just so you know, i'm going to attempt to upgrade the blog today, so apologies if things go wrong. i'll let you know when things should be done. expert weird behaviour in the interim !

update: things are taking much longer than i expected !

remember interesting 2007 ? well, i've synced my live commentary to the photos

see here if the thing above doesn't work

thanks again to russell for letting me speak.

the little video with me prancing about is here

a few months ago i did a presentation at Russell Davies' excellent interesting 2007conference. i enjoyed it immensely. and it's now been posted on Russell's blog

if you weren't able to attend (or even if you did) you can now watch it here bigly

there's a few minutes missing in the middle due to a tape change, which is quite nice as it makes the original 'live' version more exclusive !

thanks again to Russell for letting me present

interesting2007 was excellent. my talk went ok i think. i enjoyed presenting and people seemed to laugh in the right places. here's a picture tony took of me in mid flow.

here's russell and his shadow

here's a chap playing the saw and his shadow

here's a picture i drew of tony without looking, thus proving that photography is probably my preferred medium

and here's the superior picture tony drew of me proving he's got better coordination than i have

at some point, i'll get my presentation podcasted up so you can see what i presented if you are interested. meanwhile there are other pictures from the conference on its flickr pool

yikes. today (saturday) i'm talking at Interesting 2007. i've got a 15-20mins slot and have 212 powerpoint slides. i do a lot of presentations at work, and often throw in a few funkypancake pictures for good measure. but this one is just about the photos. panic is brewing !

(picture of london is a bit tenuous and only relates to the fact i'll be in london on a saturday)

(thanks to Tony and the other chap off the recent portrait course for letting me post these photos)

and thanks to everyone else for all your fantastic encouragments !

As a special treat to you i've sifted through the funkypancake archives and chosen some choice photos from each month to add to my funkypancake flickr page. i'll attempt to update this each month with the best photos.

if you've got a flickr account i'd be delighted to add you as a contact - do the online thing (possibly here if you are logged in).

beaches are great for free temporary blog advertising

people spent ages reading it, trying to work out what it means (rather like the blog itself perhaps)

thanks to my lovely wife jane for project managing the urban scrawl

are you having any problems with reading funkypancake ? i've had a couple of emails over the last few days saying funkypancake was not displaying properly and/or not letting them leave comments.

if you are having trouble, or can think of a way of improving things, can you drop me an email pls:
blog@funkypancake.com and add the subject title 'broken blog' so it doesn't get lost in all the spam.

thank you kindly

the server turbulence is gradually subsiding. let me know if you spot any weirdies.

the server on which funkypancake lives is experiencing some badness at the moment so funkypancake might be up and down all day.

apologies and normal service will be resumed asap

this is my 10,000th blog post on funkypancake !

thank you so much in continuing to visit and leave comments and generally being great encouragers.

here's a video of me saying thank you for popping by (apologies for the state of my head)

funkypancake gets around 35,000 unique visitors each month, and i think about 20% of you are regulars. so thank you for stopping by - don't forget, funkypancake is updated every day.

And you can subscribe by email and the rss feed (see panel on the right)

have you used funkypancake photos for anything exciting ? mashups etc ? if so, can you let me know and i might post something to celebrate my 10,000th post next week.

Also, i've ben asked whether funkypancake can be archived at the British Library. If you've let me publish anything you'd rather not be archived, let me know by the beginning of November.

i'm about to attempt a server upgrade, so apologies if weirdness appears for a short while

i'm having a bit of blog spring clean because i got an email about something quite exciting. unfortunately it means i need to check about copyright on photos which people have sent me.

i've sent emails to everyone i can think of who has sent me pictures which i've put on the blog. If you've ever sent me a photo which i've used on the blog, and you didn't get the email, could you get in contact pls (details on the right).

thanks - dave (aka funkypancake)

the best thing about open plan offices is that you get to see people you don't expect who stop for a chat.

