Clagnut news blog posts

  • New year, new typeface: switching to variable fonts

    My website used to be set primarily in two very different typefaces: Ingeborg and Premiéra. This is story of how I switched to a fantastic single variable font which provided the same practical and stylistic benefits, only better.

  • A new year, a new design

    To my surprise, Clagnut.com was last redesigned in September 2008. Well, it’s all change, with a new redesign launched today. It’s been created from the typography outwards, responsive from the beginning and elegant on huge as well as tiny screens.

  • A new design

    I’ve finally got around to redesigning clagnut.com.

  • Tagging blogs – a Reboot of sorts

    In acknowlegement of CSS Reboot I have created Clagnut 2.0 beta in which I have started exploring APIs and thinking more about tagging.

  • I blame Tonga

    You may have noticed that Clagnut was down for most of last week. The culprits were referrer spam robots maxing out my database connections, resulting in my ISP putting my account on hold.

  • Quiet around here, isn’t it?

    Well it’s the usual reason – so much stuff, so little time. There’s two projects, two books and then my arch nemesis pops up.

  • Normality returns

    Thanks for your support. I don’t normally get political here at Clagnut, and even less often do I get angry and sweary, so I thought I’d show any new readers what I normally write about, by way of a top ten most visited posts this fortnight.

  • Fig Roll

    Seven months late, it?s Friday Biscuit time again. And welcome to the Amazon switcher.

  • Blogmarks

    Clagnut posts have been getting longer and less frequent of late, which means a bunch of sites are going noticed but unreported. So it was time to emulate the trend of a rolling list of links – hence the creation of blogmarks.

  • Now playing

    Until today, the listening right now bit and the last 50 listens page were generated with the help of BlogAmp, a neat little plug-in for WinAmp 2. The trouble was it only worked through JavaScript document.write statements; not exactly best practice. So I figured there…

  • Look no hands

    I’m in Crete now, probably on a beach somewhere. This message has been posted by magic, without my going anywhere near a computer. And so will the following ten posts, scheduled to appear every now and then during the next fortnight. Well, I couldn’t leave you…

  • Reserved comment names

    Inspired by some recent nefarious posts, I have reserved my name for all future comments. From now on all comments posted by ‘Rich’ will be from me. The system is far from foolproof, but for now I’m satisfied that one would have to put at least some effort in…

  • Back soon

    I’m off mountain biking for a week. In the meantime I’ve added an archive to Clagnut and made some fundamental changes to the RSS feed, discovering FeedDemon along the way.

  • Honour to be nominated

    Last night saw the Brighton & Hove Virtual Festival Web Awards 2003. A good time was had by all – the beer was free (initially) and the venue cosy. Regular readers will know that Clagnut was nominated for Best Personal Site. Well I didn’t win but thanks to…

  • Give ’em what they want

    The vote for clagnut link is up. Zeldman has stopped his third party links opening in a named window. And about time too. 37 Signals have designed a better Google.

  • Vote clagnut!

    I’ve been shortlisted for the Brighton & Hove Virtual Festival Web Awards 2003.

  • Rich Tea

    I’ve added ‘remember me’ to blog comments. I haven’t asked, it just does it; is that bad? Anyway, with PHP, it was ridiculously easy. Set the cookie with setcookie(“author”,$author, time()+2592000,”/”) and retrieve it with $author=$_COOKIE[“author”] . …

  • Garibaldi

    More Friday banter from the Biscuit: I should have just got a job on the bins.
    The pay’s better and I’d know some hard blokes.
    And I wouldn’t have to pretend
    That I know what rhetorical means.I could have been like Lou Barlow,
    But I’m more like Ken…

  • Preview and pain

    I’ve built a preview feature for blog comments, to make life easier since incorporating Textile into the commenting system. And talking of Textile, I’m struggling to fix a bug with its @ notation.

  • Textilisation

    Clagnut now uses a slightly customised version of Dean Allen’s wonderful Textile. Textile provides speedier text input (without having to mark up the input into my CMS) and formats the text nicely, with proper “typographer’s quotes” and so on. There…

  • No more referrers

    I’ve removed the referrers list until I work out how to filter out all the spam. The situation was manageable until this weekend, when I got bombarded with porn links. So if you have any filtering ideas, please leave a comment or get in touch directly.

