YouReadMyBlog

Yes, after about 6 months of tumbleweed – 1 month or so of which was downtime – the blog is back in business.

I thought I’d compile a quick FAQ surrounding the events:

So you’ve thought of some interesting new things to post?

Well, no, not particularly – but some things are happening which I might deem postworthy at sometime.

Are you going to post more frequently?

With the best will in the world I hope I will; but probably not.

So why bring the blog back now?

I like having somewhere to occasionally write things down and I’m trying to get myself known in the world of IT security. I’ve also just finished Uni for christmas so have had some spare time to set up now that I’m not stressed with work anymore.

Why did the blog go down for a month?

Long story….short version = old server supplier went out of business so I had to get a new server.

Are you okay Craig? How’s life?

Thanks for asking – I’m good – as I say I’ve been a bit stressed with lots and lots of Uni work but I’m managing fine with it in general.

Any other questions?

Apologies for the downtime of the blog for the past few days – some of the unused plugins were causing a fatal error (i still dont know why) so I was forced to suspend the account until i could be bothered to fix it -  but anyway now they’re deactivated and all seems to be working?

Righto, lets try and keep this post as short as possible (I plan to code some stuff after this and need all the time I can get).

To help with this, lets use the almighty BULLET POINT

• Firstly, you’ll notice I’m using a “cleaner” more professional looking and easier to use theme.
• I updated the photo’s section, for some reason it had lost the link with facebook and wasnt sync-ing properly
• Drag Racer – Basically, Groomi told me that if I mention it over here he would mention ScreenStamp! on his blog and because I’m too lazy to give it a post of it’s own I’ll integrate it into this one -  The game consists of buying and tuning cars and racing them against your friends, its a good little app and is available on Facebook @ http://apps.facebook.com/drag_racer
• openSUSE – After trial of many many different operating systems, my Netbook now has openSUSE on it and is working great, it wasnt the easiest OS to install due to the Aspire not having a CD Drive but if anyone wants a step by step guide to getting it working drop me a line – I’m also thinking of putting an extra 1GB RAM into it.

Thats all for now, I’m going to be helping out with a site recode for a friend over the next few months; so keep an eye out for tutorials and snippets of code I write that I think might be useful to others will be posted here.

Craig

I thought this theme was cool with its vista style imitation so I thought I’d try it out for a few days and see what people think, you can change the style of it by clicking on the “Start” Button (pencil at the bottom) and choosing change theme. There are some other cool things you can do from that menu too. As with all the other theme changes, comments are appreciated.

Credit goes to http://inanis.net

I know what you’re thinking: 2 posts in 2 days, this surely cant last long? Well hopefully it will the reason for this blog is that I was given today a backup of CPB-Network.org which was taken in May 2008. For those of you who do not know: CPB-Network was the name under whichme and Stu most recently ran our webhosting and development business, however in early 2008 we decided to focus on software development and website design rather than hosting.

The idea was never really rolled out on a big scale because of the events that were to follow and the subsequent closing of the business. It was nice though to look back and see what could have been and delve into some old code.

From what I remember (and can see from the backup) I was working on a new client backend for the website, whilst at the same time designing a website with Stu for a customer. Stu was fiddling with the idea of building a mafia based RPG and was rebuilding an old version of Asgard to suit. And we were both working on an MSN Bot written in PHP based on the Blobsy Framework (affectionately or arrogantly named: Stueybot).

Looking back: one of the reasons why very few of our projects ever caught on was probably due to us never really investing 100% effort into each one and being of the mindset; if I do 500 things one of them will work.

Anyway, I guess this is a random blog but I hope you enjoyed the nice little history lesson and are a little wiser as to what I was doing more than a year ago. I might at some stage rewirte an MSN Bot depending on the extent of my boredom – perhaps in C this time?

Meanwhile I finally got around to upgrading to WP 2.7.1 and I have to see I quite like the new interface

Craig
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Yes it seems I have become a facebook whore lately and I am attempting to utilise this…erm…whoreness by integrating portions of my facebook profile into my blog to give it some more content (read my post on Facebook Integration for more info).

Anyway, today I have added my most recent facebook status update to the top of the menu panel as suggested by Groomi. You can still view lots of my recent status updates on the My Facebook page (above).

I have also added a new plugin called Fotobook which imports my photos and photos of me from facebook and displays them on this blog.

http://www.youreadmyblog.info/photos/

Well its almost christmas so in a bid to get this place into the festive spirit I have installed a christmas theme, yes its very blue and fairly busy, but it wont last forever (everything will be back to normal after xmas…seems sensible doesnt it? ). In the meantime just enjoy the festiveness and know that I wish you all a merry christmas and happy new year.

Craig

Edit –

I removed the Christmas theme as I disliked it and reverted back to something similar to the original. Except with Ice/Snow in the header – as it’s winter and cold

I’ve just added some plugins to my blog, one which will display my facebook status updates on a page (may at some point put it in the menu instead) and another which adds my blog posts to my facebook wall the link to my facebook status page is

http://www.youreadmyblog.info/my-facebook/

And i’ll be using this post as a test to see if things get added to my facebook wall

Ciao

Yay, If you can read this it means that you’re tuned into this site on the new server (mentioned in my last post) and if you don’t think you’re reading this then you must be a bit dense in my opinion :P

So what can I say about One.com so far? Well obviously I wasnt expecting miracles for £10 per year and I havent received any – its a nice service and I’m happy the only gripe I have is with lack of control, being used to having root access and then moving to having virtually no control over anything is a big step. The control panel does offer some nice options though – it’s one’s own cp (not cpanel). It allows you to set up subdomains and mail accounts – only one ftp account and mysql database is given but heh how many can I need for a blog?

There is also no option given for addon/parked domains which is fair enough, I have set up CNAME’s with my registrar for my  other domains to make them point to here.

So overall I’m happy with the new set up it may just take some getting used to I’m sure my opinion will change over the coming days/weeks/hours; I’ll keep you informed and I’ll post some server specs and interesting things I can gather later.

If anyone notices anything out of the ordinary since the move please comment here and let me know.

Craig

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Yes, its been years since I have had my site on a server that was managed by someone else, but as university beckons and the shadows of an increasing debt cloud ride over me I’ve decided to pack up my £12/month VPS and move this blog over to One.com shared hosting.

For a little over £10 inc VAT I am subscribed to One.com for a year, this is a very reasonable price in my opinion and making the move will ensure that I no longer need to worry about keeping the server running, and more crucially, paying for it. I will be able to concentrate more on posting blogs (and my studies :P).

The VPS I have been using was becoming wasteful as all it was hosting is this blog and a few sites for friends – in my opinion – not enough to warrant a VPS. I will however miss the sense of freedom and control you get from private servers but the money saved outweighs the miss and I will install Linux on my PC again to play with .

Now to the important stuff – obviously I have to move the blog over to the new server and change the nameservers (at time of writing I’m still on the VPS) So you may notice some downtime whilst I do this but all-in-all hopefully the site will be back up and functioning by the end of the day.