Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

Married

Just a quick post to say I am now a married man, and have just got back from my honeymoon.

I have been away long enough to have pretty much forgotten what my day job is…

Bank scams by phone

UserFriendly has 2 fabulous comic strips on Bank scams by phone (the kind where someone phones you up and pretends to be your bank in order to get secure information by asking you to “confirm” some details)
Cartoon 1, Cartoon 2

Its a shame that they don’t let you hotlink the images like xkcd does

Wordpress, k2, openid

I use the k2 theme for this wordpress blog. I used to write my own, but k2 is much, much neater. I also use the openid plugin for wordpress. (I wrote about openid’s before)

To get the two to play together, you need to turn off live commenting.

In my case, as my blog is also my openid url (see this tutorial in delegating your open id if you want to use your blog or website as your openid url, and any provider), I had to add some code the the k2 style’s functions.php

add_action('wp_head', 'custom_header');

function custom_header () {
        ?>
        <link rel="openid.server" href="...openid provider url..."/>
        <link rel="openid.delegate" href="...openid provider url..."/>
        <?php
}

Now you have your own blog as your openid url, and your blog accepts openid’s for comments with the k2 theme :)

Petition to reduce fuel duty

I suppose it was only a matter of time given the current prices of petrol in the UK
Petition to: Reduce Fuel duty to bring fuel prices back to an acceptable level
[petition.pm.gov]

Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion

So, as there is a new version of Wordpress (2.5.1) which has some serious security fixes, I thought I would move my blog to running from svn. This doesnt mean I am running bleeding edge code, it just means updating the Wordpress code is as simple as svn sw new_version_url. Which is a lot simpler than downloading and unpacking tars over the top.

Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion « WordPress Codex

Theres also a configuration option for the new wordpress that improves the cryptography

Garter analysts: Windows is ‘collapsing’

Turns out I’m not the only one fed up with Windows

Windows is ‘collapsing,’ Gartner analysts warn