Author Archives: Donncha

The Irish Blog Awards in Pictures

As I may have mentioned once or twice before, we were at The Irish Blog Awards on Saturday night. Here are a few photos. They’re after the jump because there are 70 there and I’d hate to see them load every time someone loaded the front page of my site!

Gallery of shots from the photowalk to come tomorrow. Possibly over 100 shots in that. I do like to take photos don’t I?

grandad

BTW – Please Photoshop Grandad above. What’s he saying? Two example to follow ..
Continue reading “The Irish Blog Awards in Pictures”

WordPress and Blacknight power the best Irish blogs

grandad

Last Saturday night many of the Irish blogging community got together in The Cork International Airport Hotel for the Irish Blog Awards. I was there with my wife Jacinta, it was a great night and I was delighted to see so many WordPress powered blogs. Both WordPress.org and WordPress.com blogs were represented again and again among the top bloggers in Ireland.

I had planned on writing a post analysing the breakdown of WordPress vs Blogspot vs MT vs everyone else but lucky for me, Cathal Garvey already did the hard work!

pub

He has some very interesting stats on version numbers, and I’m shocked that “Best Technology Blog” (sponsored by Bitbuzz) has the worst record for upgrading WordPress. Hopefully this attention will encourage those bloggers to upgrade.

WordPress is the most popular blogging software among the Blog Awards nominees and Blacknight is by far the most popular hosting service. I don’t think you can get a better recommendation than that for either WordPress or Blacknight.

BTW – That’s Grandad in the photo above. Go read his blog, Head Rambles. You’ll love it!
PS. Here are the results of the Awards, read more by Red Mum, Robert, Niall and Jason who reminds us we should vote for the excellent Cork International Airport Hotel. TheChrisD has a massive post listing everyone in his feedreader who posted about the Awards, a few pics, and some of the videos shown on the night.
I’ll be uploading photos from the night in a post here and to Pixie later.

PPS. Alan Burke got in touch and asked me to give Drupalcamp Galway a plug. He added, “Maybe we could convert a few WordPress users ;-)” but of course that’ll never happen!

On Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th of April 2009 in Galway, 2 groups of Drupal developers will work on building 2 real working Drupal sites for 2 good causes. They will have 24 hours to complete their website. We are calling organizations, charities and NGOs from Ireland to submit their site proposal. Any organisation can register as long as they are not-for-profit and do not have a Drupal site already running. (A few static HTML pages is the limit for being accepted).

Sounds like a great idea and a worthy one too.

Back from The Irish Blog Awards 2009

Jacinta and I are just back from the The 2009 Irish Blog Awards and we’re elated after the experience. If I thought I could convey half the good humour and energy and enthusiasm I’d try but I know I’d fail dismally. It was a wonderful night, full of great people and I’m only sorry we couldn’t stay longer and chat some more!

winner

Thank you Damien and everyone who helped. You pulled off a hugely success celebration of Irish blogging.

Ryanair Staff Give WordPress some lovin'

Oh yeah, a couple of Ryanair staff really love WordPress! Or maybe not. Jason Roe discovered that Ryanair’s website session handling isn’t 100% reliable. Click through to the voucher section, click back and suddenly the price of your flight is 0.00!

ra1

Unfortunately a few Ryanair staffers decided to take it upon themselves to chastise Jason for his blog post and took a dig at WordPress while they were at it.

You dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!

Personally, I believe him about ryanair.com and the “dynamic data” which I presume is POST data, but they should handle these situations better. Their chief rival in Ireland, Aer Lingus show an “expired session” page at every wrong turn which is annoying but at least doesn’t lead me down the garden path of trying to buy tickets for €0.00!

Maybe Ryanair should hire Damien to give them a clue about how to play nicely online. Can’t see that happening though. They’d probably charge you €2+€5 credit card fee just to send them a refund request by tweet.

PS. Jason verified the IP addresses of the Ryanair staff. They were browsing blogs at work from their company’s designated IP range of 193.120.152.0 to 193.120.152.127.

The survivors guide to unemployment

jobless I like this. David Jones was recently laid off from his day job and decided to write a book about his experiences in the hope that it might help others in the same position. The book is called “Oh No: I’ve Lost My Job What Am I Going To Do?” and was written in just a few days.

Last week he was on Newstalk talking about his book when he was contacted by Maryrose Lyons from Brightspark Consulting who suggested that a website would really help his book. I’ll let Gordon continue, he’s one of the team who built the site:

Maryrose gathered a team together consisting of Rachel Earley (Website Graphic designer) , David McDonald (Book Graphic Designer), David Duignan (Photographer), Alex Gibson (Award winning Podcaster ) and myself to put the site together and make the functional stuff like Paypal work.

And so was born Joblessandproud.com. Today, for one day only, you can download David’s book for free. It’s only €4.99 anyway, a steal at that price.

It also has a blog, I’m glad to see powered by WordPress. I’m going to subscribe and see what David makes of this opportunity. It’s wonderful to see that WordPress is part of this venture.

