Blogging

Some principled bloggers leave all comments untouched afraid that any subsequent edit (no matter how seemingly trivial) would represent the slippery slope to censorship, a police state, the inevitable involvement of Amnesty International and charity gigs by U2. Apart from a single comment by a member of the BNP, I have never had this problem until now. A new comment on the post #45 “music for a (very) long car journey” Mate, you’re a dick A new comment on the post #485 “flowery twats” Mate, it was obviously you’re fault you twat. ...

Yet another trackback test. One year and four days after I thought I understood the difference between pings and trackbacks, this short podcast shows me that I didn’t.

I forgot to pack my WordPress hosted images when moving my blog. Thankfully, this isn’t as important (or embarrassing) as carefully packing and then promptly forgetting your suitcase when attending a week long conference away from home. However, thanks to the Google image archive, my photo blog has now been restored to its full glory. Yesterday, I visited a customer in sunny Glasgow, near Scotland. This was very poor planning on my part. I really should have delayed this trip by 7 days which would have allowed me to gatecrash the Oracle blogger meet-up at UKOUG. ...

The observant reader will have noticed some minor changes to the sidebar. The thousands of one hit wonders from Google won’t. Popular posts (widget) Related posts (widget) ‘Archives’ gets a run in the first team, displacing the rarely used ‘Calendar’ and ‘Categories’. I prefer using widgets to having to actually edit (and risk breaking) the PHP code. Widgets always work with any theme. Also, I thought it was odd that Google Analytics hadn’t tracked a single outgoing link since I installed this plugin. This turned out to be a bug fixed by the most recent version. ...

‘A change of speed, a change of style A change of scene, with no regrets ' I simply couldn’t take any more so I reluctantly handed in my resignation yesterday. I have moved my blog to another cheap hosting provider, Bluehost. If this ends in tears, then I swear I am reverting to hosted WordPress. As Steve Redgrave once said ‘If you ever see me signing up with another cheap hosting provider, shoot me !’ ...

Just installed and configured Drupal 4.7.3 and noted an announcement asking for volunteers to test newly added support for the Oracle database. Most open source, content management systems (WordPress, Joomla et al) use MySQL so it will be interesting to see whether there is much demand for a CMS running on an Oracle database. On a similar note, Oracle are likely to confirm that the next major release of Siebel (8.0) will be available on the Linux platform. The official announcement is expected at Oracle OpenWorld later this month. This isn’t wholly unexpected as support for Linux in Siebel 8.0 was included in the public Statement of Direction (May 2006). ...

Just add ‘http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2' to your blog configuration. Let’s see if it works. Update: Posted at 17:56. Pinged by GoogleBot at 18:00. Referrer (to this article) from Google Blog Search at 20:58.

The migration from andyc.wordpress.com is now complete. All articles have been migrated. All comments have been lovingly preserved. All the internal links have been fixed (by hand) in a long and painstaking process. Robots and spiders are crawling all over the new site. The only omission was a handful of WordPress images. I realised that I was a little hasty in deleting my old WordPress blog otherwise I could have easily retrieved these files too. Or a simple ‘wget’ of the complete site would have done the job. ...

I have been pretty impressed with Dreamhost so far: Configured putty for SSH access. Installed Joomla (one-click) Upgraded to PHP5 (one-click) Installed MediaWiki (one-click) Installed Gregarius (all by myself) The only minor issues I have encountered is that I can’t disable telnet (insecure) and my analog stats didn’t get refreshed today. Dreamhost have a blog, a Wiki, support forums and any idiotic questions (after ignoring all of those) have all been answered promptly and courteously.

The WordPress rich text editor is pretty good but has an odd bug which is a little irritating. It keeps confusing paragraph end with line break I tried Writely which worked but has no support for adding categories, omits the title and uses an obscure post slug so now I am trying Performancing for Firefox which has none of these limitations and works fine.