May Day

It only happens once a year. The sound of drums played approximately (but not quite) in time, and some rather painful sounds that resemble trumpets - but not closely. For about an hour, off and on. With people parading up and down a street that runs perpendicular to ours, because the Communist Party Headquarters is not far away. It's a terrible din, and poor Cleo (most nervous of our cats) tries to hide, but the rest of us cope. I'm not quite sure what they're trying to prove, but it's all fairly friendly and civilised.

Does Richard take a day off, since it's a public holiday?

No. This morning he had a meeting at 9am, and this afternoon he's trying to sort out a major hardware problem. Typical, as he said at lunch-time, that a fairly new hard drive would fail when all the shops are closed so he can't take it back for a replacement.

He didn't really relax yesterday, either. He spent a lot of time copying my home education web-site to its new destination on one of his servers. Geocities has been a good home for it, and a great introduction to building a web-site. I only ever used their free option, which gave me more than enough space, and very easy ways of uploading files. But, as Leonid pointed out to me, a free web-site like that is probably making money from the adverts they use, and it would be more sensible to have an independent site where I could place Adsense adverts instead.

So after much discussion we registered a domain (home-ed.info) and Richard copied the entire site to his server yesterday morning. He worked out an easy way for me to adapt it to include Adsense (and thus make the site easier to read, since some of the pages had text that was rather too broad for anyone with a high resolution screen) and set me up with statistics and other features, even including a file manager that's very similar to that of Geocities.

I then spent most of the afternoon adjusting and uploading the pages to include Adsense and to leave out the Geocities counter code. And some of this morning editing some of the Geocities site pages to send them to the new site - which I hope will happen seamlessly, since the sites are almost identical. I'll leave the Geocities site, at least for now, since it does get quite a few hits via search engines, and see what happens. But I'll only be making updates to the new site in future.