Well, Bye Then
I fly out to Morocco tomorrow. This will be the last post I make before I come back, and then after that there will be loads and loads of photos.
Basically, any emails sent to me from now on will be delayed two weeks in getting a response, there is an autoresponder on my account; so there should be little confusion.
I leave home at 8 in the morning, and I think I’ll be in Morocco by about 8pm. We’re flying from Heathrow, with whom I can’t remember.
I guess all that remains to be said is bye, I’ll make up for the lack of posts when I get home, I promise.
A CSS Colour Sampler
I was doing a bit of design hacking earlier, and searched the internet (in vain) for a CSS sampler. You know the concept - you type in a hex code, and it tells you what colour you’re using. Well, that’s the second time I’ve looked, so I made my own, as you do. Found here, it does exactly what it says on the (not quite) tin - shows you a sample of any css colour. One huge block that’s fairly unmissable. I might make the code downloadable at some point - it’s really not that complex.
Anyhow, any feedback on it would be appreciated 
Some Sailing Photos
I took these at sailing yesterday, because I was bored and broke the boat I was sailing. Their not very good, but I thought I’d post them anyway.
Horus Rising - Dan Abnett
I recently read Horus Rising , a book by Dan Abnett. It is the first in the series that I am reading, which follows the Horus Heresy, a civil war that almost tore the Warhammer 40,000 universe apart. The novel is part of a series, in which Horus, the newly appointed Warmaster, rebels against his father, the Emperor. I’ve only read the first book so far, but the rest look to be as good as this one was.
The book itself was excellent, Dan Abnett really is as good as people say he is (not that I ever thought he wasn’t) - the book manages to be funny, dark and very clever, while making all three seem effortless. He manages to make a faceless army of hundreds of thousands seem real, giving an insight into their lives and feelings.
We are guided through the novel by Captain Loken, the captain of an Astartes company. Astartes are demi-god like characters in war armour, and Abnett does an amazing job of portraying them in the book, even for people like me who don’t know a single thing about them (I’m not really a massive warhammer follower, I just bought the book because it was there).
I think this is an amazing book, and one that others even vaguely interested in Warhammer should probably read, as it details the start of an event that shaped the Warhammer we know now.
Info
Pages: 416
Publisher: Black Library
ISBN-10: 184416294X
ISBN-13: 978-1844162949
Link to Buy
EarthRace Team Make Fastest Round World Trip on Speedboat
A biodiesel-powered trimaran has just completed the fastest round the world trip in a speedboat, breaking the previous record by an amazing 14 days.
Braving pirates, storms and floating logs, the team made it all the way around the world on recycled cooking fat, arriving back at a Spanish port yesterday. I guess this isn’t really sailing, as I categorized it, but it’s close.
It took the EarthRace team 11 minutes short of 61 days to get around, breaking the previous record set by Cable and Wireless Adventurer a decade ago. The team comprises of two Britons, a New Zealander and a Swede, with Pete Bethune, the New Zealander, as the skipper. It is his second attempt.
The EarthRace left on the 21st of April, and immediately ran into troubled waters, the autopilot broke, meaning the boat had to be steered 24 hours a day, and fresh food supplies were left behind.
The EarthRace boat has a clever design, which means that instead of bouncing over waves and slowing down, it cuts through them, maintaining speed, but making it a very rocky ride, and much more difficult to control. There’s a picture I found on the Guardian website below.
I guess all thats left to be said is a huge well done to the crew, who battled massive problems, and still made it.
5 Days Till I Leave
In 5 days, I’ll be flying out to Morocco. Everything is set now, all the kit is ready, and I’m really, really looking forward to it. I’ve got my camera sorted out, and I’m expecting to have LOADS of pictures when I come back on the 15th. I’m still trying to decide how to make sure GPearce and my other sites stay safe, I’ll probably just lock them down - it’s not like their vulnerable anyhow.
I’d been thinking of setting up some scheduled posts while I’m away, I’ve got some pretty good ideas for that and they could well be interesting. I’m adding a special bit of code to my blog so it shows people that I’m away, although I’ve not decided how to do it so it doesn’t change my page summaries on search engines. I’ll probably put it in the sidebar, thinking about it.
That’s an idea for a new plugin, something which automatically adds a bit of code to your template while you’re away, so that people know. I’ll have to look into that 
But yeah, I’m really looking forwards to this, and I hope nobody ruins it for me to come back to by messing with my sites 
Niche Freelancer Sites?
I was considering this earlier, I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands of these general freelancer sites, and most of them are failing - the niche is starting to fill up.
