I have been running this blog for several years now and it was starting to show. In short upgrade after upgrade to wordpress had built up a ton of bloat making it fairly unusable for me and eventually led to the RSS feeds braking. To this end I have spent the last 2 days rebuilding the site from scratch and feel I have now reached the state of the existing site. Please let me know if there are any problems.
PS Wordpress limit XML imports to 7mb. Mine was 15mb. Now imagine how fun it is to trim a 15mb XML file - not good.
Since the upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 this site seems ok from where you are looking but is rather messed up behind the scenes. It has been widely documented on the Wordpress forums that there is an issue with TinyMCE and the WYSIWYG interface. I have the issue and like many people with the same problem cannot resolve it using any of the methods described to me. XML-RPC in Mars Edit also seems to be broken. The only thing that seems to work is ScribeFire in Firefox. I’ll be using it until Wordpress is fixed. Let me know if there are any problems.
The site has been experiencing some down time over the week and not for a particularly good reason. My hosting provider fasthosts decided to scramble the passwords of all their user’s accounts making webspace, databases and other services inaccessible. Due to a security breach they felt it necessary to post the new passwords by old fashioned snail mail.
Bad move.
The first thing I did when receiving the password was to start moving the blog. This site is now brought to you by Dreamhost. And it seems slightly faster don’t you think?
It’s been coming in fast all day and I just want to say big hardy FUCK OFF to all the spammers hitting my blog.
I didn’t want to but I have introduced a temporary limitation on all comments coming in - they must be approved by me first. Once you get approval you should be set. Hopefully this won’t last too long and Akismet will finally kick in.
UPDATE: Fasthosts sent me this, from my tests it looks like no external services can be accessed from the site.
We are aware that recent changes to the network configuration of our shared hosting platform have caused a number of our customers problems, specifically in relation to connections from their websites to external providers of services such as XML interfaces and feeds. Our network team are currently preparing a fix for this problem which will be applied to the platform as soon as testing is complete. We hope that this work will be completed today.
We apologise for the inconvenience that this has caused. We advise any of our customers who have pages dependent on external services which are currently inaccessible to consider temporarily removing these dependencies.
So just waiting on these guys to fix the problem before normal service can resume.
UPDATE 2: Akismet is on. Let the floodgates open!
The footage of Heath Herring’s now famous pre match confrontation at 2005’s K-1 NYE show is now actually being used by the UFC to promote him! Being first ever site to post the video I do feel slightly responsible for ‘the kiss heard around the world’ :-).
[via UFC Junkie]
I will be posting my picks for the best games, movies, etc of 2006 in a while. I started this last year and I think it’s a great way, although totally clich√©d, to look back on the last 12 months and put everything in perspective. Last year I did a runners up and overall winner type system, this year I may do a top 5 depending on how close I feel it is. Look for this over the next few days.
Overnight it would seem that the popular web based news aggregator NewsGator has added new features to it’s service that make it frustrating and unwieldy to use.
Many people such as myself consume a large proportion of our daily news through the service. There is a lot of junk out there whether it be redundant news items or just simply things that don’t interest me. NewsGator used to display the entire contents of a feed, allowing hundreds of articles and posts to be quickly scanned through and stopped at if they peaked my interest.
To hamper this, in a clear effort to save bandwidth, they have restricted the length of all items to 3 lines and added a 
icon next to each entry which allows it to be expanded to show the full content. Right now I have 412 unread items in NewsGator and I do not plan on clicking on that little icon 412 times.
The great thing about NewsGator was it treated feeds like a river and not the email style system so many of their competitors were using. This is a massive step back and judging by a quick Technorati search I am not the only one annoyed by this.
For a temporary solution to this I recommend logging into the UK version of NewsGator which is held back a few versions from the main site. But when the update hits there you can guarantee I will be switching to something else. Any recommendations?
As many of you are aware I have been having issues with my host and my wordpress installation in general. Expect some down time as I rebuild my wordpress installation from scratch. Thank you fasthosts for finally adding mod_rewrite and allowing me to do this!!
Update: Site was fully rebuilt last night from scratch. Now we have a shiny new database, mod_rewrite support and as a result feed links that work! Woo!
I don’t normally go into the intricacies of my life on here, partly becuase I find that kind of blogging mundane and boring as hell but what the fuck I feel like shit so here goes.
I think I have come down with the plague, I’ve had a bad throat for a few days but last night my head started to spin (not helped by cocktails) and my nose went on full flow. I have a pile of work to do and I cannot bring myself to do it in this condition. One of the benfitis of having a real job is you can take a day off and not have to do anything - not so when your a student.
Added to that the weather today was just plain miserable, I don’t normally give a crap about the weather, infact I am pretty cold blooded but today was just lousy. Walking back from the shops was not fun.
Highlight of the day so far was TNA Impact which raised my spirits for the brief time it was on. For some reason I really enjoyed this show, definately one of their best. Probablly because Christian is champ and we are headed to a beautiful Ultimate X match next month. Ahhh there we go I feel better already.
The last month has been a bit strenuous on my overall mental stability, its been way too much like a rollercoaster and if I drew a graph it would feature a lot of extreme highs and lows, sadly today is the latter. I like to know where I stand with people, I like to know that the effort I am making is not in vein but most of all I like to know that I am not being strung along with false hopes and promises.
Still got to watch BSG from Friday night so that should be thrilling once again, Ron Moore is a legend. Is it so wrong that TV has become the highlight of my day? Right now that’s what I am left with so I’m sure all of you will join me in appreciating another, if fictional legend, Mr Jack Bauer (via).
I have said too much. Adios.
The time was right for a new venture so here it is, my new collaboration with Andy Griffiths is a site dedicated to Steam news and information that we like to call Steam Report.
![Futurama - Bender's Big Score (with Limited Edition Lenticular Sleeve) [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61THJCbOxwL._SL75_.jpg "Futurama - Bender's Big Score (with Limited Edition Lenticular Sleeve) [2008]")
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