Category Archives: Tech Stuff

HTML and Application stuff

Welcome to SQL 5.0, WP 3.2 and TwentyEleven!

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It has taken me a month to get here…

WordPress 3.2 was launched in early July (2011) but required a database upgrade from SQL4 to SQL5 (5.0.77 in this case). Not as simple as just “upgrade the database” though…   I had to backup the database files, install a brand new version of SQL, restore the database files to the new database, sort out the error messages (the “import” function tries to create a new database with the same name as the one you have just created), redirect the website to the new database, try it, delete the old database, try it again and finally check out all the new, fancy gizmos available in the new version.

One you may have noticed is the new “TwentyEleven” theme. It is 1000px wide (hurrah!) whereas the old theme was stuck at 760px without a lot of config file editing.

I think it looks good. I’ve designed and uploaded my own header so watch out for regular changes. Maybe I’ll put my bikes up here on rