I’m not updating my website this year, but that’s not stopped me from changing one of my websites! I’m currently working on an update to Linux-Links.co.uk.
I’m working on adding screen shots of the websites. I think I’ve got it working, I just need to do more testing on it.

To keep page loads and image display fast I’ve split up the retrieving and display of the screen shots

First off all the screen shots on the page do is a couple of checks. If there is no screen shot, or the screen shot is older than seven days, then the url is added to the queue, it then either displays a place holder image or the screen shot.

The second part does most of the heavy work, and it is a little icon at the bottom of every page. All it does is grab a url from the queue and fetches the screen shot. If everything is good the icon displays Tux’s head, otherwise it’s the Windows logo!!

Halloween has been and gone, but not the pumpkin pie yet! I’ve made the last pie out of the goo from this years jack-o-lantern, but it’s still to be eaten!

Fireworks night has also passed us by! Even though we’ve not had the weather for fireworks we did manage to get to a firework display before the rain fell!
It was a very nice night, the field was packed, and the setting off of the fireworks was delayed because there was still people queueing up to get in! But the fireworks themselves were good. And it was mine and my girlfriends first firework display together!

And that neatly brings me on to the next subject! It is our three year anniversary tomorrow, or today by the time this is posted! So yes, me and my girlfriend have been together for three years!

Here’s to the next three!

I found a new provider, OVH, its a French company, but at least they do have an English website, and I know a few other people who have their domains with them.

I checked all information was correct with my domains, and I unlocked them so I could transfer them out.

I signed up with OVH last Tuesday, and asked Lycos to change the registrar tag.

On Monday I received an email saying that my domain roganty.co.uk had been transferred, that’s one down, one to go!

Today, and still no news on linux-links.co.uk.

I emailed OVH asking what email address was associated with linux-links.co.uk, and it was a Lycos email address.
I have emailed both OVH and Lycos, and now I am just waiting to see what happens.

Aside from waiting, I have been quite busy, mainly with work, but I have been making some changes to my website, the main one is having it all powered by WordPress instead of just the blog.

I am so glad that I changed webhosting providers, but my only concern is that I’ve still got my domains with them!

More Information

Lycos Europe admits defeat in search for investor | Technology | Internet | Reuters

Lycos Europe comes to the end of the road – The INQUIRER

Lycos Europe To Shut Down; Is Recession Taking a Toll on Old Giants?

Of course why!?
I have moved hosting, I am now no longer hosting my website and blog on Lycos webhosting, I have moved to Hostgator!

I was with Lycos for about six years, and three of them was using Tripod, Lycos free hosting!
I have been meaning to move hosts for a while now.

I have had no trouble with the service provided by Lycos, and the times I have had to contact their support I got quick answers!
But, there was some limitations with the way the server and PHP were setup.
For example, to get my blog working correctly I had to have two additional plugins. One of them changed the default compact WordPress rewrite rules to the verbose type.
And the second was to disable canonical redirects. The server was setting an incorrect $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] value, which sometimes caused some pages to time out with constant redirects.

I contacted their support staff and they said that they were unable to support a 3rd party product.
I installed their One Click Site install of WordPress, but it was version 2.3.2, which doesn’t suffer from the same problem. They told me that they had no plans to upgrade their version of WordPress.

I can’t remember where I heard about Hostgator, but so far its been good!
The control panel is a little confusing, but that’s only because I’m not used to it yet.
They allow you to have multiple databases, so I have separate databases for my blog, website, and linux-links.
I went with their baby package, which still works out cheaper than Lycos.

And the best bit!?
I have been able to ditch the two plugin’s, and all parts of my blog still work!
But I am still using Lycos to serve my domain’s from.

All day I made two updates to Linux-Links.co.uk, the first update is the Linux-Links.co.uk feed!

It took me most of the day to set up and get working properly, I then set up a FeedBurner account for people to subscribe to the feed from.

The second update is a proper external links format. Instead of linking directly to the website, there is a (hopefully) unique code that corresponds to the site, and when clicked leads straight to the website requested!

If you’re unsure about what I’m trying to explain, head over to Linux-Links.co.uk, and have a browse around!

The code creation is interesting, it is three separate functions.

