Last night I upgraded this site to the latest version of WordPress 2.2.1. Thank goodness it always seems to go smoothly. To my surprise, even the template (which dates back to WP 1.5) didn’t need modifying (well, not for technical reasons, anyway — I’m considering tweaking it on aesthetic grounds!)

Anyway, here’s a few good links from this week:

How Google Earth Really Works.

You’re used to the Mac/PC adverts… here’s the Parallels adverts, highlighting their virtual PC for Mac “Parallels Desktop” product.

Something I’ve talked about before highlighted again: The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a “ticking time bomb”, the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned.

NOW HEAR THIS, all contributors and readers:

The site will be moving servers. This is expected to happen on Wednesday afternoon. During the move, we should remain reachable, but interactive features (that means Comments) will be turned off to avoid data loss. They’ll come back on as re-delegation to the new server reaches completion.

Contributors should avoid posting their brilliant and lengthy diatribes until it’s all over.

Wednesday 9:40pm. Well, that wasn’t entirely without its challenges. But we should be okay now.

We’ve got MySql problems here at Geekrant central.

MySQL said: Documentation
#1016 - Can’t open file: ‘wp_comments.MYI’ (errno: 145)

Doesn’t sound good, does it? The ISP is looking into it.

Nothing else seems to be AWOL, but I’ve taken a backup of everything just in case. Wouldn’t you know it, the backup I have of wp_comments isn’t particularly recent. Hopefully the ISP has a newer one, but if not, I’ve grabbed a bunch of comments via Newsgator’s cache. Gawd knows how I’d restore them though.

Update: Fixed. May I just say, the support guys at AussieHQ hosting are deadset legends.

It’s probably the type of anniversary that can be most easily missed without dire consequences, but I just realised that as of the 1st of this month, Geekrant.org was a year old. Thanks to my co-conspirators and (some only occasional, alas) contributors Tony, Josh, Andy and Brian.

Traffic has continued to climb, so obviously somebody’s reading, even if it does seem to be mostly a handful of regulars who keep commenting.

And if you’re wondering, the biggest hitting entry is the one with those pictures of Bill Gates.

Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast!

This site is expected to be down for a little while on Saturday as our ISP upgrades the servers. If you’re desperate, the Google cache is here, or try reading via Bloglines.

I’d like to welcome all the readers we seem to have picked up over the last few weeks. I don’t know where you’ve all come from (haven’t had time to properly peruse the logs) but the graphs are clear: like a thriving assassination business, we’re getting more and more hits all the time. Hopefully it’s not ‘cos it’s a couple of people who’ve got their RSS readers pounding us every 5 seconds.

Don’t forget to leave us comments. We love to hear your thoughts on the gumpf we post up here. If you were waiting for a post where you felt you could contribute something witty, relevant and intelligent, well… you can keep waiting, or feel free to say hello on this one.

Bearing in mind that we’re currently on a low budget cheapo traffic plan at the moment, and perilously close to blowing out our monthly quota after just 3 weeks into March, I’ve fiddled the WordPress settings to only serve 10 posts via the home page or RSS feed — down from the default of 20. This should still give you about a week’s worth of Geekrant Goodness, which should be plenty for most people. And hey, it’s all in the archives if you want to delve back further. But let us know if it effects you.

And if the traffic keeps climbing, I’ll be pushing the plan up a notch to handle it.

About to upgrade this blog to WordPress 1.5.

11:40pm. Done. The main difference noticeable to readers will be that your comments automatically go to moderation if you’ve never left a comment before.

One thing notable to us authors is that the top of the admin pages looks a bit screwy in Firefox (but okay in IE). Not sure why that is, because WP1.5 doesn’t do that on my other blogs… something to look at when I have more time.

Well after deleting what seems like hundreds of bloody comment and trackback spams over the past week, I’ve installed Spam Karma (billed as a “fearless Spam Killing Machine”) on this blog. If it’s successful, I’ll be installing it on my other WordPress blogs.

It includes blacklists, captcha or email verification for suspicious comments, a myriad of settings, all that good stuff. For now I’ve set it to “lenient” mode until I get a feel for how strict it is. Feel free to leave junk comments here to see how it goes. (But beware of deliberately leaving spammy comments — for all I know it may decide to blacklist your IP address!

PS. Tuesday 21:25. The manual install as in the ReadMe worked for fine me, except that you can’t get to the config page through the menus, you have to activate it from the plugins page, then go to the URL it quotes. (This is apparently a known thing with WP1.2, but I guess it applies to WP1.2.2 as well, which we’re running here. Presumably it doesn’t apply to the current nightly builds or to the future 1.5.)

Also be sure to try the test captcha page (linked off the config page) to make sure that bit works (eg the correct PHP libraries are there somewhere. If they’re not, I guess you need to hassle your ISP. Works fine for me.)

