The great plugin purge and other tweakery


If you’ve visited The Spicy Cauldron before, you’ll notice there have been some changes made in addition to the site going members-only. Everything should be a heck of a lot faster to load into your browser than it was before the weekend, whatever your connection speed.

The front page from now on will carry one, maybe two, posts and no more than that. There are fewer plugins offering bells-and-whistles, less widgets taking up sidebar space. The focus now is on the core content—which is, after all, everyone’s primary interest—and on having a clean, uncluttered and unintimidating design.

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Sunday, April 6th, 2008

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Sink plungers, dishwasher-attacking gremlins, and website woes


Useful but stupid. Oh yes. Stupid sink plunger...

It wasn’t just online technology driving me nuts last night. Our kitchen sink backed up and I spent ages leaning over it with a plunger trying to loosen whatever the blockage was. There’s something inately stupid about sink plungers. And yes, of course they make me think of Daleks.

After several hours of on-off efforts, the blockage seemed to clear but then I put the dishwasher on a quick eco-wash setting and went to bed, and found the damn thing still running when I got up this morning.

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Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

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