Blogger appears to be playing up a bit (I can't post any comments, for instance)—until it's fixed, service might be (even more) patchy.

UPDATE: working again now.

Technical hitch

At some point this morning, The Kitchen seemed to go off the air. The issue seems to be around the fact that Blogger does not like hosting blogs on "naked domains" and requires, instead, that you host on a subdomain: that is to say, http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk is acceptable, but http://devilskitchen.me.uk is not (the www. bit is the sub-domain).

Obviously, when I originally set up my domain a few years ago, Blogger did not make this distinction: now, it seems, the policy has changed and thus the site went down.

This has pissed me off slightly—I am so frantically busy at present that I really did not need to be fucking about with this kind of thing—and I am going to re-examine WordPress as a possible alternative.

However, I hate writing templates for WP and I do like the simplicity of Blogger. Plus, of course, not only is Blogger free to use but also it isn't putting any strain on my server. In other words, I wouldn't expect a migration any time soon.

Anyway, we are (mostly) back now. It will take a little while for the domain changes to propagate throughout the web but, once they have, all previous links should still work.

In the meantime, work is taking me to Wales and back for most of tomorrow so blogging will be light.

Thanks for your patience—and all of the emails expressing concern.

Regards,

DK

Testing out Blogger's email publishing...

... so that I can blog from Birmingham on Monday. I wonder if it works: this is merely a test.

However, if I have set it up right, I should be able to send updates from my iPhone, which would be excellent (and mean that I don't have to search for some expensive Wi-Fi...

UPDATE: yes, it does work, although formatting might look a little odd.

UPDATE 2: just as a swift reminder, I shall be taking part in a panel debate entitled "Freedom and the internet", with Dizzy, Guido and Mad Nad. Oh, and Iain Dale is chairing it: when I asked him if he was looking forward to it, his response was admirably brief.

"Gulp."

It should be fun and, if you'd like to attend, you do not need a Conference pass.

And if my drinking schedule with Guido after The Plan launch is anything to go by, the day should involve a lot of booze...

Just to let you all know, Anonymous comments have been switched on again. So, fire away (until the next time)...

Just to warn you...

An indication of things to come...?

Blogger are once more planning a major upgrade to their service, details of which are on the Blogger in Draft blog. Some of these—such as the inbuilt Webmaster Tools, the post ratings and, most especially, the Blog Export and Backup Tools—look to be really quite useful and I am going to start playing around with them.

However—and here's the rub—many of these tools require you to be using the (relatively) new Blogger Layouts system that appeared in Blogger Version 2.0. Your humble Devil is still using a "Classic" template—that is to say, it is still pure CSS and XML driven and doesn't use Blogger's widgets and their nasty, incomprehensible (to me) code. That is why, for instance, you never see polls on The Kitchen.

This humble little template has served me well over the last... what?... year and a half or so, but now it is time to take the plunge and start the work that will (eventually) see The Kitchen moving to the new Blogger templating system.

It's a reasonable time to start doing so. Much as I like this template, I have been feeling for a while that it was time for a bit of an aesthetic change. And, despite the massive clear-out that occurred when I last shifted templates, things have started to become slightly cluttered again. For instance, the blogrolls (still using Blogrolling and not the Blogger widget, of course) haven't been trimmed since I started writing, over three and a half years ago, and are full of duplications, dead blogs and, quite simply, too many damn links to be of any use.

I haven't decided what the new blog will look like as yet, but as practice for my real life work, I shall be concentrating, to a degree, on web accessibility. That means that the structure is likely to be at least partially fluid (allowing resizing of the content, probably to a max-width of 980px) and with better contrast.

But with one proviso...

I shall be dropping anything but the most cursory support for Internet Explorer 6 (Apple's MobileMe service has entirely dropped support for that browser) which was always fairly shit and now, seven years after release, is pretty obsolete and, frankly, an utter pain in the arse to design for. My intention is that you will be able to read the posts in IE6, but little more.

