Posts in category "blogging"

Graham started a technical blog and Andy used the Drupal theme on his new WordPress blog.

I felt left out so I decided to start a technical blog on Drupal with a WordPress theme.

Welcome to the long delayed and much anticipated issue 2 of Recycle Pool.

We did have a world famous guest writer lined up for this months edition but, unfortunately, he got cold feet and decided to pull out at the last minute.

Eddie Awad gets ready to tumble by sharing interesting snippets from his feeds and travels on the Web.

Graham decides to start a technical blog focussed on three letter acronyms (CRM and SOA). Brave man, particularly as his wife is expecting a new arrival - imminently.

I wonder if Graham will manage to find the time to mend his RSS feed and upgrade to the recently released Movable Type V4.

Stephen confirms something I have suspected for a long time: 'I was always more of a Buzzcock than a Sex Pistol'.

Douglas Burns conjures up a superlative blog, including photos, summarising the fun and frolics at the Miracle database forum in Edinburgh. Sounds like my sort of conference.

Kevin Burton wonders why the latest release of Emacs was six years in the oven. The answer is simple: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Diamond Geezer (pseudonym alert) is lucky enough to be participating in a trial with access to every BBC program broadcast in the last week.

Andy Campbell makes a welcome return to blogging, migrates from Blogger to Wordpress and adopts the stylish Drupal theme.

Paul Stamatiou designs a new logo for his blog. I bet he would have cost somewhat less than £400,000 and could undoubtedly produce something better than this montrosity.

Adam Ostrow concedes that further resistance is futile and Google now owns his soul.

100 subscribers Who would have thought it ? Certainly not me.

I have had an innate fascination with Google Adsense and the correct spelling of monetization for a while.

Countless times, I was poised to hit the 'Unsubscribe' button while hovering over John Chow's blog. But every single time, I stopped myself. Is this guy for real ? Is he really making thousands of dollars every months from blogging ? Does he really eat in those posh restaurants ?

This decision to place banner ads and a sponsored search box on this site was not taken lightly and sincere apologies to all my principled, minimalist, long-standing, traditionalist readers.

Rest assured, the banner ads will only remain in place until I have raised the sum of £70 to pay for a replacement bathroom door in my Prague hotel room

After a mere 10 minutes, my newly created Adsense account was unbelievably showing an incredible return of $0.34. If this income stream is sustained, I calculate I will have generated $14,000 (£7,300) within one month and £87,000 in my first year !

However, on reflection, I assume this surge in activity was caused by my lengthy trials and tribulations with the WordPress plugin and getting the confounded advertisements to display properly on the footer.

These experiments (767 clicks all by me) probably constituted a breach of the Adsense Terms and Conditions so now I have the mighty Google suing me as well as Amazon. Sigh.

Anyway, back to the original reason for the need to raise some capital quickly. This evening, when I returned to room 516, I was informed by reception that there is a small dent in the bathroom door. I thanked them for letting me know, said it was no problem and they could fix it tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, events then took a bizarre and sinister twist when the head of housekeeping maintained I must have been responsible as the hole wasn't there prior to me checking in.

However, I am not so sure. Honestly, I can not recall kicking the door in a fit of pique, my feet don't hurt and my toes are not bruised. Still, the evidence is stacked against me.

Unless I can stage a CrimeWatch style reconstruction, tomorrow morning, to prove that a maid's trolley laden with shampoo, lemon scented body wash and fresh flannels was forcefully rammed into the door by a disaffected and underpaid employee, I am in a very weak position.

Worse, I am told that I will have to foot the bill for a replacement door which costs £70.

Now I have occasionally expensed room service, wireless internet, movies, laundry and sundries but submitting an expense report including 'Broken Bathroom Door' might be pushing it.

Still, with my Adsense revenues, I won't be shelling out for a cheap pastel blue door made from MDF, I'll be buying the hotel.

WordPress versus Blogger versus TypePad (according to Google Trends).

Note the slight skew for news items about Blogger.

I don't know what I did wrong but I just upgraded to WordPress 2.2 and everything still works.

• Download WordPress 2.2 distribution and read instructions.
• Upload tar archive to Bluehost using pscp.
• Run manual database backup using AutoMySQLBackup.
• Deactivate all plugins.
• $ cp -rv blog blog-213
• $ rm -fr blog
• $ tar zxvf \~/wordpress-2.2.tar.gz
• $ mv wordpress blog
• Overlay contents of original wp-content/plugins and wp-content/themes directories.
• Reactivate all plugins (apart from widgets) which is now in core.
• Check version number (2.2) from dashboard.
• Manually delete 143 spam comments that appeared during the 4 minutes Akismet's shields were down.
• Admire new full screen WYSIWYG preview post.

Please update your bookmarks and feeds with immediate effect.

Like most newly born WordPress.com bloggers, I keenly played with all the features and tirelessly experimented with the rich variety of horrendous 1, 2 and 3 column themes.

Then, I left home and bought a domain name from a geezer in the pub. The downward spiral continues into self-hosting and mixing with the wrong crowd. Inevitably, I stayed up late, dabbled in alcohol and drugs while installing every single plugin and widget ever created for WordPress.

You start taking ProPlus, pulling all-nighters and, unbelievably, start hacking PHP code.

Then, I grew up and became a man. I bought some slippers from M&S together with a pipe and grumbled away at the television ('You can't even hear what they are singing').

The stunning Barthelme theme was left unaltered. The platform was stable but you quickly run out of ready-made, cheap blogging material. Apart from a brief dalliance with pMetrics, Google Analytics silently continues to accumulate data, statistics, lies and damned statistics. You start to sleep in the afternoons and go to bed after the News.

Even the recent announcement of a WordPress statistics plugin for self-hosted blogs couldn't rouse me from my blissful slumber. Why bother with all that pesky download, upload, configuration and activation nonsense wasting valuable time and effort when Google Analytics will probably be revamped with colourful dashboards and a usable interface tomorrow ? And so it came pass. Yet another triumph for apathy.

Life was good. And then Scott Wallick had to spoil it by announcing a major overhaul of all his brilliant WordPress themes including V3.0 of the Barthelme theme. As the current version is an embryonic 1.2.2, you can't resist this temptation. After months of inactivity, you now simply have to act.

So you reluctantly risk RSI by typing on a keyboard again. You have to endure the tortuous download, upload and configuration process. Then you have to use the left side of your tiny brain to merge your changes only to discover that the blog looks exactly the same and only a CSS purist could tell the difference.

Everything that is apart from the 'Related Posts' widget which is now completely broken. You hesitate and consider conducting an exhaustive (and exhausting) search for a WordPress alternative that is compatible with Barthelme 3.0.

Then inertia holds sway, so you give up and reinstate the perfectly functional (if outdated and unfashionable) stunning Barthelme 1.2.2 and slump back in your chair.

Donncha showed me his so now I have to show him mine.

1. dixons duty free
2. andy c
3. dixons tax free
4. meaningful questions
5. virgin media v+ box
6. sky.com/anytime
7. heathrow duty free shopping
8. dixons duty free gatwick
9. duty free shopping heathrow
10. dbms_stats+siebel

Yahoo! kindly chose to close my Flickr! account because it was associated with an additional email and not my primary Yahoo Id. I contacted support in an effort to resurrect my Flickr account but to no avail.

So, goodbye Flickr and hello Picasa. To get things underway, I proudly present a couple of poor quality camera phone shots from my recent stays in anonymous and overpriced hotels in Cardiff and Oxford respectively.