An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

I can see from my logs that I do get a decent amount of traffic but nobody seems to want to comment and seeing how I always like a little validation here & there I thought I would try running some polls to see if I can get my visitors to interact with the site as I know leaving comments can sometimes be a pain.

The first poll is about Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince, I really can’t see how Harry Potter is so damned popular, I read the first book way back when and was utterly unimpressed so much so that I had no inclination of reading the next books or seeing the movies. However I’m interested to see what everyone else thinks so vote away!

The poll is using a script from http://blog.jalenack.com/archives/democracy/, which had a few errors upon install with a MySQL insert failing and some weirdness with the answers of the first poll but that all seems to be sorted now.

I am a big fan of letting the experts take care of things like leaving the nightly backups of my site to my web host to do, but it is still a good idea to do your own backups. This gives you extra redundancy in case something really goes wrong, plus a lot of the people using Wordpress probably are with a host that don’t perform regular backups for them.

Hence Wordpress are having a backup week to demonstrate how simple it is to setup your own Wordpress backups and get everyone into the habit, their press release is below with details and who knows I might just have to volunteer to help out.

Press Release

Backing Up is Not Just for Cars

Your WordPress database contains every post, every comment and every link you have on your blog. If your database gets erased or corrupted, you stand to lose everything you have written. There are many reasons why this could happen and not all are things you can control. But what you can do is backup your data. After all, it is important isn’t it?

WordPress Backup
Week July 23-30 aims to help you become more familiar with the process of backing up and protecting your data.

Step-by-step backup instructions will be available in the online manual,
the WordPress Codex, and
support provided online in the WordPress Support Forum to help you through the process.

Guides will be available to help you backup your WordPress site and database for a variety of systems and server software such as cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk and vDeck. Consider using this Backup Week as an incentive to backup all your valuable documents and software, too.

These guides will assist you in determining:

• When and how to make backups.
• How to make things right after an unexpected data loss befalls your WordPress database.

Making backups is essential because problems inevitably occur and you need to be in a position to take action when disaster strikes. Spending a few minutes to make an easy, convenient backup of your database will allow you to spend even more time being creative and productive with your website.

For more information or to help volunteer on this WordPress Community
Event, see WordPress Backup Week.

http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/07/2005070801c.htm

A very insightful article on how blogging can effect your employment prospects, although a lot of it is common sense. Blogging about your current job or any past ones with any discernible details is just stupid, plus if you are going to have a dark blog going into your inner thoughts about depression or anything then for your sakes please do so anonymously for a multitude of reasons!

A Google search is fast becoming litmus test for many employers especially within Information Technology so you have to be careful what you put online and put your name to. I always try to find a good balance keeping things like that in mind so I hope I would come off in a positive note if a prospective employer read my blog.

I stumbled across WP-Prettypicturizer the other day and it does pretty much what I was intending to do with the original Prettypicturizer script so I downloaded it, hacked my moblogging script to output the right tag to get the image processed by the plugin and voila the previous post is the result. I still have to modify my new changes to work properly if I moblog with a location though but that is trivial and I’m just being lazy.

I really do need to clean the moblogging script up some, improve the Google Maps API stuff and release the code as the results are pretty damn cool.

If there is one thing that annoys me it is download scripts, there is nothing worse than wanting to install something like a new plugin on your Wordpress install that isn’t compatible with One Click Install only to find out it is behind a download script and there is no link to the actual file.

If you are wondering why that is annoying it is because a lot of the time the scripts are setup so you can’t use wget or curl to download straight to your server through a shell connection. Downloading locally and then having to FTP it up is a pain in the rear!

I see that I have gotten a few hits from people searching for Abby’s playlist from Blade Trinity and ending up here from my del.icio.us links so seeing how that link is about to cycle out of the top 10 I thought I should post the link here:

http://www.bladetrinity.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=2232&page=17&pp=15

And just in case that link dissappears for some reason here is the actual list:

Fluke - Atom Bomb
Fluke - Absurd
Jurassic 5 - A Day At The Races
Jurassic 5 - Freedom
Jurassic 5 - What’s Golden
Jurassic 5 - Thin Line
ATFC - In And Out Of My Life
Underworld - Cowgirl
Dave Ralph - Max Graham “Air Tight”
Silencer - Drown In Me
Red Snapper - The Rough And The Quick
Mike Wells - Supercell (original mix)
Silencer - Bubblewrap
UNKLE - Safe In Mind
UNKLE - What Are You To Me
DJ Krush - Journey of Time
DJ Krush - Sanity Requiem
DJ Krush - The Black Hole
DJ Shadow - Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt
DJ Shadow - What Does Your Soul Look Like?
DJ Shadow - Stem/Long Stem
Kruder & Dorfmeister - Heroes (Kruder mix) [a remix of a Roni Size track]
Kruder & Dorfmeister - Bug Powder Dust [a remix of a Chemical Brothers track]
Kruder & Dorfmeister - Trans Fatty Acid [a remix of a Lamb track]

Happy listening!

http://www.upn.com/shows/top_model/twiggy.shtml

*Does a little happy dance* That woman was just getting annoying, for a while she was funny but she overstayed her welcome, hopefully her replacement Twiggy adds some spice to the judging panel.

Also all you diva wannabes well be pleased to know that Jay Alexander will now be a permanent member of the juding panel, now that should be interesting!

I was just trying to get the scoop on America’s Next Top Model - Cycle 5 to win some brownie points with my girlfriend and came across the application, so out of curiosity I was reading the eligibility requirements and was dissappointed to see:

7. You must be at least five feet and seven inches (5′7″) in height

I thought that was a bit discriminating as that would probably rule out the majority of girls, I know I’ve certainly seen girls shorter than that who deserve to be models. Although luckily my girlfriend does qualify but I don’t think I’d be able to encourage her to apply even though she really does belong there.

Unfortunately however, casting is only being conducted during July & August so you are going to have to wait until October some time, which is when the filming starts so it could well be later than that.