I'm now writing in German, too: Gerd Riesselmann: Notizen aus dem Moor

A year has passesd since the last redesign, so it's time for a new look. I tried to make it look "serious" this time - opposite to the jelly beans colored company site of mine... That's why the site mainly relies on shades of brown - besides of course the title of this blog dictates variations of green and brown.

I hesistated the idea to place the Swamp Thing cartoon character in the bottom left of this page.

Unfortunately and to my disgrace, this site was down quite a while. I apologize for this.

Reason was my former provider blocked my domain, since he was suspecting this site to send spam. I checked the data and the logfiles but couldn't find anything like this. What I found, however, was a massive spam attack on the comment forms. The spam module installed didn't handle this spam correctly, since it contained mainly political slogans pro Hisbollah and contra Isreal - but none of the usual porn, poker or pills. This spam attack in turn lead to an extraordinary amount of mails beeing send from this site to - well - me. I guess these mails were accidentely interpreted as beeing spam.

Well, the headline says it all: Since April 1st I'm a full time freelancer now. And to be honest, I'm still surprised about that fact.

I decided to become a freelancer about half a year ago, and my original schedule looked like that:

1. Register yourself as a freelancer with the officials, get firm with taxes etc.: immediately
2. Reduce working hours, so there's actually some time for freelancing: as soon as possible
3. Quit company and live happily ever after: about one year later

Well, things developed faster than expected. I started my business in October 2005, reduced working hours in January 2006, and left my former job behind on April 1st, the first date possible. I already told my boss I will leave the company at the beginning of February.

Roots of the net - How the internet came to Germany: A full day conference about the history of the internet taking place in Bonn. Looks promising - plus it's free!

Go and read Scott Allen's Design Patterns: A Love Story, it's fun! (via Darrel Norton)

I added support for Gravatars today. If you own a gravatar, it will be displayed aside your comment. The following images have a special meaning:

	This is displayed, if you do not have a gravatar. It show's a plant called "Sonnentau" in German, scientifically it is called Drosera something. It grows in the bog and eats insects. Nothing about your character or your favourite meal is implied by that.
	And this is me ;-).

Within the last days I checked my log files more frequently then I did before to see if any files got lost when switching to drupal. And I recently got quite a lot of 404's, mostly caused by spam bots trying to pingback, trackback or post a comment. But some looked serious, until I figured out they where caused by a search spider unable to cope with the HTML base-tag.

If you read this, most presumable through a RSS feed, this page has successfully moved from WordPress 1.2 to Drupal 4.6.3. Regard this as beeing a simple test. I'll cover the why's and how's later on.

Autumn definitly has arrived and it’s getting dark quite early now. Especially it’s getting to dark to ride my bicycle in the evening. Wishing I had a fireplace, but since I don’t, there’s rarely anything to do but spend my time in front of the computer screen ;-).

However, I redesigned my page, so it looks a bit friendlier now (I hope). Hope you like it.