PS. Wednesday 21:15. There is a hitch: the e-mail it sends out summarising what it’s done is encoded with something. I think this is an incompatibility with the PHP setup on my ISP… the same thing happened with WordPress 1.2’s password reminder messages. I’ll have to dig around for a fix.

It should also be noted that Tony has tried to plonk it onto a blog he runs, and is having some issues. So it’s not all beer and skittles.

On the bright side, it tells me it caught 20 spam comments in the last 24 hours. I certainly haven’t seen any get let through.

PS. Thursday 20:05. Some are getting through, but evidently nowhere near the total number being caught. Hmmm.

Our RSS feed now includes full articles, not just annoyingly short extracts. ‘Cos although I’d love to make some money from the Google ads to cover the hosting costs, the hosting isn’t actually exhorbitant (in fact it’s a bloody bargain) and anyway the concept behind this site is to spread and discuss ideas, not to try and make money. Besides which the proliferation of site content via RSS may in itself bring more site visitors.

Thanks especially to Paul on the comments on full vs summary RSS feeds.

Obviously in a geek blog, you should blog about how the blog got setup.

Domain name. Geekrant.com and .net were already taken, but .org was free. I registered it with Gandi. They’re a French company, have been around for a while. I think I first encountered them some years ago in a list of domain registrars. At the time they were up near the top of the recommended registrars not only for being reasonably cheap and reliable, but also for having a domain registration policy that precluded all sorts of the kind of legal mumbo jumbo that some other registrars had at the time, which theoretically gave you rather less than complete control over your domain. Whatever the reason I originally went with them, they’ve been good over the years, and provide useful stuff like free domain and e-mail forwarding. At 12 Euros a year, perhaps not the cheapest around, but reliable and quick. Quicker than I thought, actually. I assume Those In Charge have improved the speed of new domain propagation over the last few years, because everything seemed to be done after a couple of hours.

Hosting. The hosting is at Aussie Hosts, a mob in Brisbane who specialise in shared hosting on Linux, and using the Plesk7 web site control software, which is frikkin’ marvellous. I’ve never come across a web control panel quite so useful and user-friendly. It does everything, and is light-years ahead of most of the other very clunky web control panels I’ve seen.

Software. Installing WordPress is dead easy. Upload the files into the http directory, create the MySql directory and its user in Plesk, then run WordPress’s install script. That’s it. It creates all the tables, creates the initial user, and away you go. Then I logged-on to WordPress and created the users, set the various options like comment spam parameters, and structure of permalinks. For the latter it tells you what your .htaccess needs to look like. You just paste it into the file and you’re done. (Admittedly it shat itself the first time I tried it. I wiped it out, and tried it again a bit later. Not sure what was different the second time, but it worked.)

Template. For Wordpress’s templates, you basically need to edit: index.php (the main page), wp-layout.css (the stylesheet), and wp-comments.php (the comments section, which for some reason WP’s default installation has quirks like the caption for the comment fields appearing after the fields themselves. Wacky). I’m not entirely a master of CSS yet, so I just fiddled with the fonts and colours, and fiddled a bit with the links and so on. I’ve messed the template up slightly — right now the XHTML validation gets a thumbs-down. Will fix that when I get the chance to look at it.

We started creating a (perhaps over-ambitious) hierarchy of categories for articles to fall into. Hmm. Probably should have just copied out of DMOZ or Yahoo or something. (Just the hierarchy that is. If you look around, it’s incredible the number of directory sites that have swiped content completely from Yahoo.)

Also created a basic logo in my trusty old copy of Corel Photopaint, added in a Google advert to try and recoup some of the hosting and domain name costs, and that’s about it for now. Further fiddling can (and no doubt will) come later.

Welcome to Geekrant.org. Still getting things setup. The idea came yesterday when mucking about with MamboServer. Mambo is a fine product, with a lot of cool features, and was in contention for a web site of mine. But yesterday it finally dawned on me that Mambo doesn’t allow a post to sit in multiple categories. That just plain sucks. Along with the URLs it spits out, some of which are what they call “SEF” — Search Engine Friendly — but are in no way human-friendly, that was the nail in the coffin. That site’s going Wordpress instead.

Like this one. And several sites I’ve setup, in fact.

So I e-mailed a couple of mates to ask if anybody wanted to join in. Josh reads his mail every few days when he’s not at work… no doubt he’ll get back to me sooner or later. But Tony’s in. That was good enough. A few hours later, the domain is registered, WP’s setup, and it’s all systems go. Idea to web site in less than 24 hours. Not bad.

Well, apart from little things like the site design/CSS/template. Yeah. Well. All in good time.

So what is this? A place for people to rant or talk about geeky stuff. Issues they’ve come across, clever things they’ve done, wondrous things they’ve discovered.

More later.