Recent Posts

Forget Box.Net. Forget Mozy. Forget memory sticks. Forget USB hard drives.

DreamHost have upgraded the 'basic' $7.95 per month hosting package from 20GB to a staggering 200GB disk storage.

As this humble blog currently occupies 0.01%, I have plenty of capacity for my photos, documents, CV (in txt, doc, PDF, LaTeX formats) and all my homework. In fact, as my hard disk is a paltry 40GB, I have room for absolutely everything.

And if that wasn't enough, Dreamhost are giving me a further 1GB every week.

The Council House will host the Uefa Cup Final in 2008.

Unfortunately, City won't be appearing but at least the revenue might relieve some of the MASSIVE (£60m) debt.

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.

Time for a checkpoint, I think. Activate the WP-DB Backup plugin and take a full backup of the MySQL database. Export the complete blog (posts and comments) to XML. As for Charlie - well that's yours truly for not taking a checkpoint earlier.

I decided I didn't like the format of the ' Related Posts' plugin and uninstalled it. However, when I reversed the database changes, I inadvertently deleted two key WP tables instead of column attributes. This idiotic error broke my blog. Totally.

So I was forced to delete my shiny, new WordPress installation and database, and repeat the whole migration process again (including the time consuming and painstaking change to all internal links) from my local WordPress installation. Lucky I took that copy otherwise I would have been really stuck.

Still, I am getting pretty good at the migration from hosted to hosting WordPress now and, finally, I understand the importance of backups.

Manchester City - Theatre of Comedy

• Pearce uses a cuddly horse
• Barton bares his mouth to Everton fans. A marriage made in heaven.

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.

Well, you could at least sign the petition if you feel that strongly

I had a blind date this morning at 06.55. An early start admittedly but this lady would surely be worth it. The ladys name was Iris. I was supposed to meet her in Terminal 1 at London Heathrow.

Iris was flying in from Russia after a short courtship (19 hours) on the Internet. I even had an letter (IM) from Iris. Iris said she'd be waiting on the right before you reach the shops (which was worrying enough in itself).

So I slept downstairs on the sofa, snatched some sleep and I booked the taxi 30 minutes earlier than normal.

But, of course, Iris was nowhere to be seen. Stood up once again. Why. oh why, didn't Iris show up ? What's wrong with me ? Will I ever find true love ? I am disconsolate. I am a broken man.

Turns out that Iris only wants to date high flying, big earning, international travellers with BA Silver (or above) and isn't interested in peasants in flying to Newcastle. Even if they are staying in the Malmaison.

I recently read some homework (Religious Education) about the life and times of Jesus Christ that included the following gems:

• Jesus came to earth through the Virgin Mary
• There was another incident where Jesus was crucified

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.

Choose domain name which is taken. Choose another domain name.

Sign-up with Dreamhost despite recent bad press. All the other hosting providers look similar and all have supporters and critics and, to be fair, Dreamhost were quickest (and most helpful) to reply to a simple technical enquiry.

Payment processing takes a long, long time which is a little disconcerting.

Install WordPress 2.0.4 using One-Click installation. Shortly receive email stating 'Blog creation failed. Please try again later' which is worrying.

Repeat installation of WordPress which is successful.

Export existing blog from WordPress.com into XML.

Import XML into a local installation of WordPress 2.1 alpha (includes all comments).

Import XML into new blog. Everything imported successfully apart from the comments.

Install TechSailor plugin. Delete some posts with comments and repeat complete import. Existing posts are skipped and import includes comments for some posts but not others.

Delete complete WordPress installation, recreate mySQL database and empty blog.

Install TechSailor again. Import XML which works fast and without error. All posts, all comments, all categories are present. In fact, everything is intact.

Change theme to the stunning Barthelme which was the main reason for all this effort.

Upgrade Barthelme to the latest version (1.2.2).

Notice that the 'About' page wasn't imported and recreate.

Change permalink format to include name/date as used on WordPress.com.

Install widget support and configure sidebar widgets.

Activate Akismet plug-in (needs WordPress API key).

Install Google Analytics tracking code.

Stake my claim on Technorati.

Respond to amusing comment accusing me of blatant plagiarism.

Delete WordPress blog. Suddenly realise I didn't put up a closing redirect entry. Oh well.

Put kettle on.