Complete Tosh.com

The last blog theme lasted less than a month, I realise. But it just wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do. I was after less clutter, not more. I didn’t take enough photographs to sling them across the top of the home page. And all those blue links were giving me a headache.

The idea was to layer in clutter later, with fancy contextual whatnots that left you all aghast at the sheer ingenuity of my spending whole evenings combining easily installed WordPress widgets with yet more easily installed WordPress plugins.

As Bobbie Johnson said to me yesterday – and I could sense his awe at my masterplan, even through the thick disguise of his actual words – “Haven’t you got better things to do with your time?”

The answer, my friends, is right here. Enjoy.

Things are going quiet around here for the next few weeks… on the blog’s return, should I get my head around the delights of WordPress and the complexities of CSS and DNS, things should look a little different.

One might argue that, save for the occasional flailing student stumbling through, it’s pretty bloody quiet here anyway of late. You’d have a point – things have been very busy at the mill. More of that later, too.

In the meantime, comments set to premoderate, usual conditions apply. And there seems little option but to leave you with this, just in from Tokyo:

[via William  M. Hartnett]

The subscriber to my RSS feed will have noted they’re now getting the full, non-lite, verbose version of my posts here. This represents a change in policy, if not a change in heart about RSS’s limitations.

Reasons? I stated my problems with full text RSS feeds a couple of years ago. But at least some of my concerns are now addressable; Feedburner lets me count subscriptions for ego purposes, and I don’t make any money from the site anyway, so driving people through to the HTML page matters less. Moreover, some crazy-eyed optimists insist that my pageviews will actually go up through offering a full text feed.

I’ve still got concerns over interaction; the comments left on this blog are the stuff I enjoy most, the greatest reward for writing it, and I’d be sad to do anything to discourage those. So let’s see. To give the full feed a head start, I’m doing this now, when the site’s riding high (in its own, very small, way) thanks to some big link love over the last week or so (blogging about blogging, or blogging about Technorati, remain profitable pursuits for the pageview-hungry blogger, I can confirm).

I’ll continue my sporadic, drip… drought… drip approach to blogging over the next few weeks, then perform some fiendish MBA-boy statistical analysis (once I dig out my stats textbook again) and we’ll find out if this theory carries.

Mrs Tosh, making a rare midweek appearance at home, is in uncompromising mood during the televised Italy vs Scotland match. “Oooh, is that the Hearts goalie?” she asks. Missing my disapproving mumble, she presses on.

“I never knew he was Scottish – he doesn’t look it. Who’d have thought he was Scottish! With those muscles… so tall!”

“As opposed to what?” I ask.

“When I saw him during that Hearts match I assumed he was from the Eastern block. Russian, maybe. Yes, like the Russian boxer in Rocky.”

She’s referring to the time she saw Craig Gordon swapping shirts at the end of a Hearts/Rangers match. Between bites of pizza (hey – we are playing Italy) I’m taking this as badly as you might expect.

Undaunted, Mrs Tosh starts Googling for images of “topless Craig Gordon“. She fails to find the snap of him in the skin-tight Nike vest she was hoping for. But she does turn up this story about a man so drunk he ate the crotch of his own underwear in the belief it would help him pass a breathalyser test.

1. £15m of good news for the Guardian, following on from more of it earlier in the week (blogged at length by Jeff Jarvis, who I’ve enjoyed having a few good chats with while he’s been around this week. His enthusiasm is infectious).

2. CiF saves a cat – you wouldn’t see that kind of drama at the poor old Telegraph.

3. Note to the person from a News International IP address Googling for guardian, podcast, download, figures: you won’t find what you’re looking for on the web, although the search results are a bit more interesting without the commas.

This is really rather beautiful. Via hotlinks.

Meanwhile, James Lileks made me laugh today – please, please make five minutes to read this (and click on the link at the top of his story first).

Both my brother and Martin Stabe tagged me on this while I was experimenting with being on holiday and offline (shudder), so I’m going to give it a shot.

1. I’ve always wanted to be a journalist. Or, at least, since I was 11. Before that, I wanted to drive ferries (or the Waverley). Then my primary school teacher took me to the local newspaper, showed us the 1930s flatbed press and the editor wheezing away, and we were all handed our names cast in burning hot pieces of lead. I was suckered. I’ve bought at least one morning newspaper most days since then. Even on holiday. Which has, in turn, infuriated my parents, then my wife.

2. The only other job I’ve ever really wanted is as a professional footballer. Unfortunately, I’m shit.

3. My cat likes the weed more than I do.

4. Don’t be fooled by the list of sensible books on the right. I do read them, but now I’m done with the MBA I devour much more pulp fiction. Yes, I quite enjoyed the Da Vinci Code. If I was wanting some fecking literature, after all, I’d go read some.

5. I’ve got a higher in computing, and part of my MBA covers technology management, but the last successful program I wrote was in basic, on a ZX Spectrum. I remain in awe of coding skillz.

I tag Ben, Bobby, Jemima, Jamie and Lloyd. Although I suspect they’re all too cool to do memes. Unless Hammersley chooses do his through the new medium of YouTubed expressive dance.