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Rome!

Yay–we’ve booked our holiday to Rome for this year! We’re only going for five days this year (Wednesday to Sunday, at the end of May), but we don’t really go to Rome to sight-see any more–we just go to soak up the atmosphere and relax. We plan to spend a lot of time just wandering around the Centro Storico, hanging out in cafés, and locating playparks for Alex. There’s a few we know about from last year, but I’m sure we’ll be able to find many more this time round.

We’ll be staying at the marvellous Hotel Panda again. We know it well now, and we just love its combination of price, location (practically right on top of the Piazza di Spagna) and quality. We had a double room last year, and Alex slept on a mattress on the floor, but we’ve got a triple room this time. Alex is so much bigger now, and we’re going to need all the extra space we can get….

Needless to say, we’re very excited about going!

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Blogshares

Thank you, Lisa, for introducing me to Blogshares. Not. Just as I’d managed to kick the RSS habit, along comes another reason to maniacally check on my favourite blogs, and to update my own more regularly in the hope of getting noticed. Well, I’m not falling for it, you hear me? I’m not!

Actually, Blogshares is a pretty cool idea. It’s another tool like Technorati, and the Blogging Ecosystem that illustrates the interconnectedness of weblogs, and helps people to find more stuff that might interest them. Only Blogshares turns this mess of crosslinks and mutual admiration into a game as well.

(I got hooked on Popex a couple of years ago. It’s a similar idea, but you buy shares in pop artists instead of blogs, and your portfolio rises or falls with their fortune in the charts (and other factors, of course). Blogshares sounds more interesting to me, though, because you’re buying shares in people that you know, and who may know you.)

But I’m not going to get hooked on this one. Oh no. I have too many other things on the go right now to get sucked into another addiction.

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mod_rewrite

Aha…it looks like EZPublishing does support mod_rewrite after all. Well, that’ll allow me to kill all the remote linking of Alex’s pictures. It won’t stop people grabbing copies of them and hosting them on their own site. But the password protection will stop them from getting at those photos in the first place.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://sunpig.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.sunpig.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|JPG|gif|GIF)$ - [F]
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Advances in biscuitry

Ah, the humble yet immeasurably satisfying McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive biscuit. How could they possibly be improved? Well, how about sticking a layer of caramel between the biscuit and the chocolate? Mmmmm…caramel digestives!

And the McVitie’s classic Ginger Nuts? Surely no-one could fiddle with its timeless recipe and make it even better? Well, how about leaving the ginger nut as it is…but topping it with chocolate? Oooohh…chocolate ginger nuts!

Big yay to the food scientists at UB for advancing the cause of biscuitry, and satisfying cookie lovers all over Britain.

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Password protecting Alex’s pages

I’m back to thinking about password-protecting Alex’s web pages here on Sunpig, and all of the images that go with them. Last week, there were two more sites that had linked to photos of him. One of them was fairly innocuous–the “Evil Alex” photo had cropped up on a bulletin board in response to a call for pictures of evil babies. The other site was another bulletin board, but it was in Arabic, so I have no idea what it was about. (Nearby pages on that board didn’t feature anything sinister, though.)

Having Alex’s pictures being linked to on these sites isn’t nearly as worrying as what happened back in January, but I’m still not exactly happy about it. I’m delighted to have people come across my own blog on Google. I post stuff here that people other than my family and friends may be interested in. But Alex’s pages are really only on the web so that people close to us can find out how he is getting on.

I’ve tried using a robots.txt file to stop search engines from indexing those pages (I assume that’s how most people would come across them), but that doesn’t seem to be working. So I think the time has come to lock them down. If you don’t know us, then you’re about as welcome on Alex’s pages as any stranger who sticks his face up against our living room window. If that sounds unfriendly, then sorry, but deal with it. I’m closing the curtains.

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Revert to saved

The comments I received about the change I made to my home page all served to confirm what I thought myself: that it wasn’t quite right. The quick reviews don’t feel right interleaved with the rest of my blog entries. The tone of their content makes too much of a contrast with the normal blog entries, and they end up feeling like those adverts you get stuck in the middle of articles in the New York Times on-line edition.

So I’ve gone back to the old version. Alan suggested that I could just put the title of the latest review at the top of the page, but I fiddled around with that a bit, and I couldn’t get it to look right, either. Basically, you’re just going to have to put up with checking the quick reviews in the sidebar, or checking their home page to see if we’ve written any new ones.