You won’t see anything, but I’ve been playing with things behind-the-scenes, in order to get the gallery updated correctly. If it breaks things, let me know. This post’s only going to be on here until I can determine nothing’s going to burst into flames…

By the time you read this, “Scribbler’s Laid a Big Juicy Log” will have been going for 10 years. I’m shocked and amazed I’ve actually kept something going like this for so long.

It seems absolutely no time at all since I was sat at my old white desk, typing my first post into blogger.com (before it got hammered by google), commenting on the annoying sound of fireworks going off around me. Yet, so much has changed.

I can’t even remember the URL for the first incarnation of this blog. It was using one of those free hosting sites, and not a very good one at that. Eventually, I settled down at mercuryvapour.co.uk , and have been using the same hosting company since then.

Not that the hosting actually matters, because, obviously the most important thing when it comes to talking about the blog, is the shit that spews through my fingers, into the black, plastic contraption in front of me, then through the magic of TCP/IP, apache, mySQL, and wordrpress, ends up on your monitor. I must admit, it’s been an interesting 10 years. I’ve mentioned many times that there’s stuff I will not blog about. For those who remember the early days of the blog, you’ll know what they were. I may have still been in that relationship. I may not have been. I’ll never know. I don’t care.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint a favourite post. I might as well write off the posts before Blogger implemented a comment system, or before I switched over to WordPress, because a lot of the time, it felt like I was talking to myself. OK, I know for the majority of time I DO talk to myself, but a little bit of feedback would have been nice.

I’ve just checked the archive, to find that the first comment was from c64glen, using his full name, on this post…

“New redesign”

That was 5 years ago, meaning I’ve only had 5 years to fully take on board your feedback. And by “take on board”, I mean ignore most of it. I have taken some of it on board, and my personal favourite has to be from Jonathan Sorrell, composer of the “You Bet” theme. It’s another post I’ve dragged out of the archives, and is available here. Check the comments.

On the other side of feedback, there’s been shit. Plenty of it. Mainly people who think that their opinion is more valid than anyone else’s on the internet. At the time of receiving such critiscism, I thought that the sea would rise and the sky go dark, and the sun would disappear, but the world just turns around the same, except that I’d been slightly less offended if it hadn’t happened.

My interests haven’t helped things. This is my blog. Should I be ashamed about street lighting and obscure TV themes? Of course not. If it wasn’t for a certain ‘deleted’ posting back in 2003, Andy The Iridium Fan would have no idea where I lived.

I’m going to bring this post to a close, as my mind’s wandering towards the shitty side of this blog….

If you can see this, it means I can blog almost anywhere. Brilliant

Looks like the site is having database issues at the moment. Might have to restore from the last backup, which was yesterday. I’ll investiage shortly when I’ve got the tools for the job. It might just need a repair, it might need more.

Or I might just stick it on the “Can’t be arsed” pile.

Edit: From what I can gather, the server restarted about 6 hours ago and the stats table was goosed since then. The repair on the database took longer than expected, mainly due to the size of this stats table, but it appears to have survived with only a tiny amount of data being written off, certainly not enough to warrant restoring from a backup.

The site lives to fight another day! I bet you can’t wait for my next installation of shit music and lamp posts.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, I am pleased to announce that the remixed version of Andy D’s Hartlepool Gallery is almost complete.

You may remember there’s been a section on the gallery of his photos for some time now. Unfortunately, it suffered from massive disorganization, and a whole load of low quality images. Therefore it was decided that the old images were to be removed, and replaced with ones collected over the past 18 months.

Here’s a sneaky peek at what it’s going to look like…

Currently, there’s about 1,500 images in there, but as there’s still a little bit of work to do, I’m not launching it until next year. Stay tuned!