An Exercise in Irrelevance

Some advance on the knowledge blog front this week. Firstly, myself and Simon Cockell spent a short while setting up a development and testing environment and wrote our first wordpress plugin — ”Peaches” based around the Hello Dolly plugin, but with the lyrics from the Stranglers song instead. We finished this yesterday just before automattic released WordPress 3.0. Hopefully, it will be easy to upgrade. Rather more usefully, I got the very first version of a reference list plugin working. At the moment, it just transforms DOIs into hyperlinks.

And, secondly, I got notification from the British Library that they will be archiving the website. Good news, although there are not archives available yet.

We move forward!

For the third year in a row, I managed to the Northern Rock cyclone this weekend. It was a lovely occasion as before; the weather was cool in the morning with a brisk wind, but it warmed up a little and the wind dropped by the end of the day. The numbers have gone up slightly and it was good to see so many cyclists around.

Compared to last years’ ride I was way down. I just cleared 5:30 in the saddle, or 6 hours elapsed, which is about 1 hour slower (although the route is, apparently, 2 miles longer than last year). Not unexpected, given the absence of training; this is my longest ride of the year, 40 miles being the longest otherwise. Having moved house early in the year, and with an F1 in the works, I just haven’t found the time.

This really is a great event; at the moment, it’s big enough to be an event, but small enough to still feel personal. I hope that it will get bigger, although the roads mean that it could never rival the GNR, because this sort of mass participation event will help to bring cycling up the agenda. However, having done the GNR, I know that this would almost certainly lessen the pleasure of it.