Upgraded wordpress 2.3 just now.

This is quite a major version for me because it’s the first to have its own tag support.  I’ve been doing all my tagging with a plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior and dreaded the moment I’d have to convert all my tags to some WP implimentation, but heck, with WP being such a great community developed kit 2.3 came with its own import scripts for all the popular tag plugins!

You still have to change the theme to use WP’s own functions though, which seems to have gone fine except I can’t find a way to colourise the tag clouds all pretty like.

There will probably be things in the theme I’ve forgotten to migrate so expect shitty things.

Said the man with the broken mind.

Wanting the flexibility of hosting your blog on your own space is such a faff.  I’ve not really had the inclination to blog recently because my site is totally in a state of flux.

The peeps who are currently hosting this are a bunch of jokers and it really is one thing after another.  Not long after recovering from my blog being completely inaccessible one of my 2 domains with them was due to expire.

Itchmerry.com is actually parked (is that the word?) as a subdomain of scissordesign.com, which I never used but was the first of the 2 domains for me to register and as such is the boss of the shared space I pay for.

Now, I received an auto generated email from them telling informing me that scissordesign.com was due to expire next month and that I should send them a cheque for 0.00GBP.  Obviously I needed to question such a strange amount to be invoiced for… I certainly wasn’t going to waste a page of my chequebook for zero pounds and zero pence, although it would probably have been good for a laugh.  So I emailed them and was given a reply saying the email was no longer in use and I should submit a ticket on a new support site they’ve set up.  So I did that, only for the following page to spool off a load of php errors, the sites mail server wasn’t set up properly.  So not only did I not receive any confirmation but I doubt the bunch of jokers running it received anything either.

Suffice it to say, I never heard back and the domain went and expired.

Although itchmerry.com is still accessible it is a problem because some apps, notably a lot of blog readers store the URL that itchmerry.com/feed/atom resolves to, which is itchmerry.scissordesign.com/feed/atom.  And this now fails.

So basically no one is going to be reading this, which is the sux0rz.

I’ve decided to sign up with bluehosts.  I’ve chosen them because they have paid advertising on wordpress.org’s list of compliant hosts.  So I figure that should protect me from any future wordpress issues, such as them deciding to block it or whatever…  Plus they charge a fair bit more than my current hosts and I’m hoping you get what you pay for.

They do the domain transfer for you, but i’m wondering how successful they will be considering the jokers who currently have my domain are MIA.  I hope that if they don’t manage to transfer it, they will refund me?

Even still, once I have this all migrated to the new hosts, the domain setup with be different. itchmerry.com will be the primary domain, so a lot of you (not that there is a lot of you anyway) will have to re-subscribe to the feed.  It’s my fault for not using feedburner I suppose.

Sorry.  Ugh. Still, hopefully the new setup will spur me on to keep up the blogging more.  When that happens…

Wanted to upload a song for my podcast (that no one listens to) today but it seems my site is still not quite fixed.

I cannot access it’s ftp service, just get “connection refused” the most arrogant of all error codes.  Also I don’t think email is working ‘cos I haven’t received any from the wordpress install for ages.

I can’t use wordpresses upload file because they have too strict a filesize limit in their php install.  Hmmm, wonder if you override that on a folder basis like some kind of php equivalent to a htaccess file.

Even better, whenever I email them at the moment I get an auto-response back saying that the email address is no longer used, but doesn’t provide an alternative.  And i’m using the support email listed on their website. Fun.

Wow, I’m pooped, i’ve just come back from a 3.5 mile run… well apparently it was 3.5 miles…

Hey look what arrived today! The toast of the town, it’s a red iPod Nano. Gosh, the box is even smaller than I realised, no photo can do justice to just how small this box is. Me loves the red, it’s a nice red, as nice as a red can be. The nike thing is a dandy contraption, and super easy to use. To calibrate it you just go to the calibration menu, choose either walk or run and that run for say 400metres, and it says to you sumting like “start running now” in a darling female voice. Unfortunately, i think I must have got the distance a bit off when I calibrated it though because I’ve just come back from a run and the Nike+ website reckons I’ve just run 3.56 miles and looking at an A-Z I cannot make the route out to be 3.56 by anyones reckoning. Guess I’d better give the calibration another good going over.

