13 steps

I’ve just fitted 2GB to the MacMini (which might be the scariest upgrade I’ve ever done), so now everything is set to move the site over, somewhere within the next 24 hours.
To make sure we don’t lose any posts I’m going to lock all the forums just prior to the move and then unlock them on the new server, so posting can continue as usual and once everything is resolving nicely we can go about our business as normal… hopefully… I know some things will probably break, like the layout I’m using here which isn’t compatible with php5, so it’ll be a bumpy ride to get it all glitch free.

Things can and will break.
*crosses fingers*

Apparently a security upgrade, dunno what else is new or fixed yet. But the blogs have been upgraded, smooth as always. Oh Wordpress, how I love thee.

Anyone with a blog should be familiar with Technorati, the biggest blog search engine / tracker out there. They recently added a new feature which allows anyone with a Technorati account to track their favorite blogs. The added fun in that is that there’s now a new top 100 list of blogs who’ve been added the most as faves. And seeing as the bottom of the barrel are scraping a dozen faves only it should be doable to get this here thingie on the list. I know there are more people regularly reading it.
So plug me baby!

old…. but it’s past midnight and I’m still pondering about the consequences of switching to different forum software. SMF is looking interesting thusfar.
But I have no idea yet how much work it would be to convert the entire existing forum, update all my custome code on the site which uses the forum backend, not to mention make a decent layout for it…
Then again that’s going to be a problem no matter what we switch to, and after 5 years of using phpBB I’m afraid it’s about time to move on, 3.0 is looking as far away as it did a few years ago. I’m sure it’ll be fantastic once it does get released, I just don’t think I’ll want to wait another few years for that to happen.

Which OS are you?

Read it and weep. I suppose it was only a matter of time. Expect to have to wade through a shitload more annoying ads once this goes live seeing as so many sites use AdSense.
Needless to say we won’t have any of that on here, I’ll disable it. I don’t mind a few ads as long as it doesn’t interfere with my browsing, but this ‘rich media’ stuff can only stink.

Here’s a bunch of stuff on my list I hope to get around to sooner (or later). I’m noting it down here because half the stuff isn’t written down anywhere and just pops up randomly when I’m laying in bed and should be getting some sleep.
Continue reading →

My main comp is working flawlessly again. It went wonky after I added RAM a month ago or so, black screen and everything. After getting it back to work eventually it’s been unstable eversince. So yesterday I decided to take the plunge and reinstall… no boot option for cd. Big aha moment seeing as I know my Asus board (as any Asus board I’ve encountered) is rather picky about which drives it accepts with what cables and what settings. And seeing as I have 10+ drives in there… some quick rearranging, moving some stuff around to the onboard ‘raid’ controller, some to the standard IDE and some to my pci IDE controller and tadaaa, there was the boot option again. But… no need to reinstall XP anymore, it’s been running sjweetly for 18 hours or so with none of the problems I’d been having. So yay!

It’s a big load off my back as any problems with that system would have priority over some other plans, like getting a server up and running on a dedicated ADSL line to host the site myself. So now I can wait for the ADSL connection (ordered last week) and look around for a server. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a good one before the site crashes and burns on the current shared hosting account given the increasing amount of traffic over the last couple of months. :)
Interesting times.

Finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 and the latest K2 version. Took a while before I decided to make the jump because I read a lot of horror stories about people being left with b0rked databases, incompatible plugins and lots of other problems.
But here we are, and everything seems to be fine. K2 didn’t require that much tweaking except for adding my own stuff back into a few of the php files. So all’s well from the looks of it, time to see if I can find some new and 2.0 exclusive plugins. This version seems to be more dev oriented with little difference for the enduser, except for a new visual editor everyone seems to disable straight away (me included) and a luvly image upload/manager which works like a charm after some getting used to.

A new plugin for Wordpress which allows people who run Mint to display some live statistics in templates, or even in posts.
So right now when you’re reading this for example there have been;
visits this hour,
visits today (my today starts at GMT+1 btw).

The plugin is already at 2.0, and it looks like 3.0 is coming along nicely.
Get it here.

Edit: scratch that, because it makes the blog slow as shit, with the page taking over 10 seconds to load.
No stats on the front page after all.