noticed an awful lot of folk find­ing their way here after search­ing for ‘jack’.

I’m off to France tomor­row for ten days, so if you need to get in touch, er… don’t. (Unless it’s urgent, in which case my mobile tele­phone will be switched on.)

INSERT_MAP

My apolo­gies for the dis­ap­pear­ance of large swathes of Submit Response—most of the pages hosted under this domain will be back online by the end of the day.

The prob­lem, for those inter­ested in such things, was this: any attempt to edit a file on my server, or to upload a new file, resulted in that file instantly turn­ing into an empty file. And, so, when­ever anyone left a com­ment on the weblog, the page they were com­ment­ing on, and all the index pages would - poof! - dissappear.

This very pecu­liar behav­iour had me stumped, but my hosts worked it out: I was over my host­ing quota. You’d’ve thought that would trig­ger an email alert, rather than prompt­ing the server to wig out com­pletely in a way that my host’s own tech sup­port man described over the ‘phone as ‘really strange’ and ‘not any­thing I’ve seen before’, wouldn’t you?

Hey ho.

(If you can be both­ered, do leave a com­ment on this entry so I can see every­thing is work­ing well. If it’s work­ing badly, expect a deluge of com­ments on all entries adver­tis­ing dubi­ous things.)