i made starbucks my temporary office/meeting room for 4 hours yesterday morning and who should pop in but Russell Davies from Russell Davies (funnily enough).

i've only ever managed to take bad pictures of Russell. i can only apologise.

good news - i managed to rebuild the boot sector on my dead hard-drive (like you do) and have managed to recover all my photo archives - (more than 44,000 photos or 62.7GB). I also saved my 'pending' blog photos including of snow i still haven't posted yet !

so, hoorah for TestDisk which is great for recovering dead hard drives or harddrives or hard-drives

we were obviously celebrating other things, but on Easter Sunday, Funkypancake was exactly three years old ! i've only just realised, but none of you mentioned it either did you. that probably shows how old we are in web years.

so, without realising it we celebrated it by being live on national TV. in fact the blog was running on automatic that week so i wasnt even around to notice i hadn't noticed the bloggy birthday, which is also somehow fitting.

anyway, i've updated funkypancake each day for the last 3 years with around 10 new photos for your enjoyment. , and funkypancake has had somewhere around 634,000 unique visitors, causing 35million hits and well over a million visits ! fancy that.

still no awards though. not to worry (although you could pop over and nominate me for the photobloggies - you need to enter http://www.funkypancake.com/blog in the relevant places)

thanks for all your comments and visiting - i very much appreciate of it.

i wonder what the next 3 years hold ? probably more photos i expect.

yesterday i had lunch with fellow blogger, and occasional commenter Russel of eggs bacon chips and beans. What a nice and interesting man.

of course he beat me to blogging about it as he uses real time whilst i blog in advance. so perhaps i was there first after all (i wasn't)

welcome if you've arrived via the metro

i was interviewed for the A Chair Fantastic which is a great chair related blog which i'm sure you all read anyway. the interview is here.

they seemed very nice for chair people !

here is regular commenter Rascle. The question is, will he comment on this ?

would you rather get the new funkypancake pictures delivered to your email box everyday ? If so, click on the image to take you to the sign up page

you need to be able to see pictures embedded in emails for it to work (and you need to sign up for the 'html' version)

it's free to sign sign up and easy to cancel if doesn't work for you. let me know how you get on !

here's a photo that kezia took of me

it's new year's eve today so i thought i'd take the opportunity to thank you for continuing to visit

in the last 12 months funkypancake:
walked over 4,100 kms, (40km-ish of which was during the london marathon [and you helped me raise 1,838.68 pounds]), was featured in dogs today magazine, had over 380 thousand unique visitors to the blog causing 545G of traffic over 2.8 million pages served, was featured on radio, had a site upgrade and redesign, averaged over 1700 visitors per day, went curling with olympic gold winners, visited norfolk, the lake district, austria and belgium, posted a pile of photos every day (there's now over 10,000 photos on funkypancake, and as many spelling mistakes), and lots of other stuff besides.

i hope you've enjoyed it as much as i have !

i missed the fact i'd done my 7,000th blog post on monday. ooops. hoorah belatedly and thanks for continuing to visit !

also, i passed the 4000 mile mark on my walking measurements last week.

i'm still thinking about what to do for my 400th birthday on the 1st December. i'll be in brussels on the day itself, but i'm sure we should do something blogwise.

i've upgraded the server today. if you spot any weirdness (of the undeliberate kind) please email me. i may try changing the layout a little too. so don't be scared !

yesterday was the big funkypancake radio interview at BBC Radio Berkshire.

i walked from the local train station and arrived over an hour later so wanderoursly aimed through a local copse. unfortunately i was got a bit lost and had to ask a passing dog-walker for advice on how to find the main road again !

here is Phil Kennedy with Suzanne Courtney (new name) through the window

i was in the studio from 2.30-4pm (the end of the show) and had a really good time. the banter was good and people seemed genuinely interested in the site (if only for Soose's wedding photo which are here)

Phil noticed that i had visitors in my web stats from a country called Niue and there followed a few minutes of Niue facts as can be seen on the screen here:

i had a whale of a time and was made to feel very welcome. so thanks to Phil and the team for inviting me on !

listen in !

funkypancake radio debut at 2.30pm UK time today (calculate local time here).

things are quite mad in funkypancake world at the moment.

in addition to this, the webstats show the site had nearly 43,000 unique visitors last month and around 2 million hits, with people coming from all around the world (August is shown as a part month so it's lower)

and by the end this week i'll have walked 3,500 miles since i started measuring on the 2nd February 2004.

