Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
I just posted my 3000th blog post according to my wordpress install. This is the 3001st post…
Its shows how great the internet is and what it can empower in each and everyone of us. If your in the Manchester area, you might want to sign the broadband petition.
The blog went down back in June and only went back up a few days ago. So what happened? Well I'll spare you the long story.
Hub.org did a upgrade on the Operating System and other bits and pieces, and broke the frankly weird setup I have for my blog. Now normally I would say they should fix it but the truth is that I've been hosting my blog on there lovely servers for years for free. Well I say free but I did do some work on the hub.org website a while back. So we have a gentlemans agreement that I don't bug them and they let me have a nice virtual private server, which is needed to run the Blojsom blogging server. So I needed to fix why Resin would start then stop. It ended up being a problem with the change of configuration in later versions of Resin.
The reason it took so long was because I tried a few things along the way to fix it and move my blog elsewhere. My previous setup was Apache running on port 80 in front of Resin on port 8080 (always worth checking port 8080 to see if my blog is actually down or not). Previously I was running Pound in front of Tomcat, now I'm using Pound again in front of Resin. Apache isn't really needed because Resin is fast enough to serve up static files along side dynamic processes.
When things went wrong, I did decide to finally move my blog from Blojsom to WordPress. To get stuff out of blojsom I needed to get the server up and running again. I won't explain how but theres ways to get every single entry out of blojsom in a xml/atom/rdf feed. Hell you can even filter between 2 dates and get those entries out in any format you like. Once blojsom was up and running on port 8080 I was able to get all my entries. I also discovered that Blojsom creator had created a export plugin which is now standard and very useful. The problem is WordPress, wordpress fails to import anything I get from Blojsom. I double checked the blojsom files and there all well formed. I've even tried importing into Blogger.com but none of them work, I think its mainly the size of the import file (almost 10meg). Ultimately I do want to move to WordPress because although Blojsom is great, its not quite as actively being developed. Also moving to WordPress will mean I can switch to a cheaper hosting plan and get full support. Hub are great but I think its worth paying for my blog to be up as much as possible. Maybe I'd host my blog somewhere else and I'd use the hub account for my experiments with Cocoon. Although with Google App engine supporting Java servelets now, even that might be a little mute.
For now, the blog will stay where it is but I may be doing some stuff else where in the background. Expect lots of entries from now on.
I was meant to be learning Python while on my holidays but that plan got slightly disrupted with crazy nights out on the town in Manchester and long sleeps to recover. No worries, I guess its what I should be doing on holiday anyway. However in between all the crazy nights, I did manage to start to jiggle things around on a couple of domains I own.
I recently switched over the commenting system within my blog to Disqus. The main reason is because lots of people comment elsewhere on my blog entries and I wanted to find a way to aggregate them and reply to them sensibly. Disqus also has a import and export ability which will be useful for when I do finally move my blog to wordpress.
As many of you might have seen, a while back I made a static summary page about myself on cubicgarden.com. After a while it refreshes and send you to the blog url. Some people have asked me how to avoid the landing page (as such). Simple just type cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden/ or even cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog. Most modern browsers will autotype in previous locations you've been to, so you don't need to type the lot. However this is a temporary solution. I originally wanted to install Sweetcron at cubicgarden.com, so people could see what else I get up to elsewhere online. But then I found Storytlr which allows you to semi-host a lifestream under your own url. Friend feed and tublr get a mentioned a lot in this space but to be honest storytlr was ideal. So you can get to that stream by now going to www.ianforrester.org. Enjoy…
I'm now starting to actively promote the cubicgarden.com as my news site which is kind of weird because its just evolved not really changed. Anyhow I guess with this whole new blog area and the ability to comment on what I write, its starting to come together nicely.
I'm hoping to add less techie things, but that will come as I start to do less techie things. I mean for example the last time I did mix on my computer was such a long time ago. And I love and listen to dance music everyday. Oh well hopefully gatecrasher in 2 fridays will inspire me to do more mixing.