However, what I’ve not seen many of are niche targeted job sites, for instance targeting content creation, article writing or such, and I think they would be popular. If you look on popular forums like Digitalpoint and webhostingtalk, you see a hundred or so posts a day which are after certain services, like content creation - they get huge response. Most people who end up posting on big wide niche websites are unable to find anything anywhere else, it seems to be sort of a last-call.
A niche freelancer site could be to those people what a full on freelancer site is to people with massive projects, and it could be profitable, I think. I don’t think that it should charge for membership, but if you put advertisements on it, probably CPM, then while posters are browsing looking for work, you’re earning a bit of cash - everyone wins
I don’t know how feasible the idea would be, and I’m experimenting with scripting to do stuff like this, but if it works out, I may launch my own.
Wordpress 2.6 Beta 1
Yesterday, Ryan Boren announced Wordpress 2.6 beta 1. I’ve just upgraded to it. Among the cool new features are post revision tracking, which I’ve talked about before, and Google Gears support, which is very cool. I think I wrote about that before too.
There is also better support for SSL for the admin area, and bulk plugin management, as well as a bunch of other stuff (you have to read the post to see it all).
It doesn’t look any different to 2.5 (no surprises there) but there are some nifty little new functions, like the theme selector - when you click a theme it previews, like on wp.com, which is definitely cool.
I’m looking forward to the final 2.6.
Street Carnage Kit
Today I received the awesome kit the guys at Street Carnage / Tv Carnage etc sent me. I got a tshirt, and a bunch of stickers - a nice gesture from the people I’m currently working for!
The tshirt fits me just about perfectly, which is cool, and the stickers are awesome, although I’m not sure what to do with them yet. You can buy the tshirts from their store, which I’ve been helping them populate and such, and I *think* that the stickers are free (just make a request), I’ll be adding a product for that to the store shortly.
The tee is good quality, too. Always important.
All that remains to be said is a big thankyou to Gavin, the guy who sent the stuff out for me
Akismet Count Plugin Updates
I’ve become aware of a bug with my Akismet count plugin, which isn’t obvious to most people, but for those who have only recently installed, it breaks, and causes a PHP error if they have no spam caught. This is because Akismet only creates the spam reference that my plugin looks for when it nukes it’s first bit of spam.
For that reason, I’m going to put another line into the plugin, and release version 1.10, at some point in the next week, I hope. I’m also looking at making the actual text customisable, and making it similar and all that. Feedback would be appreciated on this, because with enough work I could make a version that integrates itself directly into your footer, without you having to do anything at all – I might release a branch of the current plugin to do that.
As always, any suggestions would be appreciated.
Getting Ready For Morocco
I’ve been hinting about it for most of 6 months now, that I’m going to Morocco on the second of July. For 2 weeks, trekking. So right now, I’m in the process of packing stuff into my purple bag (see the pics) that I got given by the trip provider. That and a backpack will be what I survive out of for two weeks. It’s going to be great.
I’ve bought all sorts of kit now, walking poles, water purification tablets and baby wipes. Apparently their important for personal hygine - I’m not arguing.
Purple and red bags. Lovely.
We’re going out there with Schools Worldwide, part of Walks Worldwide, and we’re going up and over Twp Cal, the highest mountain in the Atlas range.
I really am looking forward to this.
Charging $200-300 for a Wordpress install?
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, a few weeks ago I stumbled on a website offering a Wordpress install, with nothing special added on (no theme, not even basic setup) for $200-300. I was disgusted, and posted about it on a blogging forum I happened to be on.
I think that $200-300 is more than 10x too much to pay for something like that, and if the site mentioned doesn’t even have it’s own permalinks sorted out, what are the chances they’d do yours for you? I used to charge $5-10 for full Wordpress installations, and i tend to help people out for free now - why charge $200-300? As it is, people who contact me generally tend to get my help installing stuff like that for free.
I actually wonder how many naive / unknowing people buy that service from other people for stupid money per month? It’s probably a fair few.
Additionally, those who are making blogs for non-commerical reasons can request the guys over at install4free to help them, free of charge once again.
I don’t think anyone should ever pay more than $20 for a Wordpress install, unless it includes a custom theme.
Firefox 3 Breaks a Million Downloads
Less than four hours into it’s download day, Firefox 3 smashed the 1 million downloads barrier, which is reported to be more than the downloads of Firefox 2 on it’s launch day.
There is a widescreen up in the Mozilla HQ which is live (ish) monitoring the downloads, although it seems that with the sheer rate of downloads, there has been some lag.
