Luckily, a couple of weks ago I went to IWMW10 and as a consequence I had to “renovate” my laptop bag and lo and behold, the camera turns up.  So for most of this week, I’ve not only been moving the images off the camera’s current SD card, I’ve moved them off an older card and off my son’s camera and SD cards.

I now have 2 more sets on flickr and can clear down the SD cards in readiness for the forthcoming jolly to Menorca.

I’ve only put the holiday ones on flickr.  I still need to sort the others out and move the videos.  Anybody got a preference: YouTube/Vimeo/Other.

The crates arrived last week and this afternoon I was panicked into starting to pack due to everybody else starting last week, and because at very short notice I was asked, and squared away, a trip to IWMW 2010.  Hopefully, I’ll make it over to Sheffield in time for the Patrick Lauke talk on HTML5 (and friends).

The packing took half an hour and I was done. I must hoard less stuff as I get older.

I last went to IWMW in 2008 in Aberdeen.   This year’s trip is due to a colleague dropping out at the last minute. I’m looking forward to it and this blog post is partly due to firing up the laptop whilst charging it in readiness, and partly because of the crap on the telly.

The final reason for this post is because as a web developer, I really need to get this blog back on track. I follow @philsherry on twitter and whilst he’s light years ahead of me in terms of ability and experience, I should be better. Phil has also done a really nice, recent post on a simple two liner to add a tweet this button/link to web pages.

Since the new server, many plugin and lib files appear during a svn st which can make it difficult to see changed files which need a commit.

To resolve this, you can run the following command svn –depth infinity revert lib. Make sure you specify the specific directory or file, otherwise you may find other local changes reverting back too (oops)!

On the Saturday evening we drove into Barmouth and visited Knickerbocker’s ice-cream parlour (me and Boba also visited the fabulous boys’ toys shop) before returning to Shell Island for a fruitful hour or so of crab-fishing.

We rounded off the weekend with a visit to Harlech castle, and a pint and a steak at the fabulous Victoria Inn.

Just to try and keep the weekend going a bit, Me and Boba rode up to White Man’s Damn with the 1st Knowsley Sea Scouts for an hour of kayaking.

I’ll be growing a beard next!

My brother-in-law can be a bad influence. I fancy a classic car and he has three (an MG BGT, MG B – the big resto project and a Mercedes 280 SL). He also has a very nice Mamod Traction Engine and since arriving back home I’ve had a couple of failed bids for some very nice examples on ebay.  I’m hoping to found a good working example for about £50.

We chilled out today, over the water in West Kirby, and even though it was bitingly cold by the sea, we had a nice walk around the marine lake, failed to catch a single tiddler, but had a wonderful light lunch in the Sunset Lounge cafe/bistro. We were going to have a quick shufftie at Brimstage Hall, but on arriving back at the car park, Rache, tripped and smashed her bottom teeth through her bottom lip.  Closer inspection revealed her teeth had only just made it through and the scar would be minimal.  Her teeth were intact, but a quick visit to Arrowe Park A&E to check things out meant our day ended with a whimper, literally!

Tomorrow, we’re on the Wirral again to celebrate my niece and nephew’s birthdays almost two months late.  Happy birthday Gabi and Matt!

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!

This morning I attended an arduino workshop.  I felt like a kid with his first set of lego.  Because of last night’s beer mixing, I still have a headache, but it didn’t stop me and my arduino buddy from making a traffic light, fading lights in sequence ad a whole bunch of other stuff.  I never really understood electronics, but now I want to go and buy and arduino kit and get Boba to give it a try.

The tutorial is much more than just an installation, and after completing it, I can say that its not the installation that’s complicated, its setting up the platform that allows it to run flawlessly.  I’ve been developing on a LAMP platform in my day to day for almost two years, but I’m no expert.  This tutorial takes you through the set-up of the shared hosting package and the installation of pear (something I’d never done before)  and once all those things are in place, there are only about two steps to a successful installation of symfony.  I suspect that the tutorial was written for 1.0, but 1.2 just went in like a dream.

I was thinking about developing my own site, but since I use symfony 1.0 everyday,  I decided to give 1.2 a try, by working through the jobeet tutorial,  and report back the new features to the office.  It was at this point I realised that my installation was not the now recommended way, but I decided to press on regardless as the pear installation (I think) saves me space.

That just about brought me upto the end of Day 1.  Day2 is the project brief, but if you ever wondered how wire framing might look if you stuck with balsamiq for long enough, this will give you a good idea.

That brings me to this evening and Day 3.  I tied myself up in knots by not reading the instructions carefully enough, but it seems that I’m not the only one.  You only need to run the following command if your dB already exists!..

$ php symfony propel:build-schema

Also, don’t get caught out by the screen grab of the form (you will only get that page once you’ve implimented the change outlined below the image).

Getting the dB hooked up is a big step, and if you’re past that, the rest should be easy!

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Install Google Analytics Plugin.  If you install this prior to your first post, you’ll have visitor statistics from day one.
4. 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.
5. 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.

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…….