  • Proposed change to RSS feed

    Soon I’m going to change my RSS feed to v1.0. That way you’ll get the full content of each post, complete with HTML. Hopefully this will make the feed more useful, but that’s just my opinion, so consider this your consultation period. If you use the clagnut…

  • Reformulation launched

    You are now looking at the new formulation of clagnut. The underlying HTML has swapped for more meaningful markup and the resulting style sheets completely rewritten. So far I’ve only tested on Mozilla and IE6 on Windows, so any further input from other platforms will be…

  • Praise Indeed

    I make no excuse for this piece of flagrant trumpet blowing. Eric Meyer writes: How have I gone this long without encountering Clagnut ? It’s the kind of design that I can sort of vaguely see in my head when I sit down to do something, but when I do it, the end result…

  • Only on the Internet…

    Pepys’ Diary is a weblog with daily entries from Samuel Pepys’s diary, starting from 1st January 1660. I don’t know how well known Samuel Pepys is outside of Britain (anyone care to enlighten?), but every schoolkid here learns about him in History. As a…

  • Rewrite

    At the moment, I’m attempting to completely rewrite the HTML and CSS beneath clagnut.

  • Cuppa

    Over at metaGarbage, clagnut is one of Johan Svensson’s daily cups of tea. It’s always a proud moment when one is linked from folks’ homepages, but in this instance I’m even more chuffed given the select company clagnut has been placed with: Boing Boing,

  • Fifty tunes

    I’ve added a page which lists the last 50 tunes I’ve played on WinAmp (an idea gratuitously lifted from What do I Know). It uses the BlogAmp plugin, which unfortunately requires JavaScript to view the list. However I managed to find a PHP version on the BlogAmp…

  • Spicy swatches

    My brother, a graphic designer, decided that the colours I use on Cuzza.com needed to be a bit more curry-ey. So he kindly came up with some hot & spicy swatches based upon curry products, Indian cookery books and colour theory books. And made this a super page to display…

  • Googled me

    I’ve added a crude referrers page, showing the last fifty pages to send traffic to clagnut. Seems most of you get here from Google (not a big surprise really). Talking of such things, El Reg reports that Google has changed its page ranking algorithm, allegedly (although…

  • IE6 bug

    The way I’ve coded the Clagnut CSS shows up a bug in IE6 Win. All the left and right margins (actually padding) around my text are doubled in width for no apparent reason. In fact it’s not even that straightforward – the page isn’t rendered consistently…

  • About time

    I’ve finally got around to adding the obligatory About section. Sometimes these bits are the most interesting part of a personal site. Prepare to be disappointed.

  • Clagzilla

    Why the change in name? To add my voice to the groundswell of support for Davezilla, a popular (and very funny) blogger who has been crudely targeted by Toho, owners of Godzilla®. Initially, Dave was intending to remove his offending ‘little dragon guy’, but is…

  • Easier searching

    Well, having implemented my own search engine for clagnut, I’ve just discovered (via Dean) that MySQL now has its own search engine built in: As of Version 3.23.23, MySQL has support for full-text indexing and searching. I suppose I should be pleased and excited that…

  • Wevver bruvver

    Site improvements: nice new weather icons, improved search ranking and a decent 404 page.

  • Search soon

    A handy little article illustrating a simple search engine in PHP (guess what I’ll be doing with it). Weather feed added courtesy of Multimap, of course. Finally, navigation added too (needs fixing in Opera)!

  • Tube

    Interesting article on how the London Underground presents a metaphor for information architecture. Nicely presented too. Get your clagnut fix. You can now sign up for the less than monthly clagnut newsletter. Summer has finally arrived so I’m off down the beach.

  • It begins

    Due to popular demand the clagnut blog is here. This is post number one.I will be adding some comment facilities assuming I’m actually getting some traffic, but that’s for the future. For now it’s thanks and apologies to all the people I’ve borrowed…