Truth is, there are so many things I’d love to do, and so little time to do them in.

I’m enjoying what I’m spending my time on at the moment, and that’s what matters. I’ll be back here at some stage – I just don’t know when!

It’s a very interesting experience. For instance, as housemates, we are socialising a lot more.

I’ll be back regularly when the Internet is fixed again…

This must be about the fourth or fifth incarnation of Tim Malone.id.au…. but that’s good – a site can’t stay the same for too long!

Welcome, welcome, welcome. This new design reflects, represents and expresses the new season in my life which I have just started. Friday was the last day of the first real job I’ve had. Monday will be the first day of my exciting new job at 1WAY FM. It’s a career change and an industry change – from web hosting to radio. Through all this, I’ve learnt alot about what God has in store especially for me in the future, and I’ve become alot more confident that I’m on the right path. There are exciting times ahead.

I’m going to be posting more on this site than I used to. Ha, I hear you say. He says that all the time. I do. But this time, I have to be posting more – I’ve got radio shows to present with topics to talk about in them, and I need to make sure I have things to talk about! Blog posts are going to help me with that. Yep, I’ll be blogging about what I talk about on air and talking on air about what I blog about. You can listen to me on Thursday drive from 4:30pm till 7pm on 1WAY FM in Canberra – 91.9 on the FM band (or 94.3 in Tuggeranong). I’ll probably end up with some additional on air slots once I’m bedded down in the new position.

So that’s really all for now. If you were familiar with my old site or even if you weren’t, please let me know what you think of this one. Any new features you’d like to see? Anything that doesn’t work that I didn’t notice? Use the comment form provided below or contact me directly.

This doesn’t effect my new job with 1WAY FM of course – I’m only applying for temporary work on the weekend of the election (as you can imagine, the AEC has a need for thousands of people to manage and operate polling booths and participate in the count).

Naturally, political neutrality is a requirement of working for the AEC. So while I am entitled to my own opinions, I can’t express them publicly. So starting from now, I won’t be posting any more here about Australian politics – unless I can think of something neutral to say – until at least after the election has finished. Of course I don’t know yet whether I will be offered temporary work, but I certainly don’t want to jeopardise my chances of it.

So for now, you won’t be hearing much out of me about Australian politics (of course, if you know me personally, I’ll always be happy to talk about it non-publicly). Oh, and if you don’t know yet who you should vote for, NEWS.com.au yesterday released a fantastic little application to help you decide.

The long weekend just gone has given me time to upgrade the backend of my website. The software behind my site (WordPress and ZenPhoto) are now running their shiny new versions – which basically means more security and less spam. As such, I’ve opened up the comment form again, and everyone is now free to write in comments on posts and photos. The vast majority of spam is now being caught by the handy WordPress plugin, Akismet.

I’m also working on a redesign of the site. The design has fallen a bit behind by current web standards, and needs a bit of ‘Web 2.0ising’. Keep your eye out for that in the next month… or two.

I haven’t been taking that many photos recently, but I hope to upload some more within the next few days.

Finally, I’ve almost finished working on an ‘About Me’ page, and a facility for me to easily upload new guitar chords. The guitar chords are proving very popular with people around the globe – thanks to everyone who has written in to let me know how much you appreciate them. Hopefully I will be able to get some new ones up!

As I’ve implied, I do plan to blog more often – about myself, about technical related things, and about world/political issues. So get your commenting fingers ready; I’d love to hear from you.

That’s all from me for now – let’s hope that this injection of self motivation actually lasts!

Cheers,

Tim

If you wish to see my links feel free to visit my del.icio.us page directly.

Or, if you’d like to see them back in the feed let me know, and if people actually want it I will create a seperate feed.

• My del.icio.us page
• My feeds

I have now split my blog into two, and given them the most creative names I could come up with. “timpulse” now focuses on personal things – my thoughts, my findings, rants…. just random things from everyday life that I’m interested in.

The second blog is called “thinkStack”. It’s my IT blog: programming, net news, random IT related things that don’t make sense to the rest of my family… that sort of thing.

Looking back on the archives now in timpulse, it seems I had a dilemma around this time last year in trying to figure out who to target my blog to. As a result of my abstaination from a decision on that, I didn’t write much last year. It looks like I’ve figured out now how to sort out that targetting problem, and how to write about the things I want to write about without confusing the people who read them, so now, finally (and I hope I can say this truthfully now), I will now be writing more regularly on my site.

Ha! Time will tell if it actually works this time.

So, I hope you enjoy reading – and please let me know if you find a problem somewhere that I didn’t fix.

Tim

My blogging software (WordPress) has been upgraded to the latest version, and I just need to finish integrating it into my site design (in the interim, you may notice the design is a bit broken when visiting the blog page).

There’s also some updates I need to make to the photo gallery software (Coppermine), as well as devising some form of program that will encourage me to upload more guitar chords and web programming snippets (basically, I need something that will make it very, very easy to do so!)

I’m also going to add a few new interesting feeds to the front page of my site, including the music I am currently listenting to, or the last few tracks I listened to if I’m not currently listenting. Just something for a bit of fun. By the way, on the topic of music, check out Last.FM – it suggests music based on what you say you like, and builds statistics about what you play after linking it in with your favourite music player. It’s definitely fun stuff to play around with.

Tim

Basically, I think I’m trying to serve too many audiences. There’s the group of people that wouldn’t know what a blog is, who look at my site to read what I’m up to and see photos. And then, there’s the blogging community. There’s also friends from church, and other Christians. And there’s my “computer nerd” friends too.

So, I need to find a focus for what I’m writing about, so that you, reading it, know what to expect.

What will be most likely is that you’ll read things on here, and understand some of it, and not the rest of it. That’s fine. I just want to write about my thoughts, my opinions, and my interests – and you can pick and choose what you want to read, and what you want to talk to me about. Some of it will probably be boring, other bits may be interesting. But really, just read what you want, and comment when you have something to add.

I’ll be writing about small business issues, web design issues, the blogging community, and the search engine marketing community. I’ll be writing about being a youth leader at a Christian church, and about my daily walk with Christ. And I’ll be ranting about things that annoy me, and things that I like doing, and people that I love. Names may be changed to protect the innocent.

As for the rest of the site: I’ve been a bit lazy with my camera recently. But as soon as I manage to take more photos, I’ll upload them to the gallery here. And, I also plan on sourcing some more guitar cords (when I buy new strings so I can actually play them…) and actually creating something to put on the web programming pages. All I need is time…and well, motivation!

And that’s about it. That’s my blog’s mission statement. Have fun.

But now, it’s almost ready to go. I just have to move over all the guitar chords from my old site, and write a few things to go in the Web Programming section. Oh, and I’ve got a ton of photos to upload!

I’ve tested the site in major browsers – Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, and Netscape. It works fine in Firefox and Netscape, but Opera and Internet Explorer are having problems, as usual. Fixing them up is also on my to-do list. If anyone has access to a Mac, and wouldn’t mind testing the site for me, I’d love to hear how it goes in IE and Safari.

And then, the final step will be to request a site review at the Cre8asite Forums Website Hospital. With the outstanding quality of feedback given by members there, I should be able to improve the site even more!

Any comments, please go right ahead. I’d love to hear from you.