Funkypancake along with 5 other blogs have been nominated as 'Great British Blogs' by the British Council in Japan !

I'm a regular reader of Annie Mole's (pictured here) from Going Underground but i didn't recognise any of the others listed. A quick whizz round them all revealed Hippy Shopper to be the 'website i'm most likely to keep an eye on' from the rest of the list.

here's the front cover for the magazine which is also available online here (in english)

also - i'm being interviewed on BBC Radio Berkshire on Thursday. Listen in from 2.30pm uk time here. This follows the celebrity wedding when i met soose's boss phil kennedy.

and finally, i found out today one of my photos is going to be printed in the Reading and Leeds Festival programme

i think it's probably this one - see more from within the crowd at Reading 2004 here

jolly times in funkypancake land. so thanks all you readers for the massive encouragement you give by leaving comments, sending emails and generally showing up in the webstats !

you probably wouldn't have guessed, but life in the funkypancake world has been quite busy

i had a week off work to play in the band at the holiday bible club

then we went up to Keswick in the Lake District for a week. i've got about 200 photos to post from that holiday (out of the 2000 i took). you can look forward to that !

somewhere along the way i had a birthday. i had two cakes - one was a candle shoved in 4 squares of chocolate, and the other was a candle shoved in a small ice-cream.

then we came back and went to the celebrity wedding

somewhere along the line esther got two guinea pigs

and jane got a new tent

and work became stupid busy because of this

so, that's why i might not have replied to your email. sorry about that.

my underground rabbit picture is on the back page of the London Line this week. get it while you can.

i'm not sure how i feel about being squashed against Belle Du Jour !

so what birthday greetings did you send the funkypancake blog (in the very short notice i gave you) ?

Rascale and unique eric, and a spider man burglar sent by clive and heather

princess carmen and maxx and brother edd

and cousin mike and catherine:

hey. Funkypancake is 2 tomorrow (saturday). last year i compiled a page of photos of readers so as to turn the blog inside out for a few moments.

i'd be delighted to do that again. the blog averages around 1,400 different visitors each day (over 22 thousand different visitors last month) so we should be able to get a few photos together !

so if you are a regular reader or an irregular reader or even just a random picture looker, then send me a photo of yourself and i'll compile a Readers' Faces with links back to your blog if you want.

or you could send me a mundane picture in the funkypancake style if you like.

Send your photos and suggestions to blog@funkypancake.com

can you believe it, but funkypancake is featured in a national magazine this month !

Dogs Today magazine has done a special feature on dog signs and funkypancake features quite heavily (thanks to Mark the journalist for the excellent write-up)

you must rush out and buy a copy. it's the May 205 issue you want, priced £3.50 (three and a half pond starling)

and there's a rather nice quote i shall treasure:

"[funkypancake] has a lust and zeal for life and all its quirks that those with far fewer worries in the world could be quite jealous of. From the mundane to the mad, the interesting to the absurd, [he] captures moments and objects that few of us ever notice ... and perhaps don't need to."

this entry deliberately left blank.

i'm not sure what you think about such things (i'm not sure what i think about such things either), but anyway, you might have noticed that the 2005 bloggies have been launched:

You have until 10th January 2005 to get your nominations in (hint hint).

