Twenty Major got the Go Maith treatment on Saturday. Click through to the blog post to read the English version. I previously mentioned Go Maith here.
Congrats to Twenty on his wins at the Blog Awards!
Twenty gets go maith
Author Archives: Donncha
The moon will be blood red tonight
A lunar eclipse is expected tonight at 10:44pm here in Ireland, all over Europe, Africa and elsewhere. I’ll be outside with my Canon 20D and 75-300 zoom so hopefully I’ll get a shot or two I can post here later. NASA has a great page on the eclipse which is where I got these two images.
I checked Astronomy Ireland too but unfortunately their site is basic and at a glance isn’t very informative. They definitely need a blog to update their events and provide more information. If one were cynical, you might think they want you to ring their premium rate numbers…
Never fear, the blogosphere came to the rescue. Daragh’s post on the subject has the times of the eclipse and how long it’ll last. I’m subbed to his blog, read that post this morning, and only thought seriously about the eclipse this evening, long after forgetting where I had come across it.. Thank you Darragh! Hope you enjoy the Blog Awards tonight!
Edit: I wrote a short post, how to photograph a lunar eclipse which might be useful to you if you’re out on this cold night. It’s getting foggy here in Blarney but I hope if clears up in the next hour!
9:46pm – a shadow can be seen at the bottom of the moon.
Matt has some excellent shots of the eclipse:
(Matt – get off the phone! Jacinta just rang and the line is busy!)
More photos of the eclipse:
You didn't hear? Upgrade now!
On the off chance that you haven’t heard the news yet. You should upgrade your WordPress install straight away. Don’t hesitate, do it now. Don’t pause to grab a cup of coffee. If you’re just waking up then rub the sleep from your eyes and jump to the download page and grab WordPress 2.1.2.
Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.
Users running from svn code aren’t affected, but then you probably already knew that already didn’t you? You should be subscribed to Hackers and Testers lists.
Don’t worry if you’re running a WordPress MU site. That isn’t affected, although you should upgrade to the latest 1.1.1 release as that fixes a number of problems with 1.0 as well as merging in some security fixes from WordPress core.
WordPress.com users have nothing to worry about.
Counting down to the 2007 Blog Awards
It’s not long to go before the Blog Awards on Saturday. Damien says that there’s extensive media coverage of the event including interviews on radio and spots on RTE news. I’m looking forward to seeing who wins what on the day. I’ll be keeping an eye on Irish Blogs.ie for updates that evening, but I’ll be staying at home here in Cork while everyone is partying in Dublin!
Meanwhile, Blarney suffered yet another power cut. This one lasted for well over 2 hours. Have laptop, have dvd player, watched “United 93”. Frighteningly real and shocking film. I still remember being in my boss’s office watching on a little portable TV as the smoke poured out of the World Trade Center that day and later hearing from clients on that campus that they were ok.
Edit: While on the subject of Irish blogs, Haydn Shaughnessy asked if Irish blogging is about to peak just as blogging becomes mainstream elsewhere? I never got around to commenting on it, but if I had I would have asked, “Does it matter? People have been nattering and gossiping forever and a day and they’ll do it in whatever forum they can.” His article appeared in today’s Irish Times, so go buy the dead tree version, or read the comments on the post above.
Catch it if you can! WordPress mu 1.1.1 escaped!
Despite my best efforts to put off releasing WordPress mu 1.1.1 for another day it slipped through my fingers, tarred and zipped itself into neat bundles on the download page and screamed at all and sundry that it was free.
So, go on! Download and enjoy. As always, try it on your development servers before pushing it live, just to make sure it doesn’t conflict with anything else you’ve installed. We’re tracking the development version of WordPress itself so any new features that you see there will be in WordPress mu too. And if you haven’t looked before, the mu timeline will give you a good idea of what’s changed recently.
Some highlights:
- PHPMailer is now used for email delivery. Once you configure it to use a local smtp server email literally flies out the door.
- “No Options” are saved. Well, WPMU already had something like this for storing false option values but now it’s much better. Thanks Ryan for fixing that in MU.
- Ryan’s In The Trunk post has a pretty good list of the new features you can expect in this release.
Bill and Steve and the C64
WP plugin: Flickr Blog This to draft post
Have you ever been annoyed when you blog a photo from Flickr and you wished the post had been saved as a draft instead of being published?
I’ve used Flickr to host the images on my photoblog from the first post there but this plugin should make it easier and less stressful to use. Every time I publish a photo through Flickr I have to rush to resave the post as a draft post before anyone notices all the extra line breaks or broken links. Add to that, I tag and categorise the post and it’s a frantic few minutes of editing.
The Flickr Blog This to Draft plugin for WordPress simply stops the publishing of blog posts from Flickr and saves them as draft posts.
Irish WordPress powered companies and a free iPod
Matt started the “company website run on WordPress” theme by posting that moo.com runs on WordPress, so here are two Irish companies that use WordPress to run their websites:
- Segala, a company involved in website accessability and trust. They have rather an interesting idea about content labeling. Paul Walsh, their CEO, “is Segala’s W3C advisory committee representative”. Keep an eye on them. You’ll be hearing more about them I’m sure! Oh, and if you leave a comment here, it may be entered into a
link baitcompetition Paul’s running. He’s giving away an iPod on March 2nd. If he picks you, I’ll email you with Paul’s email address. - The second website I will mention is one outside of the usual web 2.0 zone. It’s Harrington Estates, an estate agent in West Cork, Ireland. Houses are listed in posts, and interested buyers can leave a comment using the standard comment form. Thanks to the SEO friendly nature of WordPress, the site also appears on the front page of Google for related search terms! Thanks Frank for that info!
Are there any more Irish companies using WordPress that I can profile in a future post?
Update – the winner has been announced! Competition closed!
How to bend a nail
Look away now if you don’t want to know how this magic trick is done! When you press play you’ll never be able to go back to the sweet innocence and blissful ignorance of the entertained audience!
Oh dear, you pressed play didn’t you? Ruined it for you didn’t you? Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
How to edit a cell in Excel or Openoffice
This was one of those things that bugged me for ages but because I wasn’t sure of the terminology I could never find an answer for it. How do I edit a cell in Openoffice without doing either of the following?
- Double clicking on the cell.
- Clicking on the cell, then clicking on the edit bar at the top of the window.
The answer is quite simple, and it’s probably in some FAQ somewhere but each time I had a want to find it, I would have been up to my eyeballs in receipts working on my VAT return. Luckily, Lifehacker linked to this Excel keystrokes post which has a couple of magic key combos but look in the comments for the real meat.
How do I edit a cell in my spreadsheet? Hit F2.
F2 F2 F2 F2
Hit the F2 key to edit a cell. When I first discovered this keystroke, it was like the clouds parted and the light of God beamed down on my keyboard. Give it a shot right now if you haven’t used the F2 key before. (Hint: it will allow you to edit the data in the selected cell)