I guess this marks the beginning of a new era. Or perhaps more cryptically the beginning of the beginning of a new area. Everything changes, as they say.

Website Changes

First of all, if you’re reading this then it means that you managed to find the website’s new home. In actual fact, you have always been able to get to the website via http://farrin.me.uk via a re-direct, but due to how it was set up, sometimes it would work and other times strange things might happen. Now however, all services are together. And so it works.

The move was prompted by the fact I needed to get a full-time hosting  company involved on a project I’m working on (that’s the cryptic bit – more to follow…..) and whilst I was at it I decided that I’d pay slightly more and get the four websites I run all into the same place.

The theory was great, but the practice, as always, unearthed problems I wasn’t anticipating. I use Wordpress, harking back to the time when ‘A day in the life’ was purely a blog and it would seem that wherever one sets up a WordPress installation, it’s always slightly different in ways you don’t expect e.g.  the same theme in two different places is, er, different.

Hence the new look for the Norburybells website.

But it’s done. Google Analytics may or may not be doing  something to index the new locations And all the associated files may or may not have come across. Do let me know if you find any broken links, which will probably become more apparent as I begin to decommission the wordpress.com websites.

Office Changes

In other moves, the office has come downstairs. I realised that sitting quietly in the corner of the house when I had a great big window to look out of was a silly situation. So the IT move was scheduled (I picked up my monitor and walked downstairs) and I now have a great view of my washing on the line……

Even the cat has moved in with me. Having first decided that sleeping in front of the monitor was a great thing to do, he has now migrated onto a cushion on the seat next to me, a result all round.

Running Changes

On Tuesday, I commenced my new running group. I went on a course at the start of the month which allowed me to work as a ‘run leader‘ for England Athletics as we were setting up a beginners running group at Lyme Park.

The first session was a small one, with only one person joining us, and the result was probably more of a personal training session than me leading a run group.

So a quick plug. If you want to try out a bit of running – and I mean we’re at the beginner level here, nothing scary – and you’re available on Tuesday mornings 10-11am, come and find us at Lyme Park, near the Timber Yard cafe. Just bring some comfortable trainers with you and I’ll look after you 🙂

Music Changes

I resisted the idea of subscription based music services for a good number of years. I’ve always liked the physical product of a record, more lately the CD where the artwork and details about an album are recorded. I love the concept of an album, rather than disparate songs on a massive playlist that has little in common with itself.

However, more due to an error I ended up with Amazon‘s music streaming offering and I was taken by the fact that it gave me the opportunity to sample artists and albums I probably wouldn’t have  gone out and bought the CD on spec. Typically with Amazon, another error resulted in me cancelling their service and moving to Google Play Music instead.

GPM suits my needs a lot more. I’m already invested in their ecosystem, my existing music collection is in GPM’s cloud and to be fair, it’s about 30 times larger than the Amazon offering. Given my eclectic taste in music that bears no resemblance to the Top 40 (does that still exist or am I showing my age?) this has given me a much wider taste of what’s out there.

Perhaps I’m a little less comfortable that I’m not owning a product (although when you start to dig into the T&Cs in the music world, I’m not entirely sure one owns anything other than the plastic case), but at £10 per month I reckon I’m getting value out of it.