Fantastiblog

Loving this new theme! This is iLeather, one of the wonderful themes available from Blogger Lounge. The question you may be asking is : “Why orange?”

Why not?

Okay, that’s not the best of answers. The whole Fantastic web site has been online for a very long time now, and in the early days the design was based around a little orange background graphic. For some reason I’m still feeling fond of the old colour, so in keeping with that (not so carefully chosen) theme I’m sticking with orange. For now, at least.

Enjoy!

We will be upgrading the Hsphere system packages on all Linux servers on Tomorrow, March 13, 2007 at 2:30 AM EDT (Tue 13th Mar, 5:30pm Sydney time.)

Control panel will be stopped for 2 hours or less during the process. Web services can see a downtime of 5 minutes/per server and mail-services can see a downtime of upto 10 mins/per server.

While being mostly a set of security and bug fixes, it also upgrades PHP to 4.4.6 and Postgresql to 7.4.16. We couldn’t give a 24 hour notice this time as there is a major security issue that needs to be immediately patched.

Lookout – there was a security exploit injected into WP 2.1.1 in the last few days. The WordPress team are right on it and have a 2.1.2 upgrade ready to go, which I’ve just installed here now.

Great to see them on top of things and it got me motivated to install a plugin to check the version of WordPress … I’ll also sign up for the upgrade mailing list

I am trialling a very easy to install stats plugin for WordPress called PopStats. Yes, the site is in Spanish – don’t let that stop you … the plugin installs just by uploading to your plugins folder on the webserver and can be easily modified to run in English.

Perhaps when there are stats to see I will show some of them off. That’s right, not only do you get stats on your Dashboard, you can place them on your blog.

Fine, I’ll try to drop todays visits in here :

[nope, not working ... I'll have to dig a little first]

Just completed the update to WordPress version 2.1.1 which was great practice.

Also managed to edit my .htaccess file – which seemed quite hard at first!

Here in H-Sphere land we don’t allow direct shell access to accounts, which on the whole saves a great deal of grief. Occasionally we need to think outside the WebShell box, however

WebShell allows you to do all the normal tasks you might want a shell for, but in a controlled web based interface. Now, the standard way of creating a .htaccess file (and the normal reason) is to use the ‘edit .htaccess’ button (or create button) which allows you to create a list of usernames and passwords that will be allowed access to the folder in question.

However there’s no way to manually add other lines in there, like to add ‘mod_rewrite’ rules for WordPress to make nice permalinks with. So – in Settings allow all files to be seen, then use the File command to create a new .htaccess file and paste in the mod_rewrite rules that WordPress has kindly suggested. Done.

The control panel was unavailable for some hours on the 25th due to a complete database rebuild that took unexpectedly long. Investigations are proceeding to ensure that all possible steps to mitigate such issues in future will be considered.

Wow – there are certainly a lot of Wordpress plugins out there … here are a few that really jumped out for me in my latest searches!

• Yahoo Sidebar Link Badge Widget
• Newsletter Plugin this is a commercial plugin that allows you to create and manage an web-based newsletter and mailing list within the WordPress environment.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior for all the tagging you could ever want – looks like it is about to get a major overhaul, possibly to address performance issues
• Simple Tagging Plugin was created to be fast, with an auto-complete feature as well
• WP-Amazon is there to help you find and link to Amazon for any product you may blog about – with support for your Amazon Associates ID (so you can earn money when readers click through and purchase!)
• The Hacker’s Diet Plugin which you can use to input your weight everyday for calculating and tracking your weight trend based off the guidance and formulas used in the book, The Hacker’s Diet. (Yes, yours truly should be on this diet any minute now!)
• Nike+ iPod Stats plugin can retrieve your personal data and formats it to display correctly on your Wordpress blog. (Once again yours truly should be doing this as well … once the iPod fairy delivers.)

The range of possibilities is truly endless, these are just a sampling of the plugins you can install in your own Wordpress installation – so look forward to the new accounts signup page where you can start hosting your own Fantastic blog in your own Fantastic way!

That’s a great question! I must say that I have been pretty happy with our new servers – downtime has been minimal, communication has been good and performance has left nothing to be desired.

As far as hosting goes, I have a couple of subdomains being used by my first client. She has been extremely happy with the web design tools that are available – which is really great news because she isn’t a highly literate computer user by any stretch of the imagination!

These next couple of weeks will see at least two more clients added – which will give me more of an opportunity to see what’s working well and what needs more attention – from the clients’ perspective.

With K2 – an advanced template for Wordpress. This looks like a really nice template, I’ll have to get it tested here soon and see if I can offer it to my customers.

This looks much nicer than the built-in PHP-Projekt tool that we have available. I will begin an investigation (read, install and try it out myself) and hopefully will give it the greenlight for you to use.

activeCollab – open source project management and collaboration tool.

The over-riding goal is to provide a high-quality collaboration tool, which is something we have to applaud. It looks nice, too.