Posts from 2012

I am a veteran of blog migrations with the scars to prove it. Here is a handy cut out and keep checklist of the important things I normally forget:

• Permalink structure. Try to preserve the existing permalink structure to save hours of pain. This is particularly important when using Disqus (although there is a URL migration utility for Disqus).
• Typically, I like to have 'Archives', 'About' and a 'Contact' page.
• Tag support including a 'Tags' page.
• Images. I have learned to upload all photos and screenshots to PicasaWeb and intentionally de-couple images from the blog platform.
• Sitemap support. Helps search engines index the site.
• RSS/Atom support . Previously I have always used Feedburner (although I may follow Google's example and sever this dependency) and simply use the native feed. Less is more.
• Comments. Static site generators are slightly limited here (compared with proper blogging platforms) so I guess I will continue to use Disqus. Mind you, for the number of comments versus spam, I may also dispense with comments and invite people to use Google+ or identi.ca.
• Themes. It would be desirable to be able to change themes to avoid having the same look and feel and every other Octopress blog.

Please feel free to add your own tips in the comments.

My Web hosting package (provided by Bluehost) expires in October. As this blog is essentially dead (the last post was a one-liner 8 months ago), the sensible and logical thing to do would be to kill the blog and save £5 a month.

Originally I purchased the domain name 'nbrightside.com' and the Web hosting for a couple of reasons:

• I wanted to use self hosted WordPress without some of the restrictions imposed by WordPress.com
• I wanted to play with some of the packaged applications offered by Bluehost.
• I wanted access to a Linux environment, mainly to build, install, experiment with various open source software tools and packages which needed a LAMP stack.

It's really questionable whether I need to maintain this Web presence but, on balance, I'd like to keep the site alive for a little longer.

WordPress, Drupal, Habari et al are all fantastic blogging platforms but rather overkill for this simple, single user blog. For a while, I have been fascinated and trying to resist the temptation of the simplicity and power of static Web site generators like Jekyll and Hyde.

Last year, I even ported the complete contents of this Drupal 7 blog to a locally installed version of Hyde and laboriously fixed up lots of hyperlinks just so the Markdown looked neater.

The completely logical and sensible decision would be to simply resurrect this Hyde environment, re-sync the last couple of one liner blog posts, configure a automatic redirect and use rsync to upload this site to some alternative, cheaper (or free) Web hosting.

So, I have decided to use Octopress and Amazon S3 to host this humble, annually updated blog in the future. I may be able to reuse some of the Hyde content with judicious use of sed to convert the meta data in the header sections or I may just start afresh.

No - I am not mad.

Time to upgrade Drupal again. Yesterday version 7.12 was released and this blog is currently running a very outdated (and probably insecure) 7.4. Although Drupal 7 included automatic update for modules and themes, updating the core Drupal software still needs manual intervention and takes time.

Over the years, the main self-hosted blog platforms I have used are:

• WordPress - one-click updates. Quick and easy. By far the best and most robust solution. Never let me down.

• Habari - Official Habari releases were fairly infrequent so I chose to I track the latest development version so upgrade was manual but as simple as typing '$ svn update'. Rolling back was needed on a couple of occasions but possible simply by reverting to the previous SVN version ($ svn update -r ).

• Drupal - manual update. Involves taking the site offline, copying files, thinking, run 'update.php', copying files back again, bringing the site back online and a little time. Slightly tedious as Drupal tend to to release a new version of the core software every month or so with a nagging email reminder to do the right thing.

I have also noticed that my sitemap hasn't been generated in 6 months and doesn't include the most recent entries. In addition, some (old) posts have been marked as 'Never Update' but after some housekeeping to modify some permalinks to fix various '404 - Not found' errors, these old entries now need to be regenerated.

I think it is entirely right and proper that Sir Fred Goodwin has been stripped of his knighthood.

After all, I am a shareholder in the Royal Bank of Scotland and his incompetence has cost me a significant amount of money and pushed back my retirement age to 87.

In fact, why stop there ? Personally, I find it objectionable that Freddie's surname includes the word 'Good'. This man is not good - in fact, he is a very bad man so I suggest he should henceforth be known as 'Fred Win'.

Oh no. Wait hang on - the word 'win' also has positive connotations associated with victory and happiness (see also Charlie Sheen and 'Winning'). This will never do so I insist the word 'Win' is also stripped from his legal name.

So now, the former head of RBS should simply be known as 'Fred'.

Investigations continue into whether Fred has a middle name.

Must. Blog. More.