plasticbag.org

“Hello, my name is Shetland. I’d just like to say that I find Biomagnetic K9’s last comment extremely offensive, and I think that his ignorant asseretion that sheep aren’t able to make purchases as they please is both ill-informed and does nothing to avoid the kind of stereotypes that we sheep have had to put up with. I, personally, would love to get my hoofs of 48 billion dollars.” [Does America need to spend $48 billion more on defence?]

As Davo has said, if there’s one thing that’s going to stop me winning “Best Poof” at the Bloggies it’s this picture.

Frustration: Today’s mood is frustration – frustration caused by still being owed money from Time Out for work I did in October (and spending hours on e-mail and on the phone trying to get it), frustration caused by mounting bills, frustration caused by underestimating workloads, frustration caused by the worry of huge bandwidth bills and sheer panic about the absence of anything resembling full-time work a month down the line…

Is 100k enough? Blogger Pro now has a 100k per month limit on the posts that you can make. After that stage it costs an additional $3 per 100k to run. initially I was very comfortable with this amount, but having checked out my usage (there is a link on the bottom of the Blogger Pro front page), I have realised that for plasticbag.org alone I have only been under this usage limit once in the last year. If I were running multiple blogs, no doubt the figure would increase dramatically.

I may be an exception – so I don’t want to protest too loudly – but it occurs to me that if I am not, Ev’s statement that 100k is “substantially more than the vast majority of bloggers publish – even with multiple blogs – so you probably won’t have to worry about it” may be misguided. So I am going to ask people to post up their usage figures for the last year on their weblogs. It’s important – I think – that people understand what they are actually paying for.

Interested in Blogger Pro, but want to see what you’re getting for your money? Here are some screenshots for your delectation – as the interface appears on Mac OSX.

• Capture One
• Capture Two
• Capture Three
• Capture Four

I’ve got a bit of a crush on Paul Baker. But Ultrasparky has told me that he’s heavily attached. So unfair. It’s relatively hard to meet nice guys when you’re not prepared to leave your house, and I thought I’d found me a keeper here. [Addendum: passport photos through the ages]

A few months ago I was watching an episode of Changing Rooms with one of my flatmates, when she suddenly turned purple and started pointing at the television. A guy was on the show that she’d known at University. She stared awestruck, in mounting astonishment at what was happening on the screen. Months later, I stumble upon his side of the Changing Rooms story detailed in full. God bless the interhighweb.

Translate your [English language] site into English? Well why would you want to do that? Because it’s bloody funny [thanks to The Magic Morgan Translatatron].

Help debug plasticbag.org: Let’s face it, I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers. And now it’s your turn. The site looks great and seems to work on IE 5+ on Macs and PCs, but there are problems with Mozilla and all kinds of other browsers. So I’m starting a short term mailing list – which I expect no one to sign up for – to help advise me on fixing the site up and making it accessible to as many people as possible. Join Plastic People today – particularly if you are a regular reader and Mozilla user.

Sharp-eyed observers may notice the addition of one tiny syllable to this site overnight. Yes, I’ve gone professional on your ass. First impressions of the upgraded Blogger are essentially positive. The post-to-future option is extremely interesting – and could be usefully used to help run a schedule as well as for more creative purposes. Draft posts is another useful feature – of course you’ve always been able to post something without publishing it – but this legitimately provides the possibility of developing content slowly over days or weeks before exposing it to the world.

Other than that, there are various odds and ends that I haven’t had the opportunity to play with yet – from title tags (I have yet to figure out what happens if you display title in the template when you have two years of posts without title tags) to the file upload feature (designed elegantly to allow you to specify where you want your files to go – although it would be good if there was an obvious place in settings where you could specify the default location). More interesting is the stuff to come – the return of the wonderful Blogger Search, archiving by post or by day etc. etc.

In the meantime – you can talk at greater length about the launch over at Metafilter.