New Theme

Having not updated this blog since May, I figured it was time to try to regenerate my interest in it as it still has some decent content within and manages to drive 1k unique visits pre month.

Now that I have a new tech subject to blog regarding (iPhone), I suspect that the post rate may increase somewhat and with that so will incoming visits.

I have chosen a new theme to make the blog easier on the eye with it’s white background and simple styling.  It also removes some small issues that the old blog had re: plugin integration.

Please comment below whether you like/dislike the new theme.

PS.  I intend to customise it a little when I have some free time so please also leave any suggestions which I will work to implement.

New photos!

As promised, I finally uploaded all of the Rabbit photos I have and also some others from Siobhan such as karting, the lakes and more..

See them here

Thanks
Stephen

A Problem

Yeh, I lost all of you guys’ comments.

I’m not going to be reposting these (SORRY!) so if there are any that you feel should be reblogged (I can think of a few, code exerts) please post here and I’ll dig them out

Stephen

WordPress!

After a whole month of not blogging I have decided to finally go with the rest of the world and switch to wordpress.

I must say, I like it!

First impressions (It’s been installed about a minute)

• The interface is pretty self-explanitory, if not a little slow actually;
• Installation was a breeze (so simple, you honestly know nothing like it)
• It’s cosy
• The Import tool features a brilliantly useful RSS imported which I used to import all of my posts from my old blog in, 30 seconds?!

All in all it’s a much better environment to blog in than the crap old system that I coded (for fun mostly) and I think it will promote me to blog alot more freely and easily now.

In the coming days, look out for a new theme, some plugins, and some of the old blogs to be re-prettified with pictures which are now in a metaphorical dusty hole with my old blog software.

Stephen

Facebook Status now Cached

Hello, due to the 20-odd second load times that I was experiencing, the facebook status is now cached to MySQL every ten minutes and then output from the database to the main page.

If anyone wants any help to implement this, please leave a comment below and if there are enough interested people, I will release it as a downloadable widget!

Cheers
Stephen

Loadtimes

Over the last few days the site has been loading hideously slowly. I traced this back to the facebook status widget today and have disabled it until I reprogram it to work better

Thanks
Stephen

Comments fixed

Since yesterday, or maybe the day before, comment posting has not been working. This is due to paths being different between the two webservers I had and me finally deleting all of the old files.

They should be workin again now, maybe this was why noone was posting comments

Stephen :thumbs:
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Facebook Status

I have finally after much trying for weeks managed to get my facebook status on the right-hand bar below the nav menu

I will be posting the source code for this tomorrow along with a guide on how to get it all working. I am also considering moving it to above the blogs as the menu is starting to become cluttered with crap. Please drop me a comment re: wether you think this is a good or bad idea.

Thanks
Stephen
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Email

Hello

Over the past 3 hours, I have been battling to get my mail setup on my new dedi. Reason that I’m doing it so late is that it has been something I have nearly always struggled with, and the 3 hour battle I have just finished is proof of this. For that reason, I had my mail routed through my old VPS as it was setup correctly and I couldn’t even begin to get it setup as well on the Dedi server.

I bravely routed my mail.groomi.net DNS over to the new IP today at about 5pm and for this reason, any emails sent to xxx@groomi.net or xxx@sjgmusic.net haven’t been recieved. Please resend them if you fall into this time bracked

Thanks
Stephen

Back to Apache

After coming upon a problem of massive loadtimes, I have decided to revert my HTTP serving task back to good old, trusty, Apache 2.2. This time, however, I am using PHP with the aid of [b][url=http://uk3.php.net/apc]APC[/url][/b] (Alternative PHP Cache) which seems to have dropped page loadtimes by about .5/second all across the board.

Please, let me know if load times have suffered or improved any as I continue to make this website as fast as it can be

Cheers
Stephen