Internet Tomfoolery

In the absence of birds, I had a lot of fun this weekend mucking about with internet. I am a dunce when it comes to internet, but happily internet realises this and has made doing things on it spectacularly easy. Nonetheless I feel a sense of achievement that what I wanted to get done I appear to have managed. Mostly this has to do with vanity. I wondered briefly if this is one of the seven deadly sins, but it appears not to be. Pride comes close, but is slightly different, so my only feelings now are those of virtue and humility.

So, the first thing is that for the princely sum of precisely three pounds and fifty-nine pence I have purchased the much sought-after domain name of wansteadbirder.com. A stroke of divine luck that it was still available....  It was remarkably easy, as was making Blogger understand about it. Like I said, the internet was designed with dumbasses like me in mind. The upshot of this is that the new URL for this blog is http://www.wansteadbirder.com/, and not the one ending blogspot.com that it used to be, though I understand that it will still work and bring you here. There. Whatever. Anyhow, if you are the linking sort, please refresh your links to the new address, as it will not make a blind bit of difference. Compelling, no?

Internet didn't let me have it all my own way though, and so as soon as I changed the URL Blogger dropped all my links, including all the photo ones that I have only recently painstakingly added. I have added as many as I can remember back on, and a few more besides, but if there is a glaring gap where once there was a link to your blogging efforts, please get in touch and remind me. Chancers welcome, you never know....

In yet another act of gratuitous pomposity, I have totally revamped http://www.justbirdphotos.com/, including migrating the whole shebang to a new hosting service called Zenfolio. I think it looks a lot better than the old one, and has the benefit of added functionality and a much lower cost. Win win, as they say. It also includes blog functionality, so all the geeky camera shit that I mostly manage to repress on here I can dribble out on there, safe in the knowledge that only fellow photography buffs will be browsing. In addition to the slide show on the homepage, each and every photo - and there are over 500 - now shows EXIF data. You can see what focal length I used, what aperture, ISO and shutter speed. See why I spare you all this normally? I've also branched out, so the Just Bird Photos name is now well and truly non-sensical, as you will now also find butterflies, landscapes, and even one of a frog. Just Frog Photos. Creating the site was childsplay, even if I do say so myself. The difficult bit had to do with repointing DNS somethings. I'm not sure what it means of course, but I had to go onto internet, and make sure that the domain name pointed to a series of numbers that looked like 123.45.678.910 instead of a series of numbers that looked like 098.765.43.21. Amazingly I managed it, and once the overnight hampster shift ended and new hampsters took over, the next time I typed in the address it took me to the new page and not the old one. And if it works for me, I expect it will work for you too. If it doesn't, please complain to Sir Tim Berners-Lee.