Tangled up in Purple » wordpress

Linkeracy 21 July 2009

nix — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 06:39:43 +0000

Nathan Barry exposes how experienced web developers happily allowed someone else access to their Twitter network. Wth the exponential growth of Twitter and other Social Networking applications, people are excitedly giving away their passwords in order to quickly jump on the latest trend.

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I’m really excited to be attending Wordcamp NZ in a couple of weeks time. I started using Wordpress in August 2004 just love the way that it can be manipulated and stroked into amazing websites. I might not be the best manipulator or stroker but I still thik it’s the best blogging software out there. I’m really looking forward to meeting other Wordpress geeks and afficionados.

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Another favourite, MetaFilter, celebrated its ten year anniversary last weekend. MetaFilter is the best community out there – bar none. The site is not a Web 2.0 site and that’s one of the best things about it. The community is intelligent, snarky and real. They are (mostly) self-moderating, full of real personalities and a site with really interesting subsites.

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Download Wired editor Chris Anderson’s Free, for free.

But the funny thing about waste is that it’s all relative to your sense of scarcity. Our grandparents grew up in an age when a long-distance telephone call was an expensive luxury, to be scheduled and kept short. Even today, many find it hard to keep people of that generation on a long-distance call for very long—they still hear a meter ticking in their head and rush to finish. But our kids are growing up in an age when long distance is free on their cell phones. They’ll happily chat for hours. From the perspective of 1950s telecom costs, that’s incredibly wasteful. But today, when those costs have fallen to near zero, we don’t give it a second thought. It doesn’t feel like waste at all. Wired Magazine

And there is much, much more.

Upgrade Woes

nix — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 22:38:32 +0000

I have spent the morning finalising the last of the several Wordpress installations that I look after to Wordpress 2.6.2. Wouldn’t you know it but the only site that I had difficulties with was one of my own.

When I tried to run the upgrade script my blog reverted to a brand new fresh Wordpress install. If I tried to run that script it appeared that I was still logged in to my administration panel but gave me password errors before returning to the installation script.

In order to fix the problem, I logged into phpMyAdmin and repaired the database tables for that particular blog. As I did that I got a confirmation message that there had been a problem in the wp-options table and that some records had been fixed.

After upgrading that particular blog I was in the middle of a post when the editting page froze and reverted back to the installation page. I applied the same fix only to have it happen again. At the moment things are stable. I found this page (and this one) which describe how others have had the same problem and details some steps for a restoration.

If it happens again I will need to look further.

Living Inside My Technology

nix — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:20:14 +0000

I’ve been fighting a sinus infection for a few weeks now and the long, holiday weekend meant that I had a chance to hide away and recuperate for a few days. My family often accuse me of hiding inside my technology and, it’s true – especially when I feel yuckky. Anyway, here are a few of the things that I accomplished while I was living inside my geekery.

I upgraded the eee PC by adding a 2GB memory stick. Although the stock standard installation of Xandros only recognises the first gigabite of that memory, I think it was a worthwhile upgrade in anticipation of further “upgrades” to come. I have been able to simultaneously open a couple of documents in Open Office, several tabs in a couple of Firefox windows and play some MP3s without too much difficultly. I’m interested in going further though and looking at putting Ubuntu on the machine to have a look at how it handles things.

I applied Vista SP1 to my laptop (HP 6710). I have 4GB of ram in there and finally it all shows up in the Syem Properties. Whether it’s being used is a different matter of course! This is the best installation of Vista that I have done (out of about 25) and I was a bit aprehensive about applying all of the “updates” but in the end it has all worked out OK. And yes, again I did backup first.

Last night I gave in and upgraded this site to Wordpress 2.5 RC1. I backed up first – I have an automatic backup of all the sites that I look after happen every weekend – and uploaded the files. The upgrade was smooth and, so far, everything appears to be cooperating. I like the look of the new dashboard, and am particularly happy with the new addition of the full screen button – less clutter! I am looking forward to testing the new “Add Media” component of the “Write” page. More about that at the end of this post.

