Time to tweak the Honeypot
Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 1st May, 2008
Well, I took advantage of the fact that I had nowhere to go for my break today and spent some time optimising this blog. You’ll notice it’s much zippier now and that’s thanks to some caching I’ve added. Here are some new plugins I’m using:
Bad Behaviour: Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.
Google [...]
Video Comment? Not for me thanks!
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 25th Apr, 2008
You may have noticed that some blogs around the Web, particularly TechCrunch have added a video commenting service provided by Seesmic who have recently come to market with this novel service. While I quite like the technology behind it, I’m not convinced video comments work for this medium. Any my concerns are also voiced by others around [...]
Time for the big move
Posted by: Owen on Saturday, 19th Apr, 2008
Ok .. it’s time for the big move! I’ve already imported all my dasBlog posts to WordPress (bringing my total posts to around 1800 posts dating back from June 2003! Now the time has come to turn OFF dasBlog and hope all my traffic switches over to the new blog.
In order to help this I’ll [...]
Imported dasBlog Posts
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 18th Apr, 2008
I’ve finally got round to importing my old blog posts from my old dasBlog blog. I’ve had my old blog running in .Net alongside this blog running in PHP ever since I switched to WordPress. However the time has come for me to switch dasBlog off and consolidate everything on WordPress.
The process wasn’t straightforward as [...]
Do you validate?
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 15th Apr, 2008
A friend pointed out that my blog doesn’t pass the W3C validation test, so I popped down to take a look and sure enough I had 222 failures. I’ve sorted out a lot of them, but now I’ve hit a bunch of errors caused by 3rd party widgets I’m running on the site.
So, the question [...]
New Twitter Widget
Posted by: Owen on Sunday, 13th Apr, 2008
I’ve added a new section to my sidebar that shows the most recent Tweets that my friends and I have Twittered. I don’t know if you’re into this whole micro-blogging thing, but this new widget should have get more people dragged in, as they see all the fun we’re having
You’ll notice a whole [...]
Upgraded to WordPress 2.5
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 4th Apr, 2008
I’ve just pushed this blog up to WordPress 2.5. I’ve already rolled it out onto a number of other blogs and have had absolutely no problems. I’ve reactivated all plugins, but if you find any problems, just let me know.
There’s some amazing stuff in this drop. Here are some of the new enhancements:
Cleaner, faster, less [...]
Spam Policy Update
Posted by: Owen on Monday, 11th Feb, 2008
Wow, this blog has received almost 64k spam comments since I’ve started running WordPress. That’s a substantial number, but I’m pleased to say that Akismet seems to be trapping 99.99% of them. I’ve be happy to give them the award for the best software available this year! My comment spam ranges from advertising websites, encouraging [...]
A rush of blog to the .. erm .. head?
Posted by: Owen on Monday, 17th Sep, 2007
Came across an interesting post on Marketing Pilgrim this morning talking about a new blog syndication network called Blogrush. It operates by giving blog owners a widget they can add to their website that show posts from related blogs. In return, the network will syndicate your content on other blogs in the hope of encouraging [...]
Technorati and the Wind of Change
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 11th Sep, 2007
Technorati’s home page looks very different today and it’s thanks to the introduction of Technorati Topics. (On a sideline, the search is still pretty messed up, try running a lawyer search or blogger search and you’ll see what I mean). The new functionality is described in more detail on the Technorati blog:
Each topic features blog posts [...]
Possible Blog Outage
Posted by: Owen on Saturday, 25th Aug, 2007
I’m switching the blog to a new IP address so there may be some downtime while DNS resolves itself. I love that my hosting provider lets me mess around with this sort of thing.
Struggling with software
Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 2nd Aug, 2007
Don’t you hate it when something that used to work suddenly refuses to? I’m running a plugin called FireStats on this blog and it doesn’t seem to like my installation much. It’s been running fine for months on end. All of a sudden it’s refusing to write to a temporary folder on the server where [...]
A word with Woodward
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 6th Jul, 2007
It’s refreshing to see the local corporates starting to get in touch with modern technology and using the Internet more and more. The local ferry company Steam Packet has been pushing their online presence for some time now, encouraging people to book online whenever they can (though I don’t believe there’s any cost savings passed [...]
WordPress 2.2
Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 16th May, 2007
A new version of WordPress has been released. It has over 200 fixes and new features, so it’s bund to be awesome! I needed to upload this to my site, however had forgotten my FTP password. So I logged into my cPanel web hosting and promptly created a new account. This allowed me to go [...]
To WordPress or not to WordPress
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 15th May, 2007
Ian Fernando just asked a question on V7N as to whethr to go for WordPress or not. His questions are specifically about extensibility, customization and spam. Here’s what I responded:
Easy to manipulate: WordPress has an extensible API that has allows 3rd party developers to write plugins for it. There’s a wealth of plugins out there [...]
