About
Author
I am Rick Parsons and I am a computer specialist for a large company in Bristol, England. This is not a picture of me but some people think that I moonlight with a second job.
I use this blog to document, for the benefit of others, things that I discover which were not obvious when I first looked at them. Some have proved surprisingly popular, such as my notes about our car and sat-nav device. Others have proved to be of no discernible interest at all, but at least they remain as a record in case I need them again. I also write about a few things that tickle my humour and get weightier issues off my chest. All opinions expressed are my own, blah, blah, blah. Spelling, grammar and composition in general have never been my strong points, but I think they have improved from the exercise of writing for this medium. Comments are kept open on most posts, despite the burden of eliminating the spam, and I welcome the interaction.
My other “leisure” activities include maintaining the technology (computers, audio, video and website) for our church, the local history of West Cornwall and Mary’s family name (Renowden) which two projects take up the remainder of this web site. The favicon that you may see in the address bar above is the flag of Cornwall, St. Piran’s Cross, turned into a pennant.
Title
The name of the blog “Order of the Bath” has nothing to do with the ancient order of chivalry. Much like Eddie Waring’s “early bath” catch-phrase, when the children were younger, bed-time was bath time and they were given the order of the bath. Later I got the reputation of taking very long baths during which I “put the world to rights” and this developed into the time I thought of posts for the blog, hence the title.
Design
As may be obvious, this blog runs under WordPress. The theme is my own called Bathtub but heavily based on the Default theme for coding, pared down to the essentials. It was created because I am a great believer in pages with a fluid width so that the user is not forced to use a browser window of a specific size, nor is screen space wasted by empty stripes down the sides. The problem with such themes is getting the page-top picture to look good unless it fades out into a nondescript blur at the ends so I set my self the challenge of creating a “fluid image” as well. The coding of the pages is improving all the time, mostly by eliminating unnecessary bits.
The plugins currently in use are
- Akismet—to trap the spam.
- Comment Referrers—to see where comments come from.
- Delink Comment Author—to give a bit of control over outbound links added by the commenter.
- Custom Comments—to make my own comments stand out a bit.
- Filosofo Old Style Upload—because I prefer it.
- Get Recent Comments—does the section in the sidebar.
- Paged Comments—reduces the page size if there are a lot of comments.
- Self Comment Notification Filter—avoids me having to moderate my own.
- Wordpress.com stats
- WP Database backup
- Worst Offenders—which helps me control the spam moderation.
- WP-Monsterid—which does the fall back avatar if the commenter doesn’t have their own Gravatar.
Most of them are, unfortunately, not regularly maintained. Also most duplicate things that widgets can do but I prefer a bit more control than widgets offer.
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