Good blogs, bad blogs

A perusal of my blogroll should be enough to convince you that my interests are fairly eclectic. I generally read blog feeds via Protopage, which provides a handy feed aggregator (and lots of other widgets) that I can access from anywhere I can find Web access.

There are many good blogs in my Protopage blog feed, but I keep them sorted in (roughly) order of interest. Fairly high up the list is Schneier on Security, whose material ranges from fairly abstruse IT stuff, to the latest half-baked ideas from the War on Terror™. In the space of 24 hours [I drafted this a couple of days ago], he’s posted not one, but three interesting articles (1, 2, 3).

At the bottom of my Protopage list are the irritating blogs that I just can’t quite bring myself to delete:

• NHS Blog Doctor;
• POLICE INSPECTOR BLOG;
• The Dilbert Blog.

Coming (soon?) to a blog near you

My recent post on the Olympus XA is intended to be the first in a series of posts on design classics that may be found in a fairly ordinary home (i.e. my home). This post serves a couple of purposes:

1. If you enjoyed the first post, I hope this will tempt you to come back looking for more.
2. I am often filled with enthusiasm for new projects but, before I get very far, something else comes along and distracts me. By publishing my future plans here, I put myself under some pressure to continue.

My current plans are for articles about the following.

Kenwood Chef

This one’s going to be tricky to photograph, with its stainless steel bowl.

Nikon FM2

I’ll save this until after I’ve done a non-camera piece.

Picquot Ware tea service

I thought this was going to be a “swords into ploughshares” story of exotic aircraft alloys developed in WWII, but preliminary research suggests the design is prewar.

This may be even more difficult to photograph than the Kenwood Chef – it’s not quite as glossy, but it reflects in all directions.

Mag-Lite

I may not have a lot to say about some of these. Oh well – all the more challenging to write!

Blogging tools

Well, I tried a couple of other tools before I got here, and my thoughts were:

• Blogger – generates invalid XHTML, and the domain I wanted was taken;
• infogami – uses its own markup language, which I can’t be bothered learning;
• WordPress – generates valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Now, if I have to use XHTML, I’d prefer Strict to Transitional. And in fact, given that most of the world is using a browser that can’t properly handle XHTML at all, I’d rather be using HTML 4.01 Strict. But WordPress looks the best of the bunch so far.

And I’ve just spent 3/4 of an hour trying out the various WordPress “Themes” (What’s wrong with “styles”, Guys?), and come back to the default – somebody has given this a lot of thought.