Category — Blogging

So, here we are on the first day in 2008 with a new theme and a fresh outlook for my somewhat neglected blog. I’ll start by wishing everyone 新年好 (happy new year).

During the latter part of 2007 I began to neglect my blog. So much so that I have slipped on to the second page of everyone’s popular vanity search. The pressures of a new job and a new home meant blogging fell to the bottom of a seemingly endless list of tasks. And besides, if writing a blog becomes a chore, reading it can’t be anything short of sheer boredom.

I’ll keep this first post relatively short and use it to let you all know that I am still alive and will be keeping my blog updated more frequently this year - this wasn’t a new-year’s resolution as such, but the 1st of Jan seemed like as good a day as any to get started.

With the new theme comes a couple of subtle structural changes. I have attempted to simplify the layout and add some more structure to my blog. My aim is to post less-frequent but more substantial entries - we’ll see how this pans out over the coming weeks. I’ll package up the theme and give credit to all those who’s code/ideas I have used in a future post, but in the meantime I’d be interested to hear any initial thoughts on the new layout.

I would like to apologise to all of you who tried to visit my website or contact me by email over the past week. Towards the end of last week, after 137 days of continuous work, my server decided enough was enough. I still don’t know what is wrong with it. It seems to work fine after a reboot but then all of a sudden it just freezes. This may be 5 minutes after a reboot, or several hours. There is no pattern. Anyway, it looks like a hardware fault and so I’ve put together a “new” server. This has taken a while as I’ve been doing other things at the same time (Interviews etc). But at long last things are starting to return to normal.

In the rush to get things back up and running I’ve taken several short-cuts. You might notice that most of the photos are missing from the gallery and several features missing from this site. Others, like the rest of my family, might notice more important things; like that lack of their old email. Over the next week or so I hope to get everything back to normal.

One positive thing that should have come out of this is that my website should run a little faster. I know the gallery could be painfully slow at times and hopefully you will all notice a n improvement in performance.

Once again, apologies.

It’s been a long time since I went behind the scenes of my server, so long in fact that I had to once again look up how to do simple tasks in linux. Today though, I decided to get my hands dirty again. I found out that Wordpress 2.0 had been released and decided to see if there were any improvements. Despite several reported problems with the plugin I use to manage photos (wpg2), I downloaded the new version, crossed my fingers and ran the upgrade script.

Nothing much changes for the visitors, although the site does seem more responsive, as most of the changes in Wordpress 2.0 went on under the hood. There is plenty of information on what has changed in the new version, so I won’t go into that. I will say though that the upgrade process has been flawless. It just workd (for me). All the plugins seem to be working as they should as well. Congratulations to the Wordpress team. Thankyou.