wee doors banging

Greg Wood, a web designer from Nottingham in the UK, has posted a list of his top 5 Amiga games and why he likes them. “So what?”, you may ask. It’s hardly the choice of games, rather it’s the unique take Greg has taken on the design that makes his post remarkable.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the launch of Public Records Office of Northern Ireland’s new searchable archive of Belfast Street Directories. I’ve now uploaded some coverage of the launch event, originally broadcast on UTV on 23rd September 2009.

PRONI, the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, have launched a searchable archive of Belfast Street Directories dating back as far as 1819.

Street Directories are books containing a listing of the names, addresses and occupations of the inhabitants of Belfast as well as lists of commercial establishments operating in the city, and so are a vital resource for historical and genealogical researchers. Having them easily searchable online is a big step forward.

If, like me, you like your old computers, you could do an awful lot worse than pay a visit to Andy’s Retro Computers, a site of “vintage computers and other stuff”.

The eponymous Andy describes himself as a “collector of vintage computers”. He shares his home with an impressive collection of these old-time machines, one that’s growing all the time. Some are brands you’ll know well, but others you may not be so familiar with.

Schmap is a leading publisher of digital travel guides for 200 destinations throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.Recently, I was pleased to be informed that a random snap I took of Belfast City Hall grounds with my mobile phone had been included in the 8th edition of the Schmap Belfast Guide in the “Belfast City Centre and Laganside Walk” section.

For a period of two or three weeks at the start of July 2009 all my sites, including this one, were unavailable. The physical node that hosts the VPS that hosts the sites was wiped out in a mass hack attack perpetrated against the operators, VAServ. All VPS data on the node was destroyed, which unfortunately included my personal email, web content, source code repositories and so on.

Here’s a little verse to recite for all those struggling to develop websites to work Microsoft’s latest and “greatest” web browser, Internet Explorer 8.

Our Browser, Which art after IE7…

There has been much media and online 2.0 hysteria about the recent outbreak of the dangerous H1N1 strain of Swine Influenza, a.k.a. “Mexican Swine Flu”. It’s important though that we all sty calm. H1N1 swine ‘flu is still just a snoutbreak, a minor hamergency the health services can contain for now.

Googling myself is something I do from time to time and, from time to time, it turns up a surprise. This time, the surprise turned up was that one of the search results was a link to a Times Online article that mentions my earlier post, “25 Random Things About Me”.

If you’ve come here expecting girv dot net, DON’T PANIC! After running the Wee Doors Banging blog on girv dot net for around a year, I found that I was writing articles covering three main topics: technical, cycling and “everything else”. Taking stock, I felt that these three subjects didn’t belong under one roof, so I’ve recently carried out a bit of reorganisation and split the original blog out into two standalone sites under their own domains. I now maintain four “personal” sites covering different topics…