Hey, tell you what, the new headphones are a real improvement. I didn’t have all that much against the old ones except that run running I’d have re-adjust them a tad now and then. Well, these new ones sit so snug in and cosy in my ears that they didn’t budge an inch the whole jaunt.

I founsies a nice little Wordpress plugin for flickr. It adds a “photos” tab to the the upload/file broswer panel on the write post page. You scroll through your flickr photo’s right on the write post page and just click on one, a menu pop’s up and you choose the size you want to be inserted into the text! How easy is that!

Introducing All New Itch and be Merry

Power for your potential

Widescreen. Optimised for state of the art wide 16:10 displays Itch and be Merry now packs more information on your screen with room to breath. Complex rasterising allows for per pixel detail never before seen on a web site.

Wide Colour Gamut. Itch and be Merry has a more dynamic use of colour, utilising powerful colour profilling technology to deliverer richer, eye popping graphics.

More Lists! Now implimenting more listmania features, including the best LP’s of the year so far on every page.

The art of Tagging. Easy access to the most commonly used tags on every page right where you need it.

Available now!

I’ve been doing more tweaking with my WP installation, i now have OpenID support back and fixed some styling issues. BTW, do you like my new tag cloud? It’s funky.

Unlike Movable Type, Wordpress doesn’t have a system whereby entries are published to static files, every page is php, including all the index’s and archives so every time the service dishes out a page it’s having to render it. This is my biggest concern, generally my site does feel a little slower, but not so slow that i’d be overly bothered. It’s just if the shared server starts getting bogged down in php it’s surely going to suffer.

On the plus side having all pages dynamic and in a language I familiar with is surely got some potential for reeking havoc.

Something worth noting, wordpress’s “write post” page uses a rich text control of some sort to provide a partial WYSIWYG solution, unfortunately it doesn’t work on Safari, but it does work in gecko based browsers.

The battery recall discussion on MacInTouch is interesting. Seem’s i’m far from the only person who had problems getting the serial code to validate, the consensus is that it’s due to the website being overworked, which in that case isn’t very good from Apple at all because surely it should display an Error, and not a message making out the serial was to fault. They’ve also amended the affected range of battery serials as well, so if yours wasn’t one of the baddens when you first checked it might be an idea to have another quick look-see.

Scatter Cushion Affair again today. Strange Capitalisation there, S.C.A. What could it mean?

VIRGIN MOBILE DIGITAL TV (or VMDT) Our Telewest STB gave up the ghost the other day, a faint duvet covered mass floated up into the nether. So, today came the cable guy and it wasn’t Jim Carry, thankfully. The box had to be replaced, but he replaced it with the exact same model, bastard, it really is a crummy piece of crap that thing, slow as molasses, whatever molasses is. The strange thing is though, the guy rang on the doorbell again some 15 minutes later my first thought being that yet another telewest employee had misplaced something because a year or so ago a telewest engineer lost his test modem and came to our house panting desperate that it might have been left here. lol. But no, he said that he had just done a test and my cable modem’s signal was too strong. Wha? The mind boogles, how did he test that from outside? Well, I haven’t had any stability issues with my internet access at all for god knows how long, but I let him do it anyway, he attached some kind of extra screw on thing to the CAT5 screw on thing. But now i’m wondering, have I just been bugged? Have MI5 requested that I be spied upon? Eek, its so Veronica Mars.

ETCO AT MY BASTARD FRIEND Has anyone figured out how to add MT 3.3.1 style Tags to entries from within ecto yet?

WORDunimPRESSed I’m going to change my website for the new season… sometime. I want to take longer over it this time, unlike what I usually do which is suddenly think to myself, “Hey! I fancy changing my website” and then spending less than a day on it, including both the illustrator nonsense and the coding up. I do have some dandy (that’s a hint) ideas for it already. Anyway, one of the things I was going to do as well was to migrate from Movable Type to Wordpress because that seems to be the IN thing these days. But after reading Dave2’s experience I’m not sure there’s any point. Ah well.

MANTS! Gabi is ill She’s been ill for about 4 days now, I’ve given her some medicine each day and at first she seems better, but then the next day she’s fallen back ill again. It’s so sad. She’s my girlfriend in Animal Crossing and I love her to bits. It’s eating me up to see her suffer like this.