I’ve added a couple of new features to Oxblogged today:
Enjoy!
I’ve just smartened a few things up on the blog, and made it so the header image changes from page to page (there aren’t loads, and it’s sort of random, so it won’t happen every time). Pleased with it, been meaning to get round to it for ages. I will probably add some more images soon.
I had the opportunity today to walk around the roof of our new building at work. I’m kicking myself because I was thinking of bringing in my proper camera to take some pictures around the new building, and decided I’d leave it until later in the week. Still, it was a good view, and I took a few with my phone that came out alright. Have learnt my lesson, and will take it in tomorrow and plead for another opportunity.
I’ve cut down by quite a bit the amount of time it takes me to get to the new place in the morning, and I was still being careful, so it looks like with a bit of preparation I can end up getting up at nearly the same time I was before. I can’t afford to miss my bus, as unlike the old route they are every half hour in the morning, rather than in bursts of four or five every ten minutes. I should be able to manage that I suspect.
And there we go, a new look! I’ve been meaning to get into the nuts and bolts of the site a bit more, and have used the K2 theme for WordPress to give me a building block to work from. One of the nice features of K2 is that you can write your own styles for it, so you can keep the basics built by them, and then start to mould it how you like. What’s more, you can revert back to their style if you don’t like it.
What I’ve been using to assist me today is a fantastic article on Customising K2 by Paul Stamatiou (which was mentioned recently by the ever-inspiring Lorelle). I’ve had problems working with K2 in the past, but this really helped me get what I wanted working. I’ve now got a nice little set of images that rotate as the header, and a bit more idea of how it all fits together. There are 5 articles in Paul’s series on K2, so I will certainly be reading the rest of them.
My aim now for Stage 2 is to develop my own style a little more, make this blog look a bit more unique than just a different header. I haven’t got it quite clear in my mind yet, but I now think I’ve got the building blocks in place to work with what I’ve set up today.
I’m just starting to update the presentation of the blog, so it may look slightly ropey for a couple of days. Hopefully won’t be too long.
As a quick aside, there is a strong rumour apparently that Google are looking to buy up Godaddy. Which would be fantastic for me, I’d love to integrate my Google web tools with my Godaddy accounts, so I’m crossing my fingers. Apparently the rumours have backing in the fact that the owner of Godaddy hasn’t said anything about it, whereas normally he has an opinion and quote to offer on every topic going.
Long couple of days just past, but with satisfactory results. Sunday was spent helping support at work move into the new building, in the main testing phones and PCs. A nice little bit of overtime that will come in handy for New York. Then today was starting in the new building. I thought that it was going to involve two bus trips, but it became apparent on my first trip to the new place that it went a much handier route than I thought. Basic result of that is going to be an extra half hour in bed more than I thought, so that is all good.
Other than that, nice meal out with S&T and their friends for a birthday, and thus a bit of a hangover for Sunday 😉 Got me in a good mood for the week
I’ve hit this issue before with another php-based product, but suffered it again yesterday when trying to install WordPress 2.2. What happens is that you set up the wp-config.php file correctly, upload all the files to your webserver, go to the location of the new blog in Firefox, and click on the link to run the install of WordPress. It tries to save install.php to disk, instead of running the install. If you are using Internet Explorer, you get page not found.
Now I really hit a brick wall with this, it took me quite a while to track down the solution. The mistake I made along the way was thinking it might be down to having an old version of PHP4 on my server. I tried installing WordPress 1.5, and that worked fine. The fact it did, and upon further examination both my MySQL and PHP installs were suitable for WordPress 2.0, meant I really couldn’t understand the problem.
I did some further searching for answers, and got a good lead when I looked at my Apache error logs. I found the following:
PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted
A quick search on how to solve this issue with Firefox this found me the following page that helped me solve it: Tech-Recipes.com I just had to alter the following line in my php.ini file to increase the available memory:
memory_limit = 8M
I upped it from 8 to 16 (it’s on a test server, the suggestion was to try 12). Basically up it slowly and try again until you stop getting the error. This worked, and I could install WordPress 2.2 fine from there.
General pointers:
Went to see the Beastie Boys at the Brixton Academy last night. Mostly a very enjoyable experience, they did put on a good show, and basically were doing greatest hits from every era. However, the sound sucked arse. Loud vocals, very quiet beats. As a big fan of their DJ Mixmaster Mike, this was particularly annoying. Still, I think it was worth a five hour round trip to see them, as I’ve wanted to since the 80s. If I had a things to do before I die list, that would absolutely be on it. It was the whole experience I think that made it worthwhile.
Annoying day at work. Well, 75% annoying, then got something good designed at the end. So not a complete write-off by any measure. Wound up though. Possibly a good evening not to try to create much, and instead to work out my frustration on trying to solve my Hammer Throw blind-spot on Track and Field. For a bit, anyways. Have some Heroes to catch up on as well.
Oh, top tip for the day, I’ve been listening to the Money Talk podcast from fool.co.uk recently. Worth a go if you’re trying to learn more about money and suchlike, today they were explaining the recent stock market crash in nice easy terms I could understand, which is a bloody miracle.
I’ve been watching King of Kong tonight, a documentary about the World record holders for playing Donkey Kong. It’s the tale of several gaming obsessives. I found it quite inspirational, and having watched it, set three personal bests on Track and Field on Xbox Live Arcade. I’ve also watched the first episode of The Adventure Game tonight, which starred Fred Harris, as I probably could have guessed, and also Elizabeth Estensen (Diane Blackstock from Emmerdale), whom I really didn’t expect. So a good night all round
I’ve had quite a useful weekend, I’ve now got a random set of todo lists put into Google Notebook, so I’ve now got one place I can look to for things I’m trying to get done. I managed to get quite a few of these things done as well, which is always the more important side of a todo list.
Not too much of consequence this weekend, we’ve just taken it nice and easy. Had a pleasant drink in the Brickworks on Saturday afternoon, where we got away with an outside drink without being rained on, which it has threatened most of the weekend, but kind of failed to do. Which was good. We also had a cheeky takeaway from the Spice Cafe, which as always was rather tasty. I upgraded my spice threshold to a hot Lamb Saag, which took it from nice to delicious, so well worth the spicerisk.
This week brings my first ever Beastie Boys gig in Brixton, and a busy weekend. Looking forwards to both already.