It’s been a while since Justine was posting to Juzzyweb, but recently she has indicated that she wants to get back into blogging again.

It took a few hours, but I’ve managed to tease the posts from my bespoke blogging software into the Wordpress database.  It was a lot easier this time around since I’ve done it previously for my own blog; indeed it was a lot larger task last time since I had a lot more posts to bring across.

Even though I tried my hardest to leave the theme Justine had chosen alone, I had to make a few minor changes.  The new site has many of the same features as mine — Gravatars (hopefully now all will see the value of them!), the reCAPTCHA spam prevention, microsummaries — which hopefully will encourage more readers to comment.

So, welcome back Justine.

(Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back)

Just a reminder that, even though the Mr X icon is funny, one of the features I thought was really cool with my blog update was that each commenter could setup their own avatar.

All you need to do is to head over to the Gravatar signup page and in around five minutes (assuming you can choose that picture that is just so you) you’ll be done, and Mr X will be no more.

Since I’m using the Gravatar service; once you sign up any site that uses Gravatars will also recognise your same avatar. This means that if you setup Gravatar on your blog, the same icons will appear there when people comment!

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.

I mentioned to Trav the other day that it had been a while since anyone had commented on my website. His reply was that the commenting was broken. Oops.

It’s now fixed, hurrah. Now your only excuse for not commenting is because you don’t want to.

That little bludger.org in history thing on the right-hand side is great! I was on the site to fix up the search functionality I created a couple of years ago and get it working properly since the big site move of 2006, and happened to glance at the posts from around this time last year.

One was where I was talking about how we’d some house cleaning and I mentioned later in the post that I was hoping we wouldn’t be living in the same house at this time next year (well, we are) as Winter would be sucky (well, it is).

It’s interesting, because at that time we had no idea that Justine would be going back to school this year, and that the lower rent here would really help out our finances. In fact, I’m pretty sure that at that time, we hadn’t even thought about it. Well, I hadn’t at least.

So, it’s not just there to fill up space and make it look like there’s more here than there really is (that’s part of it, sure), but it’s a great way to see what was going on in the past. It’s almost like a time machine! Except without the coolness of actually being a time machine.

Since, for some reason, I don’t post all the photos I like to my flickr photostream, I decided it might be an interesting experiment to start up a photoblog.

So I did.

Obviously there will be some crossover with the photos posted to flickr; but here each photo gets pride of place right in the centre of the screen. I hope to be able to find enough interesting photos to be able to continue for a while, perhaps it will encourage more photo-taking on my behalf.

I ask two things of the readership here: 1) If you don’t want photos of yourself to appear on the photoblog, please let me know (either here or via email) and 2) Tell me what you think of the design!

Ahh yes, the address:
Photoblog - http://bludger.org/photoblog/
Photoblog RSS - http://bludger.org/photoblog/feed.rss

Well, it was the outage to end all (historical) outages, but we’re (mostly) back. I’ll go into details a bit more when I feel like spending some more time in front of a computer, but it’s been a hectic couple of days. bludger.org is running at about 95% of it’s original “greatness” and Juzzyweb is about halfway there. Give it a couple of days to settle down.

Here’s the semi live-blog as I tried to fix things:

2006-06-07 10:34	Noticed the site was down. Can’t do anything while at work.
2006-06-07 11:45	Justine was unable to restart the computer under my remote guidance. Will investigate later.
2006-06-07 18:45	It appears that the hard disk that houses bludger.org and Juzzyweb has crapped itself. There is a database backup of bludger.org from May but I am unsure whether I can recover Juzzyweb’s database.
2006-06-07 19:20	I have been able to recover the “MYD” files which have the contents of all the posts (including the most recent ones). This means that all the data’s there, but it might be difficult to recover. It seems that ext2fsd has saved me an awful lot of grief… possibly. I still need to turn the data into meaningful information.
2006-06-07 22:35	Computers seem to be breaking all around me. Not only did the bludger.org/Juzzyweb host’s hard disk fail, but the computer I was attempting to setup as a replacement appears to have completely failed (I think it was the motherboard). The final spare machine is running well right now (touch wood) as I set it up as a web server, but as I was about to update this page, my main machine had a BSOD! What’s going on today?!
2006-06-08 00:20	Things are sort of working. The data is back into the database but because of the new version of Apache being used, things aren’t quite right. Will probably take more tweaking than I thought. For now though, it’s bed time.
2006-06-08 14:21	I’ve decided to move hosting off-site since I got a deal I couldn’t pass up, as you can read this it’s obviously on it’s way to working. Hopefully the full site will be back in a day or so.