I've not got a clue which categories Funkypancake would fit, but i guess photography, british blog and humorous ? Dunno. Up to you. but only nominate if you think Funkypancake is worth voting for !

thanks

comment spam is getting a bit out of hand and i think it's artificially bumping up the visitor stats.

so i've changed the system a bit. so drop me an email if you have trouble commenting.

i've implemented some of the stuff described here:

did you notice the hit counter this month ? We've had over 10,000 different visitors which is very exciting.

and a few days ago we had our 3,000th comment.

so that's all very exciting isn't !

and here is the 3,000th photo i've taken with my new camera which i got on the 13th August 2004. I took it a couple of days ago so that's about 75 shots a day.

it's a lady with a fancy coat pushing a hospital wheel chair containing her handbag down the street.

i'm going to do some upgrading of the blog this evening, so if you can't see this or everything goes weird, don't panic.

if it's still weird by tomorrow then you can panic.

update: well, that was scarey. i got halfway through updating and it all fell apart.

the support from movabletype was fantastic though and here we are. comments still need working on so sorry if there's strangeness.

if you find anything else (unintentionally) weird, let me know

whenever i've met other bloggers they've always turned out to be fantastically nice people. regular commenter maxx from maxblog was in london today so we met up for a glass of fizzy pop with konstantin from london leben.

both are german but were happy to talk english whilst i was there. i find stuff like that really humbling and completely helpful.

here they are. konstantin on the left and maxx on the right. i can assure you they looked normal in real life !

check out jewel's new blog of photos, including some very nice bollards.

she's only just got going, but is off to a great start. jewel wrote me a nice email and said she was inspired by this site which was very nice !

and it's in the same spirit as this blog so perhaps it's the first funkypancake blog child ?

oooh, this is the 3000th funkypancake post. that's an average of 'quite a few' a day since 16 April 2003 so that's 6 and a bit posts per day. fancy that fact fans.

the last few days have been a bit bonkers stats wise !

937 unique visitors on wednesday. it must have been the power of the blog meetup.

i went with grahame (of dragoon) to a london bloggers meet this evening. here is grahame with the world famous annie mole (of going underground)

lots of the people were as you'd expect them to be - proud techno-nerds. but there were lots of jolly people there too. like these two:

i was completely un-indated with photos for the readers faces celebratory annual blog gallery exhibition.

if you ever comment on the blog or ever pop by for a read then send me a photo and i'll add you. it's nice to see who we all are !

maxx and sarah (and thomas):

tony and brother edd:

cheryl and michelle:

hoorah. one year of blogging completed today. people i've mentioned this to have said:

"only one year ? it feels like longer".

i'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.

the funkypancake blog turns one year old on the 16th April 2004 (this friday). so what shall we do to celebrate ? it's up to you.

if you don't come up with anything decent i'll submit you to some of my old songs (like the 6th month anniversary). and then you won't be happy.

or should we have a junior pop idol contest ? or a lost glove-a-thon ? or a random-misinterpreted-street-sign.

or should i invest in a spellchucker and/or thessorious ? or more dressing up ?

READERS' FACES

if you are a regular reader or an irregular reader or even just a random picture looker, then send me a photo of yourself and i'll compile a Readers' Faces with links back to your blog if you want (a bit like the commenters' links page)

Send your photos and suggestions to blog@funkypancake.com

i'm mentioned in passing in the Observer newspaper today:

how exciting ! (thanks to dan for finding this)

this post deliberately left blank.

i don't know it they'll work very well, but i thought i'd have a go. so you now have some lovely polls to fill in on the right. we can all learn about each other in aggregate. the polls should rotate randomly. possibly.

let me know if you have a good idea for a question (and a few answers) or have any problems.

it's a while since i set myself an interesting challenge so i thought i may have a black and white photo day tomorrow. i'll set it on my camera rather than remove the colours on my computer.

alternatively i could use the pyschedlic setting which i acidentally actioned for this shot.