The first function accepts a string, creates an hd5 hash of that string and then passes that string to the second function which splits that string into four pieces and passes it back to the first function.

The first function then does some wizardry, and passes four numbers to the third function which then does some more wizardry and returns four alphanumeric characters back to the first function.

The first function then returns those four alphanumeric characters back as a single string

Maybe I should setup a URL shortening site!? Lol!

If you are interested in seeing the code that is used, then you can either leave a comment or email me, the email address is at the bottom of the page.

That all for this post
Till next time,
Happy browsing!

Earlier today I finally upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5. At the same time I took the opportunity to clean out my database, quite literally I reformatted my blog!

This involved me exporting all my posts, and blogroll, deleting all WordPress files, apart from my theme and wp-config.php, and then deleting all the WordPress tables from the database!
Then I installed the new version of WordPress and ran through the install. I then deleted the test post, and updated some of the options. I then imported all of my old posts into the fresh install.

That was only this morning, now what have I been doing for the past two weeks since my last post?
The answer, nothing much!

The only notable exception is that I have finally got my new computer up and running!

I installed both Fedora 7 and Windows XP onto the first hard drive, Linux on 100Gb, and Windows on 60Gb.
I am using the 500Gb hard drive for all of my files, on Linux this is mounted as /home

The new computer is working brilliantly, and its so much quieter than my previous computers!
I’ve just got to get a set of speakers, and possibly a new heat sink/fan for the processor, and that will be it sorted!

It’s getting quite late now, so thats it for this post
Till next week!

This version is a complete rewrite of the server side of the website.
I have rewritten it all from scratch and have collected all the functions into one place, this means that all the settings for displaying and collecting the data is set in one place, and means that everything is displayed uniformly across the whole site.

I have updated the search function, and hopefully it will return more relevant results, its still not perfect, but it is working better now!

I have added a “help” section, but the only area it gives help on is the HTTP Status Codes that are displayed on the URL pages.
The basic structure is there and can easily be added to when more areas need to be added!

There are a couple more things I would have liked to have included, but I ran out of time!
I will add these updates when they are ready!

Ok, its now past midnight and it’s no longer April Fools Day!
Hope you believe me now! Lol

In other news, I have finally restarted work on Linux Links, now I just have the search page to complete before I finally release this long awaited version of Linux Links.
I am aiming to release the updated Linux Links on Tuesday 1st April, no joke! Honest!

I have done a few tweaks to my website and blog, a couple of them you might not notice!

The first is that I’ve separated trackbacks and pings from comments in single post view.

Secondly I have added a print CSS style sheet to both the blog and website, so if you need to print anything out you only get the main content, and not the navigation bars.
I think there is still a few more bits to change with the print style to make it more complete, but its working!

The third is that I’ve signed up for a FeedBurner account, I have already burnt my feed, and you can find it here. I have set up the redirects, so you can continue using the old address, and you will still receive the feed as normal!

There’s a few more that I have fixed or changed as I have been going around, but they don’t really effect anything!

My dad’s off to Brands Hatch this afternoon to watch the Truck racing on Monday, he’s camping over tonight and Monday night and coming back on Tuesday morning.
The Truck racing was awesome last time, and it’s something I would like to go and watch again, the thing that put me off the most is the weather, it going to be cold and wet!

That’s all for this post now, I’ll post more details when I know more!
Till then
See you

There may be a few issues, especially in browsers other than Firefox on Linux.
So if your using Internet Explorer, Opera or any other web browser on Windows, or Mac and you spot a problem let me know about them so I can sort it out. Thanks!

I don’t have any time to post any more as I should be on my way to my girlfriends by now, so I’ll post more details as soon as I can.

Until then,
Happy New Year!

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had an email from Schmap saying that one of my photos had been nominated to be included in the forth edition of their Bristol guide.
I got an email from them Saturday saying that my photo was included.
You can view it here.

Now for more news about Linux Links, I was working all day Saturday to try and get search working, but it just wasn’t going right!

I was copying code from phpBB, and from a couple of tutorials from the Internet, I was even using the MySQL search functions, but none of them produced the results I was after.

I now feel sorry for the pigeons working at google!

Search is still not working, but I have a new plan to try, it involves splitting the search string, searching for each word separately!
I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!

Till next time
See you!