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Episode IV: A New Home
OK, actually the third post but the pun wouldn’t work otherwise! The larger stick insects have now been moved into a BSP cage (Small-Life Supplies) to give them more room to grow and a better environment, so that’s 15 moved into the BSP and a couple of first/second instars left in the jar to develop a bit more first and still a multitude of unhatched eggs in the other jar. As can be seen from the thumbnail their first reaction to being in a new airy, spacious mansion was to crowd together on one leaf but they have since spread out a lot more and are growing at a much faster rate than before. They have actually been in there for a week now and I gave it the first change of plants today which is a little more involved now, but as they get larger it will at least be easier and easier to spot them… if I haven’t already pointed it out, the biggest problem with stick insects is that, well, they look like sticks! (more…)
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Stick Insects Update (1 month)
Follow up to my first post on stick insects. Most of the insects are approximately a month old or so now and have gone through a couple of moults. As can be seen from the photo below they are growing (couldn’t find a 5p coin today, so a 20p was used, diameter 21.4mm) but still a long way to go. Gait patterns still seem to be stuck rigidly to the tripod gait. The jar is now starting to get a bit crowded, and changing the plants has become tricky (they’re fast little buggers when they want to be) so next week I will be upgrading their accommodation next week to one of the excellent BSP Cages from Small Life Supplies, one of which I have been using at home for a while now. This will also give them the necessary room to moult successfully, as well as making it easier to care for them. Photos follow: (more…)
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Michael Schenker: Doctor Doctor (live) 1983
The Maestro at his best! Stunning…. (thanks to Christian Matz for posting the link on my Facebook wall).
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URL Shortener Installed
Spent a frustrating couple of hours yesterday installing YOURLS onto my website, although the end result was actually quite satisfying. YOURLS is a PHP based URL shortener (along the lines of bit.ly and tinyurl) that can be installed on any webserver running PHP. The installation itself should be straightforward, but I was using Softaculous (provided on my webhost, which is usually hassle free) and it was getting confused about me wanting to install it in a subdomain rather than under my root domain name. Eventually I did a manual installation and it all started working perfectly!
So now every post is assigned an automatic shortened URL, for example, my recent post on stick insects can be reached from http://go.dave-wood.org/c. Specific labels can also be added, so my page on Insect Locomotion is http://go.dave-wood.org/gaits as well as http://blog.dave-wood.org/maths/insect-locomotion/. I’ve also installed the YOURLS WordPress to Twitter plugin so now an automatic notification is sent to my twitter feed when I publish a new post. Not sure how well that’s going to work yet, so watch this space (hopefully something won’t go wrong and start spamming Twitter).
Haven’t worked out if it’s possible to display a post’s shortened URL in the post yet, it seems like a sensible thing to do so will look into that. Update: have now worked it out!
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