Posts in category "blogging"

London, near England. 1 December 2006

Brightside Productions proudly announce the launch From The Murky Depths Of The Recycle Pool.

This innovative blog series will round up the latest happenings from the blogosphere with a sideways glance at Oracle. The blog will feature a variety of exciting formats including articles, podcasts, video blogs and live satellite links. Assuming I get that microphone, Webcam and satellite dish for Christmas that is.

'Recycle Pool' will be authored by a succession of guest contributors including CEO's of leading technology companies, penniless Web 2.0 developers, 'B' listers, long standing subscribers to 'Blog In Isolation', dead pop stars, retired footballers and famous libel lawyers.

'Recycle Pool' will only be available as a beta to a limited number of subscribers for a small fee of £25 per month. The blog will be available in all popular RSS formats and an easy to digest email digest. For a small additional charge, the guest author will come round to your house and read the content to you. Travel costs and all expenses are billable.

Top London marketing agency, Scratchy and Scratchy, were paid 3 million pounds to come up with a marketing campaign, corporate branding, logo and tagline. All their efforts were discarded in favour of:

'Drudged from the bottom, read into memory, processed and immediately discarded.'

Stay tuned for the upcoming first article which will be written by the most avid reader of 'Blog In Isolation.' For over a year, this subscriber has stayed with the blog through thick and thin, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. He has devoured every single article. He religiously visits the site every single day without fail. He reads comments, categories, archives, trackbacks.

Sometimes, he obsessively re-reads the same article again and again. However, this gentleman is a little shy and, to date, has never summoned up the courage to comment. So, it is with great pleasure that, after weeks of high powered negotiations in a Travel Lodge Hotel outside Oxford and a clandestine meeting at a motorway service station, I am pleased to announce the identity of the first guest:

Mr. Google Bot

Stumbled across this blog. Another young life ended prematurely. Sad. Very sad.

Engtech has some great references stressing the importance of the blog title when trying to attract readers.

However, this merely confirms what I already knew. A couple of weeks ago, I posted this entry which brought a trickle of traffic from TailRank. This, in turn, brought another article about the same news story to my attention.

My post was titled: '361 days to go'

The other article was titled: 'Black Cat Thunderbolt Rocket Up The Arse'

Some of us have it. Some of us don't.

Phil McIntyre is busy blogging right now.

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.

However, I chose to delete these comments because:

1. I dislike such profanity.
2. The twat didn't even get the joke in 'flowery twats'.
3. Misuse of "you're" in #2.

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.

Bluehost have upgraded WordPress to 2.0.5 so I ignored this warning and clicked Upgrade

Click on Upgrade only if
- no files, languages, themes have been modified
- you haven't added mods to this installation of WordPress

After all, the whole point of hosting a blog is to add plugins and modify themes.

I find it slightly odd that Bluehost have no blog or other means of communicating the availability of these upgrades.

Let's see if posting still works.

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.

In addition, returning to Glasgow on Tuesday 21 November would have given me the opportunity to watch Celtic play United in a atmospheric Glasgow hostelry sharing a pint of 'heavy' with some friendly Scottish people.

Anyway, it's all about the customer so I flew up yesterday. As I landed, I saw a small charter plane on the runway, ferrying a group of Scottish Oracle bloggers to Birmingham. I knew it was a group of Oracle DBA's from the name of the airline.

When I arrived at the office, the client was having a theme week to coincide with 'I'm a (C-list) Celebrity. Get me out of here.' The lifts were out of action and you had to clamber up a large beanstalk to get to the meeting room on the fourth floor.

Scaling the beanstalk was quite a challenge and you had to acrobatically leap onto a slippery white pole before finally reaching the balcony. This task delayed the start of the architecture workshop by two hours but the view from the top was well worth it.

We then adjourned for a delightful lunch of widgety grubs, fish eyes and kangaroo testicles. Strange people, the Scots.

The observant reader will have noticed some minor changes to the sidebar. The thousands of one hit wonders from Google won't.

1. Popular posts (widget)
2. Related posts (widget)
3. '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.

I flirted briefly with installing Google Adsense but, in the interests of purity and minimalism, decided against.

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 !'

The migration was pretty straightforward. This time, I just imported the complete mySQL database so all my posts, comments, plugins, themes, extensions and hacks were preserved. Internal links didn't need fixing up. I also downloaded a copy of the Dreamhost Web site as a backup.

The only package that failed to arrive safely was MediaWiki (which needs PHP5) as Bluehost currently supports PHP 4.4 and mySQL 4.1 but PhpWiki is available.

Still, Gregarius works fine and Drupal is available as a one-click (rather than custom) install. Some you win, some you lose.

While the DNS changes are still propagating around the Interweb, I found a useful note in the knowledge base which enabled me to configure the raw URL to configure and check the WordPress configuration.