This website’s description on Google and elsewhere is “Musings and related links on Mancunian Paul Gregory’s favourite things, from Buffy to REM, including photographs.”

That’s from my Open Directory listing and is somewhat dated. At the present moment, there are no photographs and no mention of Buffy or REM. And I’m not even really a Mancunian, if we’re being picky.

I promise to resolve this as soon as possible with an article on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, an article on R.E.M. and the introduction of some photographs. In the meantime, this article exists to be found by anyone searching for these things. If you’d like these musings sooner, chivvy me along in the comments.

A technical switch

My previous framework, MODx, was great and all, but over time I realised that practically everything I needed from a personal site could be fulfilled by a blog. While there are some great blog solutions for MODx, they are largely just mimicking the features of other systems in what can be quite convoluted ways. I tried WordPress on another domain and quickly grew to like it. So here we are. Powered by WordPress.

I feel slightly unfaithful, having been involved with MODx, but I’m not walking away from that system entirely and look forward to the new versions in the pipeline. I may very well switch back in a year’s time.

One of the things I liked about WP is that there are both Posts and Pages, but the Pages system is a little disappointing. First, the search doesn’t search pages, it just searches blog posts. Second, although you can customise the format of Post urls, there’s no equivalent facility for Pages. This means that while you can have /year/postname.html, you are stuck with /pagename. There are a bunch of posts about this in the support forum pre-dating 2.2 but still no change. I have a handful of pages that have reasonable PageRank and I’d like to keep the exact same URL. I was able to do so when I moved from static pages to MODx, so I really want to be able to do so with WordPress. What made it worse was you can’t just set the pagename as ‘hello.html’ because it automatically strips out the dot. So my first hack to WP code was to let dots through into the page name. Problem solved.

That said, many pages are being migrated to backdated blog posts - partly to solve the search problem, and partly to make it clear how dated some text is.

A behavioural switch

With my site becoming a straight-forward blog, what is to happen to my LiveJournal? Well, the change there is subtle. LJ will be primarily ephemeral, conversational posts, but above all it’s social, addressing an audience of people I know. It will be a lot more “friends-only”. I may bounce off ideas there which I later write up for a longer post here. I will cross-link to key posts. Articles here will be aimed at people stumbling across the site, simply because there’s more people I don’t know than people I do. As I haven’t actually written many long public articles on LJ for a while, for most people this will probably seem like I’m publishing additional stuff rather than moving stuff.

What is to happen to posts on forums etc? They’ll continue, but I’m likely to start making shorter forum posts and link to longer responses here.

Previously posted on my LiveJournal

BBC1 Controller Peter Fincham must go, or at least be prevented from speaking to journalists.

It is one thing to show two scenes in the wrong order. It is entirely another to actually say “Annie Leibovitz gets it slightly wrong and the Queen walks out in a huff” to a room full of journos.

But for me, his biggest crime was his “announcement” that Friar Tuck should be in Series 2 of Robin Hood and that Matt Lucas should play the part. Don’t worry - this isn’t happening.

A report in the Sun (which was picked up by Digital Spy) quoted Peter saying this week “I have no idea what happened — I thought it would be fun to have Friar Tuck. I think we need an inquiry. They have slightly left me high and dry - I announced it and it’s not happening. I suppose it just shows you the limits to my powers as BBC1 boss.”

On first read, I assumed that this was tongue-in-cheek. It is possible to read it in a self-deprecating sarcastic tone. But having seen him on TV, he looks the type to have said that and meant it. Read that quote back in the voice of Bertie Wooster. Then dial down the likeability. That’s Peter Fincham. He quite possibly genuinely wants an inquiry into why he can’t unilaterally force Poochie onto a show’s creative team.

The only way he could redeem himself now would be for him to not cock up the Neighbours replacement. I do hope he (and whoever fills the Daytime vacancy) does use River City in the reshuffle, even if it does need subtitles at times.

Thankfully, Matt Lucas is in any event too busy making Little America etc to play Tuck. A sketch show star famous for playing a catchphrase-spouting chav? As a regular character in a Saturday family adventure-drama series? That would be a *terrible* idea.