Holy Shmoly, it lives!

This site has moved. It's now at ocaoimh.ie where I can play with a more up to date version of WordPress.

Upgrading was a breeze:

  1. I dumped the old database tables and copied them over here.
  2. I installed this site with the usual defaults included near-empty tables.
  3. Then I fed my old db tables back in, changed the prefix in wp_config.php to point at those old tables.
  4. I changed the siteurl and home in the options table to point at the new url.
  5. Finally, I visited the upgrade url which magically brought the db up to date!

I decided on using K2, and modified the default theme slightly to match my old theme somewhat. Unfortunately I had to edit index.php so I have to watch out when I'm upgrading.

I decided I needed a related posts plugin as well as one to display the latest comments. Both required a little bit of massaging to work with the development WP 2.1 which I'll update this post with later. Next in line is something to resurrect my "popular posts" list using data from my referrer plugin!

What about my old site? I used some rewrite magic to bring you here didn't I? 🙂

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Damien had a nice lunch, I had sandwiches. Thought you'd like to know!

Cyclists Beware!

I just caught a few minutes of a report on Radio 1 about the dangers cyclists face on the roads and it reminded me of an almost-incident last night.

As the sun set last night, I was driving down an urban road when a girl on a bike drifted out into the middle of the road in front of me. I wasn’t driving too fast thankfully but still had to press on the brakes hard. When I was only a few feet from her she calmly looked back at us and that’s when I spotted the white buds stuck in her ears and the wire going down to her waist.

Cycling is dangerous enough on our crowded streets but why the hell would someone tempt fate and risk their own life by limiting their awareness of their surroundings?

If I had a “stupid things people do” category..

WordPress Gathering in San Francisco!

I’m off to San Francisco at the end of the month! Matt is organising WordCamp, a free WordPress conference on August 5th in San Francisco and I’ll be there along with the rest of the Automattic guys.

I’m really looking forward to it, meeting people I talk to every day online, hacking on WordPress stuff and taking lots and lots of photos. I’m not the only one making the trip across the Atlantic either; Podz is flying over too!

Corporate WordPress support is evil?

Toni announced yesterday the launch of the Automattic Support Network. This has of course attracted the attention of many blogs who have discussed the business implications but Peter Chris wonders if WordPress.org support will suffer. Here’s another post on the same issue but Matt replies with an excellent rebuttal.

I very much doubt the support network will have any immediate effect on the level of support offered to non-paying users. The number of non-paying users will always vastly outnumber those who pay for support. What happens if commercial support adversely affects the time spent on non-paying users? Guess what? There’ll be money in the bank to hire somebody else from the community to help out!

This can only be a win-win situation for all involved.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, then give WordPress MU a spin. It’s come a long way recently, and if you’re looking for more, then visit wpmudev for older releases, some plugins, a theme pack and other stuff.

The Akismet Worst Offenders

Rich Boakes has written an extension to Akismet that makes deleting all the spam comments much easier. His extension adds a “Worst Offenders” list at the top of the Akismet page. The list is ordered by hits from IP address and helped me delete 2,407 comments with 3 or 4 clicks and saved me scrolling through an endless list of spams.

To make things load faster, look for “LIMIT 150” in akismet.php and change 150 to 10. Your Akismet review page will only display 10 spam comments now, which is more convenient.

Using another mod he wrote he has also hooked Akismet up to Apache’s deny/allow capilibities. It updates his .htaccess to deny requests from the worst offenders on his Akismet page. If your server isn’t particularly powerful this would be a great way of stopping those spammers eating all your precious server resources.

The best anti-comment-spam engine just got a great UI overhaul!

No more dumping in Blarney

I'm just back from the recycling area in Blarney and I'm perplexed. There's a huge sign there saying that effective from the start of this month, papers and plastics won't be collected. The large container for these products is conspicuous by it's absence.
The sign also has "No Dumping!" written on it in pen, and some of the remaining glass containers have the warning, "No plastic bottles if you don't want these to be removed as well!"

On the ground in front of the sign lay five or six white plastic bags full of rubbish. It's more than likely wet waste as well as recyclables and as I left a young man in a hoody approached carrying another white bag. A young woman trailed behind him by a dozen feet with another white bag.

How long more will Cork County Council collect the rubbish that's dumped there before they remove the facility altogether?

Update 24 hours later: The rubbish was cleared up this morning.