As you can see, if you’ve been here before, I’ve re-jigged the site. “Ah, it’s the same content, just a new WP theme,” I hear you cry. Well, to a certain extent, that’s true, from a user standpoint, but the foundations upon which the site sits have been overhauled.
I was with another hosting company for this here site for quite some time. They had a pretty sweet deal – a year’s hosting, plus a .com domain for something like £30 a year. However, it was all run by one guy out of his house using one of those ‘Reseller Hosting’ packages, and I guess he stopped giving a toss about the hosting end of things. Maybe he was having real life problems. Maybe he was eyeballs deep in his day job. Who knows?
As a result, I decided to up sticks and find a better host. I found a nice company called Vidahost that had a similar deal to my previous host, but is actually run as a business rather than a side project. Their customer service has been very good, and as a result, I decided to jump on board. Bit of a pain in the arse getting the neilmcdougall.com domain transferred over, but that’s now well in progress, and should cause no further issues. Best part is, I’ve paid for my hosting up front for the next three years (on a three years for the price of two deal). £60. Wahey! Bargain get!
Been footering about with themes and whatnot, and settled on this nice chunky effort. The site’s had a white-on-black vibe since I started it. Can’t seem to find anything colourful that tickles my fancy. *shrugs*
At the time of writing, some of the links in ‘My Music’ don’t work yet, need to get files re-uploaded and renamed.
So, onwards into 2010, and hopefully more blog posts from me! Huzzah!
Edit: Yes, I know the header image is guff. I knocked it up in 5 minutes. Any Photoshop wizards are free to submit new ones to neil@neilmcdougall.com
This entry was written by , posted on February 15, 2010 at 3:06 pm, filed under musings, Site, tech and tagged design, me, Site, wordpress. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
So, this here is the first (of many to come?) blog posts using the WordPress client on my shiny new iPhone 3GS.
I was using a Nokia N95 8GB before now and that has served me well for the last year and a half, but I never really felt like I was using the phone to it’s absolute fullest potential. I never really used the email functions (writing email on a numeric keypad would royally suck), or the office type stuff, and I had my iPod for music and podcasts, so the multimedia side of the phone kinda went to waste too. It was basically phone calls, texts, calendar, web browsing at work, keeping up with Twitter at work and the odd game of Tetris or Bejeweled at work (yeah, working in a bookies can get dull sometimes, especially in Kilmarnock).
However, things finally came into shape for me to finally jump on the iPhone bandwagon. My iPod went tits up, my phone upgrade was due, and Apple released the iPhone 3GS, which ticked most of the boxes I was waiting to be ticked before I was iPhone-ready- better camera and more storage being the main ones. If a phone was going to be my all-in-one device, I needed it to have at least 32GB on board to replace my 30GB iPod Video. Lo and behold, come WWDC, Apple drop the 32 gig 3GS. And it was good.
So, what am I enjoying so far?
The apps are tremendous. Well, some of ’em anyway. There’s plenty of shovelware on the App Store, so it’s definitely worth doing a bit of snooping around for app recommendations and community word of mouth. Alternatively there’s often free trial or lite versions of some apps to tickle yer fancy. Check out this Twitter feed for a feed of apps that go from being paid apps to freebies. I’ve got a couple of decent ones out of that. There’s also a podcast called Appslappy that’s available on iTunes and the like. It’s all about iPhone app reviews, but it’s quite entertaining.
Anyway, I reckon that’s enough iPhone blogging for now. I’ll be updating this blog, my twitter feed (link at the bottom of the page) and my audioboo feed (more on that soon) with more stuff in the days to come.
Oh, incidentally, thank for all the great feedback on the Rick Astley/Dream Theater mashups. Glad so many folk enjoyed them
This entry was written by , posted on August 6, 2009 at 12:27 pm, filed under apple, musings, Site, tech and tagged apple, iphone, tech. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
See the ‘My Music’ link over there? Yeah, click that shit and listen to the tunes on there. You might actually enjoy some of them.
Nothing majorly noteworthy happening of late, unfortunately. Get paid on Thursday, though, so shouldn’t be too long before I’m back on the road.
Oh, that’s right, I got shot of my DeArmond Jetstar guitar and replaced it with a nice Ibanez Soundgear bass. Need to get it set up to remove the pretty chronic fret buzz on the lower frets, but once that’s done it’ll be pure bass sexyness.
Pics of bass and eventual new car will be forthcoming soon.
This entry was written by , posted on April 26, 2009 at 9:45 pm, filed under music, musings, recording, Site and tagged bass, car, music, thoughts. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
If any of you are familiar with the old neilmcdougall.com, and know a thing or two about web design, you’ll know it was distincly last-decade in its execution – laid out with tables, done in a WYSIWYG HTML editor, basic graphics, no Javascript, XML or any of those fancy modern doo-hickeys.
Look-wise, it was fine – nice and clean, no flashing ‘E-Mail Me!’ animated .gifs, ‘UNDER CONSTRUCTION’ banners or scrolling/flashing text, but it was a bit of a pain in the arse to update, frankly, and I wanted to make some use of more up-to-date web stuff. Seeing as I know next to nowt about CSS, XHTML, Javascript or the like, I decided to do what countless other people have done, and whacked WordPress onto my website.
It’ll be a lot easier to update the site now, seeing as I spend far more time in a web browser than I do in Dreamweaver or the like, and I can use Firefox plugins like Scribefire to update it without having to log in to my site. I hit the wee icon in the toolbar at the bottom of Firefox, I write a post, and boom, it’s up on the site. Yaaas.
So. add this here site to yer RSS readers, ’cause you’ll be hearing more from me, on a multitude of subjects, ranging from music, to sports, to whatever other shite I feel like writing about.
This entry was written by , posted on April 1, 2009 at 4:43 pm, filed under design, musings, Site and tagged design, me, new, Site, thoughts, wordpress. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
www.neilmcdougall.com
It’s a site about me. A bit lo-fi in the design, but it’ll do the job for now.
This entry was written by , posted on February 28, 2006 at 1:32 pm, filed under design, livejournal, Site and tagged design, livejournal, Site. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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