'Energetic' and 'imaginative' best describe the 4-year-old. Often impatient and silly, they discover humour and spend a great deal of time being silly and telling you 'jokes.' A 4-year-old's language may range from silly words such as 'batty-watty' to profanity. Loud, boisterous laughter may accompany such language. Imagination suddenly becomes greater than life for the 4-year-old, who often confuses reality and 'make-believe.' Wild stories and exaggerations are common.
Continuing the trend from last year, I thought I'd let you into the developmental stages of the average 4-year old, as today this blog celebrates yet another birthday! Sometimes I feel a little bit like My Family - scorned by the critics who prefer meatierstuff but plodding along quite happily nonetheless, albeit with drastically declining standards...
Anyway, I had hoped to bring you something in the way of history - perhaps an e-mail happily announcing the blog to the world? - but I found nothing of interest at all back in April 2004, and very very interesting things from May 2004 which unfortunately have nothing to do with this blog. (No, I'm not saying anything more... other than that they prove someone a liar, and someone else deeply forgetful. All in the past, though )
Back in the present: essay title is tricky, and I'm really not sure how I'm going to answer it, but I have some more time yet before I have to decide. And the weather is still lovely!
So Sophie, Joe, Irfan, Oliver, Owen, Abi and I finally went punting! Check out some of the photos in the yes-this-is-the-first-one-in-ages photo gallery, or the full set on Facebook.
I'm trialling out a new feature for this blog's sidebar: the Feed Mix. The idea is to showcase the latest posts from the blogs of friends and family, in lieu of my ongoing attempt to get some kind of blog network together. There are a few kinks at the moment - most importantly, no Blogspot blogs! The feeds provided unfortunately get a big mangled and don't work properly at the moment, for reasons I do not fully understand. Sorry. However, enjoy the (however unfortunately limited) mix!
Edit - oh, I've finally figured it out! I will now include Blogspot feeds, but you want the link to work to your blog you're going to have to include a title with your posts I'm afraid
Originally, I had planned to fully redo this site over the summer. Start from scratch, completely, and rebuild. You were supposed to arrive one day to find it entirely black with black and white photos of models posing in little clothing, for example, or a fantastic Web 2.0 interface, or little virtual worlds delivered in high quality video graphics.
Then a couple of things happened. First, I found I was busy for large chunks of the summer doing silly things like earning money. Second, even if I could design those things, you'd probably see them rolling out in the year 2020 when everyone else in the entire world has already got little virtual worlds delivered in high quality video graphics. But most importantly, I actually quite liked the design already. Well, it worked for what I wanted to do, and the whole thing took a lot of work to put together in the first place, so why throw the baby out with the bathwater?
The result is what you see before you now. (If you don't, press Ctrl and F5 together to force refresh your browser and insist on downloading the new stylesheet.) Aside from some funky new colours and deft reorganisation of content, the main change for the user is the new emphasis on photos. It's no Flickr, but thanks to a little bit of software from Flash Nifties photographs which were previously hidden away in blog archives should gradually make it to the light of day again, thanks to revamped galleries and randomised slideshows on the homepage.
There's still more to do, and I wouldn't be surprised if the changes have broken some things, but I hope the new look proves satisfactory. And, naturally, it is utterly unrelated to the new RV design, as ever.
[Comments on this post now enabled, thanks Saoirse]
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but we needed something to...
