I’m still listening to Noah and The Whale. This album is amazing.
This is the first post I have made since moving my blog across to my own website. For those of you who do read this regularly I apologise for yet another move. This is definitely the last one. I’ve been wanting to make my website entirely dynamic for ages now but haven’t felt I had the php skills to make it look how I want. I think I’ve managed it ok for now though.
I’ve got really addicted to code actually. I now have some idea how php works. Simply put html pages always exist. They are made and can stand alone. Php pages are made from lots of other php pages and are pulled together everytime someone loads them up. For example, this page is made up from lots of commands that say ‘get header,’ ‘get content,’ ‘get sidebar’ etc etc. The advantage is that if I want to change the make up of the sidebar I just need to change the page called sidebar.php and it will automatically update all my pages.
The other advantage is the blog format. I think posting poems as blogs is the best way to do it. My static poems page on the old site never got updated and so I never re-edited pieces. I’d find people quoting my work and get annoyed that they had an old version of the work, then check the website and realise they had the public version. Blogs are easier to update. Once I get settled in here I’ll start posting all of my old work one by one so when you click the ‘poems’ link on the right-hand sidebar you’ll be whisked away to all the poems I have written over the last few years. If that’s the sort of thing you like.
My new found computer geekery has meant that I’m rarely out of bed before one or two, preferring to instead lie in my own filth with my laptop changing the colour of the links. There’s something that really appeals to me about web design. I guess I like the way you can slowly change and watching it develop. Like building a little empire. Like Sim City, but with my poems. Self-indulgent perhaps? Certainly, but if one cannot be self-indulgent at the end of a four week Edinburgh run, when can he?
Who Writes This Crap? has had an awesome run. We got a four star review from The Scotsman on Monday. You can read it here. Since Sunday we’ve sold out or got damn close to selling out. It’s so nice not waking up each day to worry about ‘numbers.’ Next move is to book a tour for the show, which shouldn’t be too difficult as I have a fairly good touring reputation now and the show’s a proven seller. Hopefully I’ll still be able to tour A Poet’s Work Is Never Done as well.
Home on Monday and not a day too soon. It’s great and all this festival but after seven years you really start to feel the four weeks. I’m tired, spotty and lonely. I’m surrounded by great friends here but I miss my wife like crazy and long for a night on the sofa with a nice bottle of wine and cuddle. Nothing tops that really.
September is all about spending time at home and getting some writing done. I want to start working on a rhyming play. I want it to use traditional epic poem forms so I’m going to have to do some research 😉 Joel and I also have an idea for TV pilot that I’d like to get written up sooner rather than later. And ….. I scratched a story for my new poetry show last week and it’s fired me up to get on with that sooner rather than later. But not doing too many gigs. Definitely not.