Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Google have unveiled their marketplace for Google Video in which you can buy TV show episodes including CSI, Star Trek Voyager and a load of other shows. But guess what – access it from the UK, or presumably anywhere outside the US, maybe Canada and it says this content is not available to you. It’s complete BS.

I’m running a trial with Feed Burner at the moment. Not as in a free-trial dealie, just as in an experiment to see what happens. I’ve added the RSS feed from Angelina Jolie Planet to it just to see what happens.

What the site does, or at least one of the things it does is turn it into a more readable page and provides subscription buttons for services like My Yahoo, Newsgator, Pluck, etc. You can find the page it created for AJP here.

6 of the top 10 performing banners on WorldBE belong to yours truely :p. I’m sure it’s just because I am running more banners than everyone else (I have 58 active banners) but still…

1. Maze Radio (mine)
2. Koozi
3. Flash Dev (mine)
4. The Gurkin (mine)
5. Carmen Electra Planet (mine)
6. Post Forge (mine)
7. I think it’s one of Huumors banners
8. If I’m correct this one is also
9. M World Hosting (mine)
10. InterSabre hosting

Ping-o-Matic was offline when I tried it earlier and now it just has a WordPress error message like it’s half in development (if it is then Matt it like myself, screw this test server thing, just shove it on a live environment and hope it works. It’s how I upgrade all my sites :p). When you’re close to hitting 100 automatic pings a second though it’s easy to work out why it needs a little tweaking.

I’ve also been picking out some possible WordPress themes in case I start some new blogs. The best ones I’ve found are…

• Pink is the New Black
• Orchid
• PinkCurves

As Worfolk Online expands, a server to test things on, especially on PHP 5 and MySQL 4.1, etc would be really handy so I started pricing up what it would take to get a basic system. This is what I came up with…

• Barebone case, £65
• 80gb Seagate hard drive, £35
• 256mb DDR memory, £15
• 2.26gb Intel Celeron processor, £45

Total price, approximately £170. It doesn’t include delivery and it’s from eBuyer (but at least none of the equipment is made by eBuyer so it’s not too bad) but still I think that’s pretty good. Huck it up to my mouse, keyboard and monitor at first, stick Fedora on it then just attach it to the network and I can remote access using VNC from my desktop whenever I need to admit it.

It would also help me in admining a Linux server as I really need to learn more about it. When I move off my VPS and onto a fully dedicated and I will need to do quite a bit probably as even if I do go for a managed server (and I probably will) I will probably be restricted to only having so much time per month where they will do admin stuff for me.

Maze Radio‘s forums have been locked for a good long while anyway as they were replaced by Maze Forums but they were still online so people could read old posts. They’ve now gone as well though.

I think that’s it for my current killing spree though, everything else can stay unless I go totally crazy.

Well, I’m off to a start. Although it wasn’t an upgrade, I’ve just taken the Nerd Base forums offline completely. Nobody really used them (the odd post here and there) so for one of the first times ever I’ve taken something offline without replacing it or anything. phpBB is a rare circumstance though as if I leave it online it becomes a security risk otherwise, I would just leave it up there.

I’ve been toying with the idea of taking a few of them down for a while now (that or merging them into xmeltrut.net’s multi-host dealie) and a few other forums might be for the chopping block also as there is no point me spending time upgrading them if they aren’t going to be used.

Yeeha! I’ve finished upgrading all my MediaWiki installations. Now just WordPress, vBulletin, phpBB and Drupal to take care of and I’m all up to date :p. Seriously, I’m not sure what else I have to update but I think I have quite a bit to do. Upgrading is hard though, why can’t it be easy like SMF?

Ok, well I didn’t do that. Technically I did but I learned to do it many years ago so it’s nothing new. But enough with the Family Guy references, I fixed a problem! Anything that involved fonts on images was screwed on VPS. I tried re-compiling Apache with GD but that didn’t work. In the end I needed to re-compile it with Truetype support as well.

Who knows what other damage I have done re-compiling Apache but for now, it’s a celebration time!

Ok so I’ve got past the moaning stage and started upgrading my MediaWiki installs. I’ve done most of them although there are still two I need to take care of. Haven’t had much in the way of issues, compared to the first one I did anyway although I had to re-do the access control on the Worfolk Internal wiki to block all you lot out :p.

I’ll probably finish off the CassieNet wiki and Bay City High wiki tomorrow. Well, technically today I guess. Later today. Much later. I need sleep.