what's it to be ? black and white or psychedlic ?

it's pancake day today.

esther mixed whilst kezzie watched

jane enjoyed tossing them (note the psychedelic camera work):

and everyone enjoyed eating them (with chocolate sauce, lemon and sugar)

If you see the autoblogging sign it means i've set the site up to keep you amused automatically. it usually means i'm not able to access my computer for some reason - perhaps travelling with work or going some place where i don't know if they have internet connectivity.

or maybe i just want some time off.

anyroad, you will be funished with your usually daily funky goodness.

but approving comments might take slightly longer than usual.

enjoy the machine ...

i've noticed my google page rank has dropped from the heady highs of 7/10 to 4/10. have the quality control people moved in ?

i'm still number one for a google search for 'junior pop idol' which is good. and still the only result if you do a search for "macaroon macaroon macaroon"

A massive thank you to Cheryl of BatonNOiR for my lovely pancakes and help with my colour scheme.

I don't know if she cooked them especially (or whether she had a stock picture of pancakes), but they look good. They have a mysteriously purple color and bits of banana on top which makes them very funky.

i'm even happy to use the lazy American spelling of color on this occasion. but ONLY this occasion !

One of my daily blog reads is Texas T-bone. He's recently published a cook book made up of contributed recipes. it's even got one of my recipes in there !

check out his dinner project page for more info, or download the pdf (145KB) here (right click and save might be safer than just clicking).

just trying out some new colour scheme. let me know if you see anything weird.

(i've decided to change this new scheme as it's not very clear ! but might not be until tomorrow until i get time)

not sure if anyone noticed but the server went poorly again last night. i've now implemented a little message thing which i'll put up if it happens again.

it means i can't add any new posts and no comments will be displayed during this time ! hopefully it won't happen that often. if it does you'll see this:

those who blog will know of the scurge of blog comment spam. the idea that someone posts a comment with their webaddress name pointing to their website which is usually selling some enhancing or prolonging or age reducing miracle.

i think the e-landlord might be doing some work on the server at the moment, so apologies for any temporary blog disruption which may have or continue to occur. how i missed it when it was gone.

it's just like the wispa bar, but i suspect they may be gone for good.

on the subject of old sweets, everyone must have seen this by now. Relive the sweets which made your teeth what they are today.

i think there may be something wrong with the server this evening.

apologies for any temporary lack of viewing

did you know there is a secret petition thing going on ?

check out this previous entry.

It was this that lead me to disable the display of email addresses on comments as i didn't think it a great idea for me to be publishing young girls' email addresses.

i'm going to write to the TV company and see what i can find out what they plan to do for the under 16s ...

the poor old weather pixie has been feeling under the weather. So i've moved her to her own entry and people can go searching for her if they want.

If you can't see anything exciting above then she's simply too busy to appear.

oh well. it's always raining in england anyway.

i went out with grahame from dragoon last night. until recently his blog was sublet under the funkypancake domain, but now he has his own house to live in.

we wandered the streets of london and relieved some of our various blog postings. most(ly) fun.

this photo is sideways, but i think it works better that way:

things are getting big round here, especially the cateogry areas. i may install this and see what happens. but not tonight ...

MT Extensions: MTPaginate 1.2.2

yeah - the blog is 6 months old today !

here are some celebratory postings:

wigs
wigmore
music

here is a bit of excitement for us as the blog approached it's 6th month birthday.

we have a google pagerank of 5/10 which i think is probably quite impressive. how we love technology when it brings us nice surprises.

well, i had some trouble with missing field text on comments. it was an IE6 parsing error. however, a fantatic chap from uglypeoplesuck.com gave me some instructions on how to solve the problem. (the site is not available at the moment so i can't vet advise you on the content). Many thanks Rob !

finger trouble by the techies running the site meant we lost all of funkypancake a few hours ago.

