Nggh. Three hours sleep, then a trek across London in the rain and gloom to the printers (thank God, it all printed fine, no howlers). Then a morning being thrown out of various railway stations while handing it out, followed by uploading the day’s material and launching the proper site (some copyright probs mean we can’t publish all the graphics, annoyingly) - yours truly wrote a short article for it - before bounding round Soho and the City in the afternoon trying to get as many passers-by interested as possible. We shifted nearly 2,000 copies between 4 or 5 of us, which was pretty good going.

I’m off to sleep for a million years, and then try to get back to my normal life.

It’s 2 and I’m nearly dead, but it’s all been worth it, sort of. Been working all day proofing and setting the pilot issue of The Line, which will hit London’s streets (in limited numbers) tomorrow. I have to be up at 5.30am with Damian (who’s still panicking like a bitch about it) and Tom to pick up the copies, and then later that morning go distributing them (I’ll be in the Docklands area somewhere in a natty ‘The Line’ T-shirt handing it out - pick up a copy and you could win an iPod!). And then after that I’ll, er, be launching the website for it that I’ve been lovingly crafting. And then maybe sleep. Or maybe not. Aaargh.

I was being slowly driven crazy by coding The Line’s website (I ditched eZ publish as it was just too damn slow, plumped for writing something bespoke instead), as deadline approaches, but now my sanity has been restored after reading through Weight Watchers recipe cards from the 70s (via Dave Denyer). Whether it’s the ingredients, the end result, the presentation, the stupid names, the ghastly props alongside, the snarky comments or some combination theref, I’m not sure, but whatever it was I nearly fell off the chair laughing.

Sellotape is the new Olympics, while Toogle (via Linkmonkeys) is just plain cool (like with this). See it before Google’s lawyers do.

It is of course unethical to conduct an experiment to see whether one can live on beer alone.

What? How can that be?

Further elucidation (via Small Values of Cool).

I can’t believe that this is a frequently asked question.

My application to link to the Athens 2004 site is in the post, I swear!

Been working lately on the site for The Line, given the short timespan and unlikelihood of me working long-term full-time on the paper, I’ve decided to use third-party software for the CMS, so handing over is easier. After looking round I plumped for eZ publish, which is open source and well maintained, and is used by a few other news sites, such as the comrades at The Morning Star. Just don’t mention too loud that they’re in league with the capitalist pig-dogs at BT Click & Buy and demand payment for any article on the site.

Still, eZ publish looks great and has lots of potential, but if you’re on a shared server and without root access then it tends to fall over on installation (lots of PHP options have to be ‘just right’ for it to work), which annoyed me a lot. So, I manually installed it rather than use the wizard, which allows you to set your own admin password for the site, but the documentation does not tell you what the default admin password when doing so manually. For anyone similarly frustrated, then the code to reset it to what you like is (in PHP):

$hash = md5("admin\n$password");
mysql_query(”UPDATE ezuser SET password_hash = ‘$hash’ WHERE contentobject_id = ‘14′”);

Now suitably calmer after a day’s stress (several glasses of red wine helping the cause), but the Best. Advert. For. KY. Ever. (via Boing Boing) still made me wince.