Wow… what a nightmare that was. It’s now 9:30am Sunday morning… I’ve been going at this server move literally all night. I’ve not had any problems with the new hosts (more details to follow), but i’ve had an absolute mare with DNS resolution. One second it was there… then it wasn’t… ARGH!!! And I still have work to do for work work No Sacboy for me I fear.

Anyhow… as I say, more details will follow. The guys at the new hosts have been awesome… around 7am ths morning I got my second IP address. Not bad considering it was only 7:30pm last night when the server first sprang into life.

Right, time for a coffee I think. And a somewhat more leisurely completion of the upgrade task

As I’ve already mentioned, I’m looking at migrating our dedicated server. Due to my current hosts being unwilling/unable (delete as you see fit) to provide me with a satisfactory upgrade path, I’m going to try a different provider. This does have the advantage that I should be able to setup the new server and then simply switch DNS around, so there shouldn’t me a major outage, but you may encounter minor problems with incorrect DNS records being cached.

I’ll post again once the jobs done.

If anyone who is a regular visitor to my little corner of the web has sent me a mail in the last week or so could resend the mail, I’d appreciate it. For some reason the mail server had gone on holiday, and I just cleared the mail queue thinking it was all spam that wasn’t getting forwarded/returned.

Thanks

Athena

Just to let anyone who visits regularly know, I’m planning a server software upgrade that will hopefully take place within the next few days, so the site is going to be down for a while (assuming it goes down in the morning, it could be back online around 6-7pm that evening).
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Yet more LittleBigPlanet inspired site tweakage… well, perhaps inspired is the wrong word… yet more site tweakage caused by my LittleBigPlanet tutorials pages is a more accurate if slightly longer way of putting things.

The child pages menu that I added has been adjusted to add a widget styled section to the main content section. It works OK in IE 7 and Firefox 3, but if it causes hassles for other browsers, I’d like to know. To check it out, just go to the LittleBigPlanet Tutorials page.

Well… what a busy week this is… another blog upgrade… unfortunately, this one didn’t go so smoothly.

After a busy weekend upgrading the theme and plugins on the site, I figured I’d try and stay on top of the upgrades, so now 2.7 is at release candidate 1, I figured I’d take the plunge. My confidence was boosted by the fact that the Simplicity theme by Zit Seng supports 2.7, he’d already upgraded and the quick test upgrade I did on my working copy on my laptop went swimmingly.

But the live one… I forgot to deactivate the plugins!!! *ARGH!!!!*

The site itself worked sweet, but the admin area was completely knackered. Thankfully I had a backup of the database (give or take a couple of days of stats) and the working 2.6.5 site (complete with plugins etc). One quick restore followed by a full deactivation of the plugins later, and the upgrade went great.

So, I’m sat here typing away on the great new 2.7 admin system and I have to say… I LIKE IT… I like it alot. But for now, that’s all I’m going to say about the latest version.

Well, well…. it’s been a busy couple of weeks for my lil’ ol’ site. WordPress upgrade… widget upgrades… and now, finally… a theme revamp.

Since I butchered the Stylevantage theme by Styleshout, I’ve been wanting a fluid three column layout, and now, finally… I have one.

After much tinkering, I’m pleased to announce the Athena’s Pad v2 theme. This one is based on Simplicity by Lai Zit Seng. The majority of tweaks were for colour scheme changes, and the inclusion of the header image (Simplicity allows the inclusion of a logo, but that didn’t fit my needs).

The only other major tweakage has been one or two bit for IE, mainly relating to the left hand bar which seemed to disappear off screen. That said, thanks to Zit, this is an altogether better theme than the old one, and even manages to look pretty good in IE.

So there we have it… the site makeover for 2008 is now complete

In recent months I’ve had a few of accounts sign up, providing the most basic of details and matching usernames, nicknames and email addresses, all of which were linked to spamming.. needless to say, they got banned. But more annoyingly in the last month or so, someone has hacked the site. Thankfully it appears they broke something before they could do any damage.

The upshot of this is that I’ve turned off signups since these people seem to be able to break captchas and other measures, so…. if you’d like to get involved in discussions on my site, drop me a mail introducing yourself and I’ll get you a user created. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but unfortunately thats life on the internet these days. Oh happy times

Apologies if you’re a reader who checks back periodically… theres been hardly any action for quite a while, but this time, I do have a good reason. (more…)

Just thought I’d make a quick mention about this issue to try and help someone else being bitten in the ass by it.
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