zedzdead » blogging

Outage

Andy — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 21:44:48 +0000

Since moving to Media Temple, I haven’t been the most attentive web developer, probably because all the sites I have on there are my own and none are particularly good. I’m trying to change that, and for once, tonight I had some time to have a fiddle, change a blog theme here and there and generally get under the skin of the whole thing. Problem is Media Temple went awol, and I’ve been surfing the web, waiting for the service to come back up.

Its here now, and I now have about 2 mins to write a blog post and not much else. The kids are going to bed in a minute and I’m dying to get to my second Schneider Weisse of the night, so bang goes tonight’s little site fiddle. Bollocks!

What I did next

Andy — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:52:49 +0000

Anybody who has set up wordpress more than once starts to add to a list of things to do after install. Here’s just 5 things I did straight away even though it took me 10 times as long to finish off the blog post about it.

I changed the theme and I don’t need to tell you how to do that because there’s a whole raft of stuff about it out there.
I activated Akismet (spam killer). You’ll need a WordPress API key for this, which you can get by creating an account at WordPress. Once you have your api key, navigate to Plugins on your WordPress dashboard and if it isn’t already installed, install it and activate it with your key. At the time of writing I have 4 spam posts, which have already been blocked by Akismet, and countless others, no doubt, already deleted. Install it now.
Install Google Analytics Plugin. If you install this prior to your first post, you’ll have visitor statistics from day one.
Added a favicon. I don’t know in what version a default favicon began shipping with WP, but all you need to do is find it and replace it with one of your own. I have the .ico plugin for PhotoShop but you can get free favicon generators all over the web.
Microformats. I’m a big fan of microformats, and browser support is growing. I have an hCard on every page of the site, (hidden for now, until I find a theme I really like or until I design my own). If you want to find out more about microformats, the wiki is a great starting place and if you’re using FF, download the Operator toolbar now, its the best microformats tool around.

That’s it. I did all that about 6 weeks ago! C’mon Andy get your arse into gear and write some more posts.

Welcome (back)

Andy — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:09:23 +0000

Welcome to the third incarnation of this blog. I’ve been blogging, mostly very badly, for about 7 years. I started on a domino platform but following a move into PHP development in 2003 I moved towards the LAMP platform. I have backups, but I read them and they’re rubbish, so I’m starting over with a clean slate.

Until a couple of months ago I was turning out weak, limp wristed posts about once a month but when my hosting company went West with no warning whatsoever, there I was blogless. Thanks to twitter, flickr, friend feed, linkedIn, and Facebook losing the power to blog is nowhere near as debilitating as it might have been two or three years ago.

So a new host and a new wave of optimisim, plus a scheduled reminder on rtm heralds a new era of blogging from me. So expect the usual load of everyday life crap mixed in with a bit of WordPress, symfony, social networking and the latest from the web.

Now, lets get this blog set up the way I want it…….