yooo all! well hasn’t it been a while!? and why do i say “all”? because 23 of you are still subscribed - how strange!

anyhow, i just went on feedburner out of interest and saw that and was amused. i have nothing else to add. oh other than that the england rugby team sucks ass.

i’m off to uni this sunday (WOOOOP!) so anyone residing near nottingham - watch out!

does this mean pixelpruner is back? nada. i would quite like it to be. but we’ll see what uni holds. i miss blogging. hmmm…

Pixelpruner.com is quite a personal creation for me which is probably why i struggle to realise it’s flaws and let it go. The truth is that I don’t know enough about web development to talk about it day in, day out. And given that I know have a full time job (at least for the rest of the summer) designing and coding websites, this is really the last thing i want to spend my evenings talking about.

I’m not going to take pixelpruner.com down, but I am going to change it. Firstly I am going to seriously decrease posting frequency. Well, I’ve already done that! I have no doubt that my recent lack of dedication to this site has been the primary reason for it’s downfall. Those of you who do still read my blog: I really do appreciate it. I hope you will stick around, but expect to see a post every week or two, not every day or two. In the longer term my plan is to run a graphic design/architectural blog (what I should always have kept this as, given that they are my real interests…and the name “pixelpruner”) and a portfolio website for my stuffs. These will most likely be arranged across the pixelpruner.com and thomaspartridge.com domains but I’m not quite sure how this will work yet. I will, however, use this blog as a place to announce any major changes, on or offline.

There are a lot of things currently consuming my time which have led to my decision to chill out with the posting on here. I’m starting a few new websites: We Love Pentax and Fill The Trash to name two that at least partially exist at the moment! Although they’re both still under construction. If anyone thinks they could help with either I’m still looking for contributors to both.

I’m glad I did the whole entrepreneur blog thing for a while - it has introduced me to a lot of interesting people with whom I have much in common. Those few of you who I know are regulars around here but have never made contact should pop me an email. I’m talking like I’m terminating this blog, but I’m not. Just thought I’d fill you in on where I’m at! Oh and if anyone didn’t notice I added a subscribe by email form in the sidebar a while ago - might be useful given that I’m planning to update less often!

See y’all around.

I wasn’t Blair’s biggest fan, but as far as politicians go his strengths were undeniable. Well, except that flawed unquestioning relationship with a certain President, but he was a pretty good leader in many ways. Gordon Brown on the other hand… well I don’t doubt his intellect, at least academically. I happen to think he was pretty decent at running the nation’s finances. But a Prime Minister? A leader? No fricking way! Anyway, my voice means nothing because I’m stuck in a Labour stronghold constituency so what can ya do? I love democracy (read: strong tone of sarcasm)! Having said that at least he’s not quite as lazy tongued as the aforementioned President!

Enough of the politics! I’m back in the UK, and I’ve gotta say my trip hugely changed my impression of the US. My previous (significant) experience was of LA, which I hated. Sure there are still the big cars and big…. well everything else, but San Francisco was just awesome, Yosemite stunning, and the Grand Canyon… you can guess (i urinated a little). Anyway, I took way too many photos and so I’m currently reducing that number and when I’ve picked a few of the best I’ll pop them online for people to have a look at.

So what else is new? Well I’m (finally) blogging from a 17inch Macbook Pro ultimate; my dream machine! I’m telling you - it’s damn awesome. Don’t ever use a mac for an extended period if you can’t afford to buy one! Man, it’s nice. I had to boot up my desktop Dell today and going back to that interface made me cringe, quite literally. And now I’m getting over the whole “oh look I have a mac and it has loads of cool visual effects” thing, I actually think my work flow is gradually becoming much more efficient as I figure things out. It’s funny though: before I had a Mac I hated the smugness with which Apple fanboys tend to talk about their machines. Well now I understand it, because I have it too! Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it is all I’d say. Anyway I’ll bring you some pics of my actual set-up soon.

Other than that (sorry that this is one of those lame “update” posts) I’ve still to consider what will happen with this blog. I’m half tempted to drop it because it takes a surprising amount of time and apart from meeting a few cool people it hasn’t really brought me much. I think this is an issue for many bloggers, but let me know what you think. I’ll keep you all informed on what I’m thinking anyway. Oh, and thanks to the 20 something people who stayed subscribed to my RSS feed while i didn’t post for 3 weeks! Crazy people!

