The Amazing Adventures of Dangerous Dave

this one’s a picture of ben, doing an impression of me. the location doesn’t look that impressive, but laurence tells me that it’s at niagara falls. if anyone else emails me a picture of them doing the jonny pose, i’ll add it to my picture of the day.

btw - i’m having real problems uploading photos to wordpress. chances are, i’m just not doing it properly - here’s what i’d like to do. i’d like to be able to upload a photo quickly and easily, such that the photo that goes into the main post is resized, but that you can click on it to get to an enlarged version. i was hoping that wordpress would do this kind of stuff for you, but if i have to resort to doing it myself, then it’s actually not a lot faster than my old blog. if anyone can give me some pointers on this, that would be great.

something i forgot to mention the other day when i was talking about my new blog is the fact that you can now comment on what i’ve written, and i’d like to encourage you to do so. please let me know whether you like the videos, pictures, thoughts i’ve decided to share with you

here’s an interesting piece of film trivia. the strange thing about it is that some of my favourite films are in there (star wars, indiana jones) and once i’d heard the scream, i knew the exact scene that it was going to appear in.

and here’s some well earned light hearted relief to those one picture a day videos. for those who’ve not seen them, people take a photo of themselves a day for X amount of time (usually years), and then upload the results to youtube. this one’s just silly:

UPDATE:

just found this video too and thought it was too good not to share - star wars vs monty python:

i’ve decided that every time i blog i’m going to upload a photo that i’ve recently taken somewhere - a brighton daily photo if you will, but less spammy than the others. the photo above was taken at lewes fireworks at the beginning of the month, and shows Bush as Uncle Sam, and Blair as what looks like a donkey.

i’ve been really getting into digg lately. for those that don’t know what it is, the wiki provides a good explanation of how it works. generally the articles there are really good, despite the fact that it’s open to jiggery pokery. it was on digg that i found the following cool video:

for the first 30 seconds i actually thought it was real, but then i started to think that there can only be so many plants out there with eyes.

if jim’s reading this, i saw this and thought of you:

here’s a quick link to another website i’ve been getting into recently - throw away your tv. with media this good available online, it’s no wonder that people are turning off their tv sets.

hello all - sorry to have been away for so long. i feel i have a little explaining to do since i have been rather slack in the blogging department for quite some time. here are a few reasons why i’ve been slack:

1. the last few months have been really busy for me workwise
2. my old blog was falling apart
3. my pc ground to a halt
4. traffic to my website dropped significantly

if you’re new to this blog, then my old blog can be found at www.jonathanstewart.co.uk. during the summer, my blog was doing pretty well. on average, it was getting about 400 visitors a day. the problem with it was that it was starting to get unmanageable. my blog started out as a little project that i could work on to learn a little bit about web design / hosting / SEO in my spare time. as it got bigger and bigger, it got more difficult to maintain. i wanted to add more and more content to it, but i needed an easier way to do it.

i effectively built my own CMS (content management system) - this does pretty much what it sounds like - it helps you easily manage your content - at least that’s what it should do. for some reason, it actually made things more difficult for me. my little side project had grown into a big monster, and i was getting frustrated with it.

the new CMS also meant that my site’s architecture had to change quite significantly. quite soon afterwards, i noticed a massive drop in traffic - a drop from which i’ve still not recovered. i went from getting 4oo visitors a day to the current level of about 80 a day. at its peak i was earning $5 a day in adsense - i current earn about 50c a day. Needless to say, when you’ve worked so hard on a project in your spare time and it all starts to go a bit pete tong, you might start to feel a little bit disinterested in it. i guess thats what happened to me with my blog.

my pc also ground to a halt, which didn’t really help matters. i’m too busy at work to blog at lunchtime, so the only time i can blog is at home. when your microsoft hunk of junk takes an age to do anything, again, it can make you feel a little disinterested in blogging.

however, i’ve now taken some steps to remedy these problems:

1. i’ve moved my blog to wordpress
2. i’ve bought a new macbook
3. i’m gonna rebuild my website from the bottom up

as you can see, my site is now hosted on wordpress - http://dangerousdave.wordpress.com. wordpress is a wicked piece of blogging software, that basically makes it really easy for me to blog. what used to take me an hour should now take me 5 minutes. sweet! i’m not sure whether my blog will stay at this address. i’d like to move it back to www.jonathanstewart.co.uk, but there are some hosting issues i need to resolve first.

i ditched my old pc, and bought a macbook. the thing i love about it is the ease of use of everything, especially when it comes to my photos - i can simply plug in my camera and have my photos ready to upload to my blog in 10 minutes. it’s also great because most of the pubs in brighton provide free wi-fi, meaning that i can blog down my local on a sunday afternoon while watching the footy.

finally, when i built www.jonathanstewart.co.uk, i didn’t really know what was going to be on it. as it grew and grew, more and more stuff just got tacked on. now that i’ve got an idea of what i want on my site, i can rebuild it with a much better architecture - this’ll make it much easier for me to add new content, and will hopefully encourage me to blog more often.

well, i hope you accept my apology for being away for so long. i won’t leave it so long next time. i’ve got some great photos of things i’ve been doing lately, so i’m going to start with trying to get my most recent photos uploaded asap. it’s getting late now though, so i’ll love you and leave you - laters potatas!