I've started my teaching course and I'm 3 weeks in to a 10 month course. So hopefully if all goes well this time next year I'll be a qualified teacher. I've a mass of work to produce in the the next few months and that's on top of lesson plans and actual teaching.

But before that I'm going to be included in an O'Reilly book. I've never bought an IT book, always preferred something with more of a story, so it's a strange to think I'll be in one of them.

Also I've spent the last few weeks developing a site for Valleys Built Heritage which is an organisation based in the south wales valleys to aid the redevelopment of the area in particular valleys houses.

As much as I'd love to describe the way that we do appraisals here at Hairy Spider, I can't. Being a one horse company there isn't much point.

However, my day job as a developer does get me involved in appraisals. They follow the familiar format of sitting in a room with your line manager (project leader, team leader, department leader, technical director, etc.) and dicussing your work. The discussion at some point turns to the uncomfortable question of strong points and weak points. Nobody likes these questions and you have to query the validity of them particularly when, according to my last appraisal, my weak points are my lungs: I'm asthmatic you see. Anyway, this is a great exercise for the line manager who has all the fun of a particularly sadistic medieval torturer.

Now the problem for me is that if I have a problem with procedure I'd like to feed that back to my line manager and if it's something the she is responsible for then I'd like that to go on their appraisal as an objective to be met. All the appraisals I've ever sat on have been one way traffic in that the developer has all the objectives that the line manager sees fit.

So in my fictional future where I'm in charge of what goes on, I think the company policy will be for peer appraisals. Where the system will be that a line manager will do the individual developer appraisals, but following these there will be a line manager appraisal where all the subordinates will provide feedback and objectives.

Ahh yes the future...

Finally completed some site updates. They are all pretty minor but will hopefully make my life a lot simpler.

Doing the updates would have been alot easier if my network card wasn't so dodgy.

Briefly:

• The order of the items in the multisite support forum is now set to most recent at the top of the list.
• I've finally got round to sorting out the title of the blog, so that -> thingamy has gone and is replace by the blog description in the main page and the title in the permalink pages.

I also spent some time investigating how much work it would take me to get the main page showing a description and then the permalink page showing the full blog entry. I decided that it was a good hour of work which can wait for another evening. The joy of scheduling one's own work.

I think I may add a section to the blog which list the music and book I am currently reading, but then again does anyone care?

What a great weekend, we've accepted an offer on our flat, and have now started house hunting in earnest. What this does mean is that pretty much every weekend is taken up with a list of viewing to attend.

In the first weekend of the 6 nations a great 20 minutes from Wales and some poor defending from the Scots gave Wales a good victory and the first time we've had a win on the opening weekend of the championship since last century.

Valentines night was a real treat: we went to see a production of Tosca at the Hippodrome in Bristol which was quite amazing.

A few people have raised the issue that support for the Multisite filter is pretty non-existent at the moment, which is true. Unfortunately, work commitments at the moment mean that I haven't the energy to spend a great deal of time on other projects. However, a support forum is literally a few days away, and I think that I've solved the problem with passing control through to the script engine.

Once I get the forum live, I will be able to provide more timely responses to questions, even if these are along the lines of: "Sorry I can't help with that."

Well it's been a pretty shitty start to the year for me - I'm still carrying an illness from Christmas. Although following a second visit to the Doctor yesterday, a new set of pills and some spacer thing to go on my inhaler, I feel like this is the last few days of coughing.

Still, on an optimistic note February holds plenty of promise. The first 6 Nations where we can play against the World Champions starts in a fortnight. My Jury Service has also been postponed until March. Hopefully this month we will get an offer in on our flat so that we can finally make the move back home to Wales.

Also let's not forget that this will be my first Valentine's Day with my Wife.

I will shortly be adding a new FAQ section to help people with the new version of Multisite. I've so far had a couple of support issues to resolve, one is proving a real headache: If you set the default document to be an aspx page then the aspx engine isn't called after the internal redirect. I think I've found a work around for this issue but there has to be a way to make this work.

Anyway the site statistics are gradually growing the stats for this month are double those for December. There seems to be as many hits on the Crossword Helper section as forMultisite 2. In light of this I will probably add some extra functionality to the crossword helper.

Also loads of hits for the javascript and XML issues in Mozilla, so I'll try to do some more in that area.

After the minimum amount of testing I have enabled the comments functionality on this blog

I am now able to include hyperlinks Search Google

Need to remove hairy spider from the referrers list.

The referrers list is now controlled centrally and referrers are added manually rather than automatically as before.

the rss syndication is not working.

Had to add the following settings to the Web.config:

<webServices> <protocols> <add name="HttpGet"/> <add name="HttpPost"/> </protocols> </webServices>

Well the first problem to resolve is an error I've just recieved sending through HTML as part of the blog description. A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client (AItemProps1:txtDescription="...cription. <p>here</p>").

completed

Welcome to the new blog from Hairy Spider Solutions.The styles haven't been completed and there are some usability issues which need to be addressed. But that's something for me to worry about. If you are looking for more information regarding the latest release of Multi Site then I can confirm that I have only two small tasks remaining (thank you VS.net for the TODO: comment)