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.
(more…)

Apologies if you are receiving spam claiming to come from this domain, but I can categorically assure you that it does NOT originate from me, the people I work for, the company Spirit and I run (Outer Reaches Studios) or anywhere/anything else I have anything to do with.

I have in the last few hours received over 1000 bouncers from mail servers all over the place.

Well, what can I say… what a nightmare. It really was “My New Rig From Hell” (more…)

Its been a long time coming, but finally, I have a new rig
(more…)

Well, I figured it was about time I gave the site a major overhaul, so here we have it. (more…)

If you are weak of heart and haven’t gotten around to upgrading your Plesk installation, but need to run an upto date version of mySQL…. then read on. (more…)