Yesterday, this blog got a bumpy ride from its hosting provider, Fasthosts. For several hours, it was down and there have been occasional errors returned since then. I’ll be keeping an eye on this but I hope that things stabilise sooner rather than later. There’s no question of moving things lock, stock and barrel at this time; patience is a very important virtue when it comes to these things…

Over the course of it’s short history, this blog has had four different themes, the latest of which being my own customised variant of Dezzain’s Zoxengen. It’s predecessor’s have included Andreas04, Andreas09 and Prosumer. I have tinkered with all of these to varying degrees but each has offered me a certain something before I set about my tweaks. Zoxengen is no different and its clean lines and Web 2.0 feel attracted my attention. Other little features like seeing related posts listing on a post’s comments page or listing the tags associated with a post under its title line are, I hope, useful little extras. Correcting English (I may be digging a hole for myself here) and removing advertising slots (for me, this blogging business is a hobby so you’ll find no ads on any of my blogs) both seem to be a necessary tasks when implementing themes these times but the really major change was to make the design more flexible when it comes to different screen sizes, something that I hope to have achieved by allowing it to fill more of the browser window. There may be more changes, hopefully small, but I hope that you find the result as pleasing on the eye as I do.

Update: The blog’s current theme came with a lot of text that was written in poor English. While I should have got rid of all of it from the theme by now, there may be some still lurking here somewhere. If I find any more, it’ll get sorted. If something has escaped my notice for whatever reason, please let me know.

Unfortunately, due to a spot of hosting trouble, this blog was offline for a few days while I was getting things sorted out. Along the way, I learned a few lessons about web hosting that I’ll share soon. In the meantime, I’ll continue to set in place the last few bits and pieces that made the site’s precessor what it was.

It was a year ago that I set this blog in train. Then, I was exploring the possibilities offered by WordPress.com. After some months, I decided that I wanted to make my own decisions rather than have them so I went independent in June. Between those dates, some big launches took my attention: Windows Vista, Office 2007 & CS3 come to mind. All the while, my experience of UNIX, Oracle and other such matters kept growing more and more. In the latter half of the year, I finally made the leap from Windows to Linux on the home computing front, a decision that taught me a lot and one that I don’t regret. Other subjects featured from time to time as well and my musings on web development and blogging made their appearance too. 2007 was a packed year on the technology front and 2008 is only just getting under way. There’s a Vista laptop and I am already picking up ideas for posts, though I am not going to force them out like I might have tried to do last year. 2008 may be a spot more leisurely but I hope that it’s just as interesting.

In 2007, I set myself a challenging goal: post something new to this blog every day. Of course, it didn’t happen quite like that. Therefore, for 2008, I’ll be going for a less onerous one: a post every two or three days. That should mean that I don’t run out of steam; pacing yourself to ensure that quantity doesn’t dilute quality is a very good idea. Welcome to 2008.

On Ubuntu, I made a move to using Ubuntuzilla’s deployment of Firefox. Because Firefox’s Gecko engine is used by other parts of Ubuntu, any Firefox updates issued by Mozilla don’t come through straight away. The idea of using Ubuntuzilla is that you get Mozilla’s latest, be it Firefox, Thunderbird or Seamonkey, without having an impact on the rest of the Linux installation; Ubuntu’s Firefox is left in place but you are now presented with the vanilla Firefox for all your web surfing needs. Visually, there’s not much change but for the built-in Firefox application fonts coming through in the new instance, a strange sight when you see Ubuntu’s more subtle alternatives everywhere else. I tried the new tack to see if picked up RealPlayer in place of Xine but that sadly has not been the case. Nevertheless, I now have 2.0.0.9 and the latest improvements this side of version 3.

The last week on WordPress.com has featured decisions that some may question, to say the least. For instance, the death of Feed Stats was something that I saw as a retrograde step. Next, I saw a slight change to the appearance of my blog that led me to take full control of the situation; a previous discussion with WordPress.com staff about changing a theme to the way that I wanted it to be got me nowhere so I wasn’t about to try again… I might miss having advance notice of where WordPress goes next but I am not sure that I want to be a guinea pig either.

So, you now find this hosted by Streamline.net and, apart from a lengthy hiatus (at least, it felt like forever thanks to recurring thoughts of PageRank loss; yes, I know that sounds silly…) spent awaiting FTP access to be sorted out, the set up ran smoothly enough; I think that my request for transfer from a Windows server to a Linux one might have been the cause of the delay. Setting up a MySQL database was a breeze and it’s part of the package too. In fact, the Pro package that I am using is £31.99 ex VAT per annum, not bad at all, and, teething problems out of the way, it’ll be interesting to see how things will fare from now on.

Having a self-hosted WordPress installation is nothing new to me since I do it for my hillwalking blog and everything came together very quickly this time around. knowing what plug-ins add real value was a definite help: Bad Behaviour and Ultimate GA headed the list but a Spam Karma 2 is another option. Feedburner integration is another potential item on the configuration list. I have stuck with the Andreas09 theme but am unsure as to how far I will take customising it; it’s not a high priority right now. In fact, I may find another three-column layout that takes my eye now that I am not limited to the offerings available from WordPress.com.

The posts from the old blog have arrived over here and that seems to have worked fine first time around thanks the Wordpress’ import/export functionality. I still have to get the images over but there’ll be time for that yet. Another thing on the to do list is to transfer over the links and set up any text and RSS widgets that have been a feature of the previous rendition of the blog. That means linking to wp-links-opml.php on the old blog using the import links functionality. There is no other link export function and you can only import into a single category; a link import/export plug-in that retains the link category information would be a bonus.

While I wonder if I have made a rod for my own back with my having two self-hosted WordPress blogs, it does feel good to have more control and it’ll be interesting where where this journey goes next.

If you have been here before, you may have noticed my posting frequency has gone down recently. Part of the reason for this is my taking on two big Vista-related issues that have attracted a lot of attention and wading through the various articles on the web has taken a lot of time. Finding out as much as possible about Vista licensing was certainly a challenge, thanks in no small part to Microsoft’s legalese, but it has been the DRM/HDCP issue that has really swallowed time on me; a passion-stirring topic that raises tempers is almost guaranteed to generate much discussion. Add to this the need to take care when considering such an impassioned subject and time really does fly by…

Addressing contentious issues that attract comments taking each which view has got me thinking about my blogging habits, particularly given that blogging is a hobby of mine and I have plenty of other things to be doing. As result, the post rate slowed down. If I wanted to continue like that, I could post more detailed entries once or twice a week and leave it at that. Or I could keep things short and frequent, say one post per day. Another idea is to have one long entry per week and shorter ones one per day for other days in the week. Now, that sounds like a good way to go.

Following my change of WordPress theme, sensible headings are beginning to return to its summaries of my posts. Interestingly, it would appear that Google’s BlogSearch has been unaffected by the glitch.

After trying to get Wordpress.com to amend the Andreas04 theme and getting nowhere, I decided to jump ship and try the Andreas09 one instead. The permalink titles are more sensible on this one so I’ll see what Technorati makes of them. Even though I have had to change theme, the wonders of CSS have allowed me to carry over elements of the colour scheme from the old to the new. If you really want to witness the raw power of CSS, pop over to CSS Zen Garden where the same HTML code is rendered in extraordinarily different ways thanks to CSS. There is even a book written by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag to go with the website.