I downloaded FF3 about an hour ago, and in my opinion, it’s not changed a huge amount from the last release candidate, not that it’s meant to have. It’s still great, though.
The great thing is, the developers of S3fox have upgraded it to work with Firefox 3! yay.
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Mozilla officially release Firefox 3 stable in one hour, and 2 minutes. From then, they have 24 hours to get lots of downloads, their planning to set a world record.
Good luck to them :) (1)
S3
Today, I spent a bit of time playing with S3 (simple storage service), a service run by Amazon. I only really thought about it recently after I helped someone I’m working for to make videos run from it.
The main bonus of S3 is that it’s cheap, and unlimited. You only pay per what you use - nothing more, and nothing less. I think it’s about 15 cents per gig stored, which isn’t bad at all, and the transfer prices vary. For my backups, which come to a few gigs, I’m looking at about 40p (80 cents) a month, which is peanuts really. Less than a decent bar of chocolate costs 
The main downside of S3 is that for a newbie, (like me) it’s very difficult to use - the developer site suggests a bunch of encoding and post templates and stuff, which while I understand how to use them - it’s too much effort. Things like JungleDisk cost even more money (although it’s not much) , and the idea of S3 (from what I can see) is to create cheap, fast and reliable storage.
Thankfully, there is some skilled coder person out there, who has created the following 2 items, which, while they are in beta, work almost perfectly on my pc- s3 backup and s3 webmaster. The former uploads files so they can’t be accessed through http - not public. The latter uploads files so they can be accessed publicly. Both make using S3 for file storage and webmastering much, much simper. Yay!
That means that the only thing I don’t like is that you can’t put a cap on the monthly bill. If you upload a lot, or someone downloads a lot, you’ll get a big bill. There’s no way around that, unfortunately.
As an additional note - I think Wordpress.com use S3 a bit, I saw a post about it on Ma.tt from a year ago, so they used to, but whether or not they still do I don’t know.
You can find out more about S3 here.
Sea Fishing
I went sea fishing yesterday, with someone that I’m designing a website for. Never fished before in my life, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it’d be. Just as a note - sea fishing is off of a boat, it’s not just sitting on a shore doing nothing.. :p
Anyhow, I also took some photos, which I’m going to use to test out the gallery function of my blog. I’m also probably going to use some of them, scaled and trimmed slightly, on this website I’m making.
As you can see, I’m not the most amazing photographer ever. Infact, far from it. I’m trying to get at least relatively good at it so I can take some good shots in Morocco
Exams Over!
Today was my last exam, Welsh. Now it’s all finished and out of the way. It’s an incredible relief, you don’t realise how much weight there was on your shoulders until it’s gone. My results come back in August sometime, and until then, I can forget about it all, totally.
There’s a party next Friday, which is going to be great. I’ll try and take some photos
Complete Stats Revisited
It’s been a month since I released complete stats, my statistics plugin for Wordpress. It’s great to see how well it’s done, there have been over 500 downloads from it’s page on Wordpress, and better, it’s gained me about 1500 backlinks - not bad.
I’m open to suggestions for the next version though. I’m thinking of taking the backlink out of the plugin, as people didn’t seem to like that, and placing it into the Wordpress footer instead. It’s not decided totally, but that’d work quite nicely.
I’d like to say thankyou to everyone who downloaded it, and to Ben for the idea!
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I’ve got my second to last GCSE tomorrow, and I think the last one that I think is important. It’s physics, and I’m quietly confident, I think it’ll be fine. Then freedom! (1)
BingoDisk
A few days ago, I signed up for BingoDisk. It’s a nice Sun based storage system, which support webdav, which is access as a drive on my pc, as well as http access and all that stuff. I think it’s pretty nifty.
I bought the Nano plan, because it’s simple, and has all the space I need. It’s not for my files, more my work, email and database backups, which it seems to be doing okay at for the moment. Upload speeds were excellent, and downloading was just as good - no problems whatsoever.
I talked to the support reps about a problem with the SSL on the signup, and asked about content limits, to which they happily replied ‘ I’m storing my entire iTunes library on my Bingo, I can’t see why you can’t do the same ‘, nice to see that they care what’s on their servers.
I know one thing I’d love them to implement, and that’s FTP. That way I can upload via everything. Admittedly, it’s not needed, but FTP to my server is a bit faster for small files. Can’t have everything, and for $19 a year, it’s pretty good value.
Let’s hope I don’t actually need my backups, hey?
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