More excuses & some pagination

It's been eighteen months since my last blog post. The simple reason for this is that I never finished my old blog engine to permit me to add anything new. I have on numerous occasions been tempted to install something like Wordpress, grab a half-decent theme, tweak it a bit and be done with it but I'm a software developer. The least I should do is code my own blog engine. In programming parlance we call it 'eating your own dog-food'. In other words, use your own code.

Recently lots of folk have asked for my website address, more than ever before. I couldn't put it off any longer, so here it is. It may look simple but it has been carefully designed. I favour the utilitarian so this site has been designed primarily to be readable and navigable. I have eschewed such things as tag-clouds, user accounts, search tools and side-bars. I may add RSS though I suspect demand for this is waning. I may also add buttons for Digg, Reddit, Twitter etc. though I do not see inclusion in so-called social news websites.

Lastly I wanted to briefly mention pagination. I read a lot of blogs for both work and pleasure and two things persistently bug me. Firstly I find long lists of page numbers utterly pointless. If I'm going through search results, online stores or looking at image galleries then it certainly has its place. But on a blog how could I possibly know what I'm going to find on page n that I would ever need to jump there from another page. And if that were the case, the URI structure should allow me to jump straight to it.

Secondly the common use of the terms 'next' and 'previous' to move through pages. If I come in to a site on the front page, then only one of these will be available, though either would make some sense. Such ambiguity has little impact. However, if I follow a link and appear on a site deep in to the pages I'm left flummoxed! Does next mean the page is earlier, or newer? Does previous refer to older posts or a lower page number (and hence newer posts). It makes no sense to me. So on this site you will see only 'newer' and 'older' and the URI structure has been designed to allow you to jump to any page you see fit.