I've being re-laying the front page round a bit today, as you've probably noticed. 

I really wanted to make a feature of Workshop Notes as I think it is the most important part of the web site. To give it a hands-on look I've taken a photo of my open notebook and used it as a background. Over the top of that I've pasted the latest two entries from Workshop Notes. It is all automated, I just need to add a blog post and the web site takes care placing the picture and extract of the text in place on top of the notebook. It still needs a bit of tweaking but it is getting late so I think I'll call it an evening. Night all. 

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I've been working on the guts of the website for the past couple of days trying to get the main database into some sort of sensible structure. I'm at a point now where I could do with rebuilding the whole thing, I've added bits and pieces in the months that the site has been online. Now I could do with removing some of them but it's not obvious how to do so.

For the moment I'll be leaving the extra parts of the website inplace and just ignoring them. The main thing that I need to do is sort out the database structure for the shop. I'm trying to unify the various ways of accessing content from the site so that they are all just different views of the same database entity.

Wish me luck!

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There are PCs out there, at this very moment, trying to add spam to blogs and websites including this one. As regular visitors to the forum know I've been plagued with this problem several times over the years. I've lost entire forums and had the previous forum reduced to a state where nobody could join.

This website is based on the Drupal content management system, an opensource framework that lets you (fairly) easily add features and content to your web pages.

One of the add-on modules that I used is called Mollom, it works in collaboration with other Mollom users to keep spam at bay. The graph here shows the attempted plcement of spam on this website (orange) and legitimate comments and forum posts (green) Hopefully as time goes on the green will overtake the orange!

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I've had a day of emailing and tying up loose ends. The fun part of the day has been being able to sit and read through some interesting books and being able to call it research.

I've found out about selling T-shirts online from the Spreadshirt shop. How to upload designs (caffeine molecule T-shirt anyone) and how to sell them using their commision based system.

I've done some more research into Drupal theming, I'll make a start on that later, and I've been readling the book Free about the new economy of the digital age. Chris Anderson gets to the heart of the way that web based companies, like me, can attract customers and make money using the power of free. More on this soon.

I like my job.

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