You’ve probably noticed at this point that the website (again) looks different. Over the past few months I have been installing, customising, tinkering and fiddling with Wordpress to get it”just so”.

If you are a technically-minded user, you may also be wondering why I chose to go with Wordpress versus my own blog that I wrote a couple of years back. The answer to that is both “interoperability” and “functionality”. Since we are going overseas soon (I’m sure you’re all aware of that now), I wanted an easy way to update while away.

Wordpress has an email-to-blog function which means all I need to do is to send an email, wait a bit, and have it posted. I’m sure I could have coded it myself, but it would have taken a while and Wordpress already has it. There are a bunch of other great features I’ve introduced including Gravatars (which allows you to have a picture beside your comments), Flickr integration (whenever I post a photo from Flickr, the data is read as well as the comments on that photo — this is my attempt to integrate both my blog and photoblog) and a bunch of other stuff designed to make it easier to get in, read what you want and find more content that makes you want to stick around.

At this point, I will step back and give a quick history of bludger.org, since the old site will soon come offline and I won’t have pictures of it any more; indeed, I only have pictures of the most recent versions of the site.

• 2000 - bludger.org is registed primarily for me to have an email address I never have to change again.
• Early 2001 - The first blog is created, though I didn’t know it as a blog then. A gaudy bright orange and dark blue colour scheme are used (based on a Microsoft Access database running with ASP, hosted at www.brinkster.com).
• Late 2001 - The site switches to mike.bludger.org as I’d decided to create a “global” website and a personal one. As well as a blog, it also had book, movie and restaurant reviews (still on Microsoft Access and ASP).
• 2002 - 2003 - Not a lot of blogging goes on, but I was attempting to revamp mike.bludger.org. It never really materialised.
• Early 2004 - My first use of software I didn’t make. I used PHPNuke after setting up a Linux server at home. The server was a paltry P133 and couldn’t really handle running Apache, mySQL and PHPNuke together.
• Mid 2004 - After 4-6 months of using PHPNuke I decided to again build my own site. I used mySQL and PHP this time and created a simple site with a “blog of doom” and “links of peril”. A dark blue colour scheme with the first appearance of the couch.
• Late 2004 - I decided to recode the entire blog from scratch as blogs are becoming more popular and I decide to make my blog more “blog like”.
  
• 2005 - A few problems with the style sheet on the new site prompt me to change the look and feel again. These problems are mostly due to Internet Explorer’s poor handling of transparencies.
  
• 2006 - A small visual refresh of the look/feel to the site.
  
  
• 2007 - (Where we are now) I install Wordpress, create my own custom Flickr integration using PHPFlickr as well as creating my own custom Wordpress theme.
  

This is actually not the first time I have installed Wordpress. I installed it late in 2006 with the intention to moving across and using lots of AJAXifications, but became bored with the look and feel of the site I’d come up with.

Getting the data in posed a problem, as I had to take my data from my database and change it around to suit the database structure for Wordpress. Since I’ve done plenty of database stuff both at home and work, it wasn’t particularly taxing but was time-consuming. Speaking of time consuming, I went through every single post and painstakingly added tags to each one. Some are better tagged than others, but they’re all there.

Since I have been working mostly on this site, I decided to simply ignore my other site. I was updating both simultaneously for a while, but thought getting you to read a number of older posts might be a good way to get you to explore the site.

So there you have it! Explore, enjoy and let me know what you think.

Our Internet sharing/firewall/proxy/DHCP/etc server is great, most of the time. Most of the time it does it’s job without complaint and it does it well.

However, when the machine loses power unexpectedly (which seems to happen quite often in our area) the hard disk totally craps out and when the filesystem is attempted to be scanned, it can take hours and hours and still not finish (last time, I left it for seven hours and it was still chugging along terribly slowly).

Linux is great in most cases but I’m surprised that Windows is far more robust in this respect, most of the time it will just do a quick scan then continue without issue. As far as I am concerned this is a big issue with Linux that’s been around for years (I first experienced it seven or eight years ago) and I’m really surprised it hasn’t been fixed by now.

Since I have a new laptop to play with I downloaded and installed the latest release of Fedora Core on the machine. It took a number of failed attempts before I gave up using the graphical installer and used the text-based installer, which worked first time. Once I got into the system, it was extremely slow (5 minutes to get to login screen, then another 5-10 minutes to be usable, got worse from there). Eventually I found out the system requirements for using the GUI are 192MB RAM, which the machine is not close to meeting.

So next I tried a ‘live’ version of Linux (runs directly from CD and a RAM disk) called Damn Small Linux which worked really well, but isn’t suitable for a disk-based installation.

I am going to download Ubuntu tonight to see how that goes. Apparently it’s been getting a lot of praise recently.

Interesting how there are so many versions of what is essentially the same thing. And for once, I can say I use all my bandwidth to “download Linux ISOs” and it’s the truth…

A few weeks ago I was messing with some configuration files on my webserver (the one you’re using now to see this post) to make the settings a little bit neater/cleaner.

One of those changes was moving the server from both ports 8080 and 80 to just port 80. I hadn’t rebooted the server to make these changes take effect… until Saturday, when the power went out.

None of this would have been a problem, except that I’d forgotten that our ISP, Optus, blocked port 80 last year due to the Code Red worm. D’oh. If you can read this it should be fixed (for now).

After a little bit of playing with PHP this evening, I’ve finally managed to get the server to send email via my current ISP. It’s easy at work because there’s no authentication required and it’s just always been setup to work. At home, it was a little more difficult and after a few hitches (complaints of non-existant domains, and so on), it’s finally working.

The reason I’m writing, and you’re reading this is because I’m wondering whether people would find it useful to receive an email whenever a post’s been made. There’s hardly any registered users here as it is, and I suspect not all of them would make use of such a thing. Obviously, such a feature would require people to register, if they wanted to receive email. As part of the registration I’ve already been asking for the email address (in anticipation for this and other possible features down the track) so I already have your details.

So, is this something the people who visit the site want, or wouldn’t you use it? Email me if you’d prefer.