At long last this blog is back on the air. A few weeks ago, I started hearing a deathwatch-beetle-like ticking noise coming from under the television. It turned out to be coming from the hard drive of the server which used to support this web site. To my shame, I didn't have any proper backups. In any case, there's only one right thing to do with a ticking hard drive; it had to go.

In the intervening period, my free time has been taken up with the following tasks, among others:

• Go out and buy a second hand computer to become my new server
• Install Gentoo Linux on it.
• Install and configure Apache, Zope, Plone and EasyBlog

Needless to say, it wasn't quite as simple as that, and I've had various technical challenges to overcome along the way. Still, with this web site, or rather cluster of web sites (the same server hosts web sites for the whole family) that's what it says on the tin. One of the primary goals of this activity has always been to erm.. "boldly go".

As has been said before, I choose to use technologies that I wouldn't usually encounter in my working life, even though I'm a computer programmer who works mainly with web sites and the software used to manage them. This sometimes means that the home projects are a little amateur, but hopefully not amateurish.

Now all I have to do is put some new content on the web sites, and pretty them up. For the content, I'll be trying to recover some of the old data, but don't hold your breath. For the look and feel, well there again, I'll be trying to do things a different way to try and learn something along the way, so I hope it doesn't take too long. In the meantime things are going to look distincly plone-ish around here.