IE7 will be basically supported (I am learning a lot on that front and now have facilities to test it) and—assuming (perhaps vainly) that it won't bugger things up too much—I shall also support the forthcoming IE8. It is, however, extremely unlikely that IE8 will support all of the design bells and whistles that I intend to add—the border-radius and box-shadow properties, for instance (and IE7 certainly doesn't)—but we shall have to see...

I shall, of course, support all of the standards-compliant browsers; however, the site will be optimised for Safari (and especially Webkit, whose CSS engine is by far the most advanced) and for the forthcoming Firefox 3.1 (currently in alpha, codenamed Minefield). Earlier versions of Safari and Firefox will be supported and the site will look fine, but you will get the best experience (in terms of design) with Webkit primarily and about 90% of it with Firefox 3.1 (according to what I know of the latter's capabilities at time of writing). I shall also be adding optimisation for mobile and handheld devices.

Given how unbelievably busy I am at work at the moment (I am pretty much fully stacked for at least the next two months), it is unlikely that these changes will happen for a while yet. However, I thought that I'd give my readers the opportunity to leave any ideas that they might have, or design features that they would like to see.

The little Devil who appears at the top of the page will, of course, remain as he is...

I have switched back to allowing Anonymous comments.

If the spam keeps coming in again, then I may have to switch it off yet again but I want to continue to make it as easy for people to comment as possible...

Comment problems?

Is anyone else having problems posting a comment?

I am (rather unwisely, probably) attempting to reply to an Anonymous troll who wants to bring back illegal backstreet abortions, but Blogger isn't letting me post a comment at all.

Ok, I'm going to put my reply to Anonymous on the Nad: still mad thread here because, for some reason, it's still not allowing me to post a reply on the actual post. Which is really weird.

So, after that painfully tedious analysis of Nadine Dorries' writing...

You don't actually have to read it, you know. I'd be more than happy for you to never to come here again. Really.

But I am looking forward to you publishing your URL so that we can all read your deathless prose.

... you show off your scientific credentials with the following pronouncement: "a foetus is not a human being".

Quite right. Even a born baby does not have a fully formed nervous system.

When does a foetus become a human? It's a question that bugs people, but I would tend towards the "when it's viable outside the womb" argument.

"And if you say that a foetus is equivalent to a gamete, I'll believe that when you give birth from your testicles."

That might be one of the stupidest comments that I've ever had on this site, and I've had some real crackers. Well done.

Tell me, do you believe that it is a human being at the moment of conception? Or when it's a four-cell blastocyst? Or when it's a zygote? Or... or... when?

Tell me, should every miscarriage be followed by a funeral, in your eyes? Or would you imprison women who drink and smoke whilst pregnant, perhaps?

"I've often asked on this Web site how libertarians can justify, according to their own theory, limiting their freedom when it comes to violence against others."

Yes, and I've given you answers that you have utterly ignored. Basically, you can do what you like as long as you do not harm another person: I can't see why that is so difficult to grasp.

"This posting shows that apparently they don't."

Yawn. I'll go over this once again, nice and clearly, so that your tiny brain can grasp it: I didn't actually, in the post, express my views on abortion. I pointed out that Dorries was lying.

In the comments, I expressed the view that I think that the current term limits are about right.

As I have said to you before, I am a consequentialist, not a rights libertarian. As such, I am prepared to allow a certain level of taxation to support some services, which is a limited support for coercion in the interests of practicality; in the same way, I am prepared to allow coercion against a potential human in the interests of practicality.

You would prefer to return, I take it, to the days of backstreet illegal abortions?

DK

Not sure why it won't let me post on that one thread; it's really odd.

Bizarre coincidences

When I got home tonight, I was going to write about how much cyclists irritate the shit out of me. But, having scanned the blogs whilst Blogger was down (briefly, it seems), it has become obvious that I don't need to, because Mike Rouse has done it for me.

With cars there is a respect for the rules taught at the early phases of learning to drive. Those rules are enforced by the use of signage and the sheer fact that not following the rules can kill people quite easily. Most drivers recognise the importance of these rules and their responsibilities. Cyclists, however, do not - or at least so it seems to me and others. Some disagree, of course.