i'm hoping i can rebuild most of it, but i'm concerned i haven't got archives of all the photos. i was trying to back up the blog this afternoon and left my work machine downloading the files this evening. i've no idea if it had finished or not. i guess i'll find out on monday ...

so what we (nearly) had here was a low bandwidth, photo free blog :-(

update: i've managed to piece most of it together from my own backups and my Internet Explorer Cache. I'm still missing a few photos though. if you visited the site yesterday (friday) and saw my st paul photos can you drop me an email as the 'missing' photos might be on your computer !

me mending the site at 2.48am Saturday morning. i finally went to bed at 3.15 and got up at 7.45am to look after the kids whilst jane went shopping.

update 2: thanks to Tony, we now are back to a complete blog. hoorah.

also, the funkypancake blog is 6 months old next thursday (assuming it survives the journey). we should of course celebrate this fact in some appropriate way. but how ? suggestions please.

also, funkypancake will be down for part of tomorrow as the server it lives on is being physically moved to a different location. hopefully they'll wrap it up nicely in some fluffy bubble wrap and treat it "real good".

apologies for the short out(r)age. was due to bad server stuff. sorted now. did it remind you of electricity rationing in the 1970s ? no, me neither.

you probably never go there, but i just updated the funkypancake front page with a logo and longer wait before it bounces you to the blog.

here it is for those who can't be bothered to click the link above (or can't see the new page because the old one is stuck in their cache)

i had some really nice photos for you today. but i accidentally deleted them. there was a really good one of a man attempting to push a building down the street. here is a very small version:

it was recovered by photorecovery. it's $40 to register (then you can recover the full sized photos) It's not worth it for me for the two photos I want. definately worth considering if i start doing this trick more often though !

i've taken 7300 photos with my camera and this is the first time i've accidentally deleted any :-(

one day i may get round to making this blog look a bit prettier. when i do i'll use the tools referred to here

a[pologies for anyone trying to post comments to the blog today or last night. server trouble meant your attempts would have failed. we all back and doing now though.

Yoz Grahame's Cheerleader: Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog

my blogging may be restricted next week as i'm not in my office.

therefore, for one week only, here is a blog for work related activities:

The Girls From The Office

Webmonkey | Reference: Color Codes

i'm potentially unable to blog for a few days next week, so i've been asked to consider allowing a couple of guest bloggers.

i'm undecided on this at the moment - there's a certain randomness in the plan which i like. but an obvious lack of editorial control (and potential for destruction).

thoughts (and volunteers) welcome.

wow. the 'n' was the n'th entry which was entry number 1000 (across all the blogs including deleted entries). makes you proud doesn't it. probably. not.

i've set up a blogstop game. My version is heavily based on the original blogstop here.

As with all games there are some rules.

Kaleidoscope

i was mentioned on radio6 this evening for bumping in to famous people. unfortunately i was listening via the internet and my machine crashed just as he said "we've also got an email from funkypancake who sent in a list of things and web addresses by ..." machine froze. so i don't know if this site was mentioned or not. and they don't archive that particular show so i can't listen back to it.

that's modern technology for you. you can't trust it. and you mustn't either.

i haven't been able to update the blog because there is some DNS trouble with my ntlworld connection meaning i can't see the site.

lots of photos to put on the blog sometime today and another spotted celebrity picture ...

update: midday Monday. trouble still remains. ntl not bothered. ho hum :-(

what if you can't find this site ? well, here is a google links to bring you back to the blog.

"macaroon macaroon macaroon"

It's one thing being the top of a Google list. it's quite another to be the ONLY link !

wow. i missed the fact that i did my 750th post yesterday.

I've now set up the blog so it automatically updates the following sites when i add a new entry:

• movable type


• blo.gs


• weblogs.com
  

just updated the blog to version 2.64. Seems to have gone ok.

I also did some SQL stuff to force allow-comments on all my old entries and this should be the default for all new entries.

so now the blog can be very interactive and we can all be happy.