PRESS PLAY ON TAPE: Retro Action

Get your dose of retro action in this video! The Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC 464, 1541 disk drive, Sony Walkman, D&D, Sodastream and various other memories of the 80’s all make an appearance. Might not be safe for work though. You’ve been warned! 🙂

An introduction video used for a couple of our concerts as a kick starter. A tribute to C64 and the 80s – and Benni Benassi’s “Satisfaction”

Want to test the new WP Super Cache?

I need testers. Several people answered my call on Twitter last week to help test WP Super Cache. Here’s your chance!

Grab the development version and install it in your plugins folder as normal. Some of the new features and bugfixes to look out for:

  • If your cache files aren’t being deleted add “$wp_cache_shutdown_gc = 1;” to the config file, wp-content/wp-cache-config.php. The plugin will do garbage collection at the end of page load instead of using WP Cron. It’ll only fire off as often as before.
  • Empty supercache directories won’t be created now.
  • Bad Behaviour supported is added. Just enable the plugin at the bottom of the admin page.
  • If you’re getting an error “Call to a member function get() on a non-object in .. cache.php” that should be fixed.
  • Incorrect supercache mod_rewrite rules were generated if your blog was installed in a sub directory and they’re fixed now as well but you’ll have to delete the old rules.

If all goes well, WP Super Cache 0.9.1 will be released before the end of the week!

I called the litter warden

litter warden

This morning I discovered a black refuse sack of rubbish had been dumped almost in front of my house. This afternoon it’s still there but I rang the litter warden for South Cork, Jim Dooley at 021-4285417 giving my name, address and phone number. Hopefully they’ll get out here soon and find incriminating details buried in the bag but I don’t hold out much hope of that.

From a brief inspection of it, whoever dropped it doesn’t have the healthiest diet in the world. Packets of crisps, cans of Diet 7UP, plastic wrapping, and of course some of the local dogs have got their jaws into it too. Oh yeah, dogs are supposed to be under the owner’s control? ‘Course they are. The dog warden would have a field day around here too.

Anyway, I’m really pissed off at whoever dumped the rubbish. It’s disgusting, ignorant and completely irresponsible. I’ll update this post if the litter warden shows up. Seething.

WordPress MU 2.7

After a lengthy delay, WordPress MU 2.7 is now available. WordPress MU is the software that runs on WordPress.com and many other sites.

This is a sync of the code from WordPress 2.7 released last December. It’s taken a while but I think it’s worth the wait as there are many bugs fixed. Besides the merge with WordPress 2.7 there are also a few new features, including Viper007bond’s admin bar which is the most user visible addition.
Check the timeline for further info.

Upgrading from WordPress MU 2.6.5 should be as easy as copying over your existing install but please backup everything. Blog databases must be upgraded but that will occur in the background as usual.

I would really like to thank everyone who helped me bring this release out and offered me encouragement along the way. I’d name names but I’m bound to miss someone! It’s great hearing what everyone is doing with WordPress MU. There’s quite a community out there!

WP Super Cache 0.9

WP Super Cache version 0.9 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.

Update – if your blog is installed in a sub directory instead of at the root of your server, the .htaccess file might be wrong. Download and install the development version which corrects this. You’ll have to edit the .htaccess file (anyone want to volunteer to write an auto-upgrader?) and remove the rules between the lines # BEGIN WPSuperCache and # END WPSuperCache. Delete those lines too and visit your admin page. The plugin should do it’s stuff and spit out correct mod_rewrite rules for you. The dev version also has a few other bug fixes so if you’re adventurous have fun upgrading!
There’s no need to touch wp-content/cache/.htaccess

Are we nearing version 1? Possibly. In this release a number of bugs have been fixed and the following new features added:

  1. Mobile user agents are detected and a different cache page created for them. If you use a plugin that displays a different theme to these devices it will hopefully work now. The plugin changes to “half-on” mode because the detection is done by PHP. Thanks to Alex King‘s WordPress Mobile Edition plugin for the detection code.
  2. The number of cache files will be more than halved on a normal site with plenty of anonymous visitors. This should be a huge win for WordPress MU sites and very busy blogs.
  3. The last and next garbage collection times are displayed on the admin page now.
  4. In previous versions the newly generated page was delivered uncompressed to the first visitor even if the browser supported compression. I’ve fixed this but I’m not 100% certain it will work for everyone so it’s disabled by default. Edit wp-content/wp-cache-config.php and add “$wp_cache_gzip_first = 1;” to enable this. It’s enabled here.
  5. If expiry time is longer than 30 minutes, garbage collection will be done every 10 minutes, else it’ll be done 10 seconds after the expiry time.
cache-contents

Unfortunately wp-content/advanced-cache.php will have to be updated again and it’s not as simple as copying the file from the plugin directory. Full instructions are printed on the admin page and it should auto update in most cases.

PS. Test your upgraded blog on Is my blog working, a project by fellow Automattican Alex Shiels.
Here’s the page for this site. 102ms page generation time is rather fast!

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