This afternoon I got a tad side-tracked by the latest fad. Muxtape is a 21st century way of sharing your favourite music with your friends aka the old fashioned mixtape. It’s super simple – upload 12 MP3s, sort out the order and share the URL. My Muxtape is here – today it’s a mellow late afternoon playlist taken from the first twelve songs from my favourite iPod playlist. I could change things tomorrow by uploading some different songs. It’s simplicity is its strength – although I’d love to see a few stats. Who else likes Cordova from the Indigo Girls? And how many other people have played my Muxtape? I’m sure it will all come. Of interest I can’t play any Muxtapes in Firefox on either my laptop (Vista) or the eee PC. I think it might be something to do with the extensions that I have installed. I need to rouse myself and troubleshoot it further.

The other job that I’ve been doing over the last few days is putting together a P4 2.8GHz machine for my daughter and her family. Their old Celery is dreadfully slow so I have put together some old parts and got a nice machine for them to use. It’s a nice solid P4, 1.5GB ram, DVD RW and has 180GB of hard drive space for them to collect photos of my grandchildren. It’s running Xp but after that I loaded Open Office and a whole lot of other free and open source programmes. Hopefully it will suit them for a little while.

And so to “Add Media”. Firstly an image:

Easy. The options are really clear and easy to follow. And, incidentally, checkout a whole gallery of Last Supper pictures (I know – Easter is over …).

And a link to a YouTube (make sure that you have your headphones on):

The Virtual Barber

or via the embed media button in the advanced options:

Which may or may not be something that Artichoke mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago? It’s definitely worth the five minutes it takes to watch / listen / think about.

Evolution

nix — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 09:22:10 +0000

Site redesign :

“To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and the psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.”
~Anais Nin

There may be some funkiness over the next day or so while I decide what still has “dynamic, living use” in this website. Version 2.5 of Wordpress (back to skipping version numbers) is due out in a couple of days and that gives me a perfect excuse to do some house work.

Ink Blog

nix — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:37:59 +0000

Windows Live Writer

Ink Blog Plugin from Ed Holloway

Tidy Up

nix — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 09:11:51 +0000

I have tidied up a few pages on this site.

Firstly I added a new entry page, here.

Then I added a couple of extra pages about internet security and some of the services that I offer through my business, NixIT Teaching Technology.

Backups

nix — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:20:08 +0000

Always do your backups.

Always.

No related posts.

Linkfest

nix — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 06:22:29 +0000

I’m in the middle of a site tidy up and so I am in a posting mood. Long may it last.

Podz has a great tutorial for getting Wordpress on a USB memory stick. I can verify that this does actually work and is a handy way of demonstrating how Wordpress works. Get the tutorial here – not forgetting all of Podz’ other great helpfiles.

According to ZDNet, Google are planning their own version of GDrive. The idea originated when GMail (Google) decided to offer 1 gigabyte of storage to their email account holders. A clever programmer designed a Windows extension to allow people to use their GMail storage space as a virtual storage drive. Now it looks like Google are going to offer the facility albeit in some cases as a paid service. It’s interesting to note that a similar service is being offered by Box.net.

Fix those annoying Firefox memory leak issues.

A map of ships in the world’s oceans.

A UK investigation over pricefixing in the music downloading business. Not something we need to worry about here as there isn’t that much choice at the moment. A report from Wired Magazine.

Back to tidying up my site.

Yesterday’s Post …

nix — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 06:16:50 +0000

… was written when I showed some teachers how easy it is to use Wordpress (or a similar application) to keep a website up to date. Specifically an interactive school website. Far away from the traditional website that gets designed, half built and never updated (because the geeky teacher moves on or into other things) a school site based on blog software comes alive and gets messages out. Sure, have a static front page if you want! But consider a site that is as dynamic as the school that it represents.

We had a bit of an all sorts day yesterday. We went back to our cluster philosophy and looked at our mission statement and also at our key vision:

Footprints into the future

Our vision statement encompasses so much of the essence of our ICT_PD cluster. We want learning to stick like the black sand out at Muriwai; we want to develop our leaders and chart a course through the tides; we want to feel the sands of ideas between our toes; and we want to have fun in the sandpit.

Our lead teachers are a crazy bunch of people. They sat around in silence getting their heads around Centre4, our online environment. Then they let rip in the chatroom and blogs. We are going to have an excellent year with some very out-side-the-box-people.

Upgraded

nix — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 04:24:18 +0000

This weekend I have upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress (2.0.1) and have gone to the K2 theme.

I aim to slowly customise the whole thing and make it look a tad less utilitarian and a lot more attractive. Again!