This is a guest post by John Lampard at disassociated.com. Thanks John! If anyone else wants to submit a guest post just email it to me (tom{A*T}pixelpruner.com) and as soon as I hit the internet cafe I’ll post it up, assuming it’s reasonably decent! Oh and don’t forget your name and URL! And if I like your post I’ll stick you on my blog roll when I get back. Sorry I can’t offer any more, holidays are expensive! *Hands over to John*…

Recently I read an interesting article at Blogging Tips about nofollow links, written by Kevin Muldoon.

In recent months some bloggers have been using a plug-in to remove the nofollow tag from the URLs of people who leave them comments.

To cut a long story short, these URLs become visible to Google, which in turn goes someway to boosting their Google pagerank. I then followed a link to a very detailed article on how a pagerank, or PR, is calculated. Some of the calculations used to determine a PR were enough to fry my very non mathematical brain, to say the least.

And a good job it did!

Despite having had a blog for five odd years, I’ve become a lot more interested in blogging since the beginning of the year. I spend whatever time I can at places like MyBlogLog which is a community of tens of thousands of bloggers. I am always on the lookout for interesting or unique blogs, and MyBlogLog, or MBL, makes a great starting point in my search.

However you do not have spend too much time at such blogging communities to see certain patterns repeating themselves across the “blogosphere”. Sometimes relentlessly. Certain topics are blogged about ceaselessly it seems, and one of them is pageranks!

In fact it seems there is no shortage of “advice” on how one can improve their pagerank, which if you believe the hype, will apparently lead you to a place where the streets are paved with gold!

For some the pagerank topic bordered on the obsessive. A few months ago I followed the writings of one fairly new blogger who was waiting for the then upcoming Google pagerank update to take place. According to his blog, rumours that the process was underway were sweeping the blogosphere, so he was checking for his revised pagerank quite regularly.

Every six hours regularly!

That’s unfortunate. He could have been spending that time producing some real, and interesting, content for his blog. That in turn might have boosted his overall readership, possibly generated some incoming links to his blog, which could then have helped up his pagerank.

My point? Forget about what your pagerank may or may not be, and even how the hell it is apparently worked out. Focus your energies into providing something for your readers to read or look at. After all, what good is a pagerank or whatever when you have no traffic?

Right, this post is being made in quite a rush so apologies for any errors. Because of the flooding and so on we are having to leave first thing in the morning for London in order to ensure that we get to the plane on time - three major motorways are shut and there is more flooding expected in the South East tomorrow. That means that I loose about 6 hours tomorrow, approximately four of which I was going to spend preparing posts and time stamping them so they appear while I’m away. Anyway, that aint gonna happen!

I know it sounds lame, but I’m disappointed that I’m sorta letting my readers (you) down… I really had good intentions for ensuring that this blog stayed updated. Anyway, there’s nothing I can do now. I will do my best to find an internet cafe over there and keep y’all updated!

Don’t miss me too much! Wahhoooo bring on San Francisco!!!

I might be wrong, but is sitting at my computer working on web developments projects until 4am in the morning not a little unhealthy? The result is that I get up late, feel drowsy for a few hours but eventually get a kick and start my productive day at around lunch time. But then I work for a while, get tired early (relative to the time I got up), then eat a lot and force myself to work until the early hours of the morning again. Like I am now. It’s only 2am at the moment, but there’s a lot of this post yet to write and I still need to write and timestamp a few posts for while I’m in America in the next couple of weeks.

So I think I can answer my question fairly quickly. I am addicted. If I don’t go near my computer I know I can maintain a “normal” sleeping pattern, getting up in the morning and going to bed before midnight. However, as soon as I am given the option of blogging, designing, coding or whatever my sleep pattern is disrupted. And it’s not very logical. It makes me feel tired and crappy because tomorrow morning I am going to be forced out of bed at 8am. But I’m still sat here writing. All logic says that I should just save this as a draft, get some sleep and finish it in the morning. But no, something overrides my brain.

Addiction or mere enthusiasm, there’s one major facet. The effect this is having on my productivity. Today I have begun a regime of closing MSN for a minimum of 5 hours a day. The reasoning is simple, obvious and adopted by many. It is a distraction - I could talk for England, as long as the competition was based exclusively on MSN. But this decision to try and improve my productivity really got me thinking about the whole sleep thing. Should I do more to force myself to go to bed and get up early? Is it just a teenage thing that I’ll get over once I’m twenty (some)? I know there are biphasic and polyphasic sleeping routines which I could try adopting, but should I just realise that my own mentality is the issue and have some self restraint?