Flat3D

The Grand Tour

Now the new blog has been online for a bit, I thought I’d show you around the new layout and some of the nifty stuff!
Ok, so here where you are reading right now is the main blog bit where the blogs go for blogging.
Then over on your right you can see some lovely photos, that is the latest 4 photos of my flickr Flat3D set, it is going to be a bit of a “heres an interesting/nice/funny picture I took recently” kind of area.
Just above that are a row of tabs to take you to various blog archives and suchlike.
Below the tabbed box there are a couple of menus:  the right hand one has my links and some admin guff for the blog; the left has some interesting articles I have come across while surfing/reading and below that are category links etc for finding things more easily.
Speaking of finding things, the top right of the page has a slightly hidden away seach box for searching (no really) and a nav bar listing pages that are fairly constant (FAQ and About).

So welcome to the new stylee and enjoy your stay, may I particularly recommend the amusing Wired article on lego photographs in the Interesting News section, accompanied by a browse through the links to its right.

If you are reading this on a syndicated site (Facebook or OMF Social) you’ll just have to follow the relevant link to the real blog to see what the craic is!

Hurrah!

Working away…

This week I met with my new dissertation supervisor and we talked about moving on into producing an actual dissertation.  After a bit of discussion and idea chewing, we have settled on the subject of the pagan reaction to Paul in Acts  (This is a bit narrower than simply reaction to Paul).  I am looking particularly at three instances in Paul’s 2nd missionary expedition, the interactions with a Roman colony in Philippi, Paul’s encounter with the philosophers of Athens and finally the confrontation with the Artemis worshippers of Ephesus.  The main thrust being to look at the reaction to Paul’s message by the three main relevant aspects of pagan culture at the time: Roman government/imperialism, greek philosophy and pagan worship.  I have been working away since our meeting at Philippi and it is so rich and deep in terms of material it is beginning to feel quite daunting (just this one section!)  But at the same time it is very interesting, and as I read more and study more it is increasingly relevant to today’s society and also particularly to Japanese society, as each aspect studied has a parallel aspect there…  I don’t know if I will be able to include a bit of discussion on that in my actual dissertation itself, or if it will just be something to think about on my own afterwards…  but it is interesting and quite challenging too…

I have plunked for a flickr photo display on the right there as Picasa was just a bit too annoying to get to work quite right with the sidebar.. I want it to be like a kind of photo-blog, with the latest photo being most prominent and the previous few as thumbnails beside… Picasa wanted to start at the beginning each time!  Maybe when I have more time I will write a little bit of php to do the work with picasa..  But for now I have downloaded picasa2flickr and am just sticking them up there instead.  It is actually pretty well suited for this purpose as the limitations are upload bandwidth based, whereas picasa’s are storage based…  I will continue to use picasa to share albums of photos though, but they will get posts of their own I think!

New design

I have gone for this theme by http://www.blogohblog.com/ called Statement, with a little bit of customisation (title and photo slideshow on the right there, it’s not quite right yet though…).
I quite like it!

I plan to use the photo slideshow as a mini-photo blog, when I take a new pic or something and want to stick it up I can, it integrates with Picasa (http://picasa.google.com) so it’s all nice n easy!
I am also going to contact Tony at OMF about integrating with the OMF website…  I think I will need to make a few adjustments to allow that to work correctly…

Anyways, feel free to comment and let me know what you think!