Life in Ronda and Spain, Spanish Property

The BBC reports today that scientists at UC Santa Cruz have made progress toward identifying the gene that makes humans different from the other species. The gene HAR1 appears to have undergone accelerated evolution over the last few million years, and they believe, is responsible for the development of the cerebral cortex.

If this turns out to be the case, then fully exploring what this gene does and how it works will I guess be high on the agenda of genetic scientists. Now I know that the scientists who made this discovery will probably flinch at my suggestion, but this is the kind of discovery that could allow us to 'uplift' some of our planet's other species toward sentience, just like in David Brin's Uplift Saga. Moralists might argue that we should leave well alone, but not me. I'm not so sure about the value of uplifting chimps or dogs, but dolphins or giant squid have definite advantages. Squid could be engineered to survive in space and pilot craft that run between Earth and her colonies (Mars, the asteroid belt mining factories etc). Dolphins could help us to fully understand our planet's oceans and find sustainable solutions for reversing the damage humans have inflicted on the planet.

Of course full citizenship as equals would need to be offered to any species that undergoes uplift, but think how great it would be.

Wow, my new site for my short stories got listed in Google in just three days. I'm new to SEO, I've been reading everything I can for several months now and joined several forums where I've talked to the experts, but this is my first real experiment.

Let me tell you what I did. I got a free hosting account with Fusion X Host, then I uploaded the Serendipity blog script, and then I created a couple of entries. Next I added my first story, something I wrote many years ago, and which has been published before. Every time I added an entry I pinged the major services using Pingoat. Then I announced my fiction site here and on the forums at FXH, and I also took some time to read make some comments on other blogs. I hate spam, so I make it a point of only putting genuine comments on other blogs. This moring I checked Google to see if the site is listed, and it was. Woohoo!

I need to add a little disclaimer, yesterday I added the subdomain off this site and pointed it to the FXH account, so the URL that is listed in Google is actually the fxh domain, and not my own subdomain, but I figure this will change fairly quickly.

So, that's how I did it, now I need to work on getting traffic to the fiction site. Any ideas?

EDIT: One day later and the sub-domain is now indexed by Google, so in four days I successfully got carlgalloway.myfxh.com and fiction.carlgalloway.com indexed by Google. I'm really happy with that and it proves to me that getting into Google is not rocket science as many of the SEO experts would have you believe, and it also proves that you don't need to submit your sites to the major search engines. Get their spiders to do the work for you.

Someone emailed me asking how to widgetize a Serendipity template. For those who don't know, widgets is the name Wordpress people use for their plugin that allows users to sort their sidebar plugins or even remove them altogether.

The Serendipity developers actually included this functionality so long ago we've probably even forgotten who orignially came up with the concept. Wordpress just copied us. And only recently as well. Now I know my loyal WP readers and friends in that community are going to flame me, but I don't care, bring it on. Ok that's not true, I do care, but bring it on anyway.

So, if you're a Serendipity user and you want to edit your templates to add that widget stuff, you don't need to, every template for Serendipity already has it built-in. Need proof, easy, just open index.tpl in one of the templates. What you're looking for is a couple of lines that look like this;

{serendipity_printSidebar side="right"}
{serendipity_printSidebar side="left"}
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For some time now I've been wanting to start a new blog for my short fiction. Check out my first story, Ancient conspiracy amongst women continues it presence. Writing is just a hobby of mine but as I transition into retirement I thought I might as well revisit some of the short stories I wrote years ago and publish them. Also this gives me the opportuinty to keep my mind active. From speaking to friends, retirement can be one of the most incredible decisions a person can take, yet also fraught with danger so it is important to find activities that keep mind and body active.

Going through this process made me realise that I should take a hard look at free hosting, some of the people offering this service are really dedicated and offer a high quality product. I've tried several recently, and hands down the best so far is Fusion X Host.

Fusion X Host work differently from many other host companies. The hosting is completely free, and I'm getting 300mb space, ftp, mysql etc so I can run a Serendipity blog, and all I have to do is make regular posts in their forum. This is an easy thing to do since I love sharing my thoughts anyway. I've even configured a subdomain from carlgalloway.com to point to the account at FXH.

Users of Serendipity who want to take advantage of this service simply need to follow the link above. You'll be taken to a page within the FXH forum that details the hosting plans available. Unfortunately you can't just apply for hosting without making a commitment to FXH, so the first thing to do is register your membership in the forum. Go ahead and add your thoughts to some of the latest threads, I would recommend creating new posts or only replying to some of the latest threads. Then follow the link to the Hosting Control Panel at the top of forum page, activate your hosting and wait for the email. I got my host account within 20 minutes. Be sure to read the literature thread and vote on my first story.

Recently I've been making some changes to this site to provide a better experience for visitors, increase my traffic and search engine exposure. I'm doing this because I plan to retire completely over the next couple of months and I want this site to become what Google calls an 'authority' site for the general Serendipity community.

More traffic means that the Serendipity community will be bigger, I fully expect the number of Serendipity installations to hit 1million some time around March-April 2007 which means there will be a large community of people wanting information and templates.

Ceejay and I plan to continue providing templates free of charge to the Serendipity community, as well as tutorials on using and theming Serendipity. We are currently working on a new template exclusively for this site.

Regular users will notice that we've added social bookmark services under every entry, and we want to ask our readers to please bookmark any pages that should be shared. If you think we should be supporting other social bookmark services please let us know.

Thanks for helping us grow this site.

Woo hoo, check this out, I'm famous, even Garfield has something say about me!

Ever since a just a little boy I remember being a really big fan of Garfield. His dry humour always appealed to me, and when I discovered I could create my own Garfield comic strip... well, just look at what I come up with. Not some witty expose of my eating habits, or the size of my..., oh no not me, ceejay reckons I'm too serious...