They ride through red lights, even at pedestrian crossings, they attempt to under-take slow moving traffic and often occupy the driver’s blindspot. Then there’s those that use the pavement as a shortcut, the ones that think they’re invincible by cutting in front of traffic, and utlimately there’s those that think they are part of some Cyclist Army.

The Cyclist Army is the worst. They kick vehicles that get in their way, hurl abuse at motorists and pedestrians and generally think that the streets of Britain should be a cyclist utopia.

There's not an awful lot that I can add to that diatribe, except to point out the following because, apparently, cyclists simply haven't got the fucking message:

• You are not allowed to cycle on the pavement.


• If you cycle on the road, you must obey the laws of the road.


• This includes being equipped with lights.

Mike thinks that one should license cyclists. Me, I rather favour stringing cheese-wire across the road and laughing in childish delight as another cyclist's head, neatly detached from its body, goes bouncing down the road.

UPDATE: in reply to some of the comments—mainly from cyclists justifying themselves—I would like to add the following points:

• Yes, yes, I am sure that the majority of cyclists are wonderful people. I am specifically targeting those who do not obey the law. (There is nothing un-Libertarian about that, Newmania. As I have explained to you before, libertarian is not the same as libertine.)


• Yes, there are many car drivers who are utter pricks too. However, cyclists (especially in London) tend to adopt a particularly irritating holier-than-thou attitude which is ripe for pricking.


• Although I have a full and (almost unbelievably) clean driving license, I do not (and have not ever) owned a car and carry no torch for car drivers.


• I am, however, a pedestrian and object to nearly being knocked over by cyclists. Red lights apply to cyclists too: they aren't an optional fucking extra and I shouldn't have to wait until that cyclist has definitely stopped in order to know that they are going to do so (all caveats about people running red lights in cars, etc. applying, of course).


• Further, if cyclists continually run red light into streams of traffic (as I have seen them do), they can't honestly be surprised if, one day, they get hit by a fucking car. Those actions don't affect me particularly, it's just that demonstrable stupidity irritates me.


• Having respect for everyone on the road—and being bloody cautious—would be a good thing (and that applies to drivers, motorcyclists, cyclists and pedestrians).

As for the danger of bodily fluids caused by the decapitated cyclists, perhaps we could try a high-intensity laser which would cauterise the wound on contact...?

OFF-TOPIC: is anyone else finding that Blogger is really playing up at present?

Responding to comments may take more time than usual as Blogger seems to have decided, at some point yesterday and for reasons unknown, that it is not going to email them to me anymore.

Anyone else having the same problem?

Dear Blogger Team,

What the fuck have you done to the format of my Comment Notification emails? They used to be clean and legible, now they look like particularly inept spam. What the fuck are you playing at?

Regards, DK

UPDATE: And why the cocking fuck are half of the back end instructions in German, or something? Oh well, you pay peanuts...

Admin at The Kitchen

Just to let you all know, I shall be doing a bit of a revamp of the blog over the next couple of weeks. The three-column template was originally implemented to allow me to put Adsense in the "sweet spot" but, since they will no longer serve to me and the others bring in nothing significant, they may as well be excised.

All round, I shall be going for a sleeker and, hopefully, more swiftly loading template (this one has become very bloated). I shall also be trimming my blogrolls. If anyone else has any suggestions for what they'd like to see on here, please let me know, Anonoymously if you want, in the Blogger Comments (the Haloscan ones will be leaving. Finally).

UPDATE: could I also get your views on the level of swearing? Is it amusing? Is it tiresome and off-putting? I ask because, when I started this blog, I was seriously angry: hence the swearing. I have calmed down a bit—or, rather, I've become more grimly focused—over the last few years (although certain things still piss me off); indeed, you may have realised that the amount of Anglo-Saxon has dropped. Views on this?

Should I try not to swear at all, or just simply go with what feels right for any one piece? (I will probably go with that last anyway, as I always have; still, it's good to get some views).

As you might have noticed, I have been doing some admin and I have finally been able to switch to the new version of Blogger. One of the things that this allows me to do is to use one of the many domain names that I have to point my blog properly.

You can now find The Kitchen at http://devilskitchen.me.uk and don't worry about any old links: they will all still work. And if you want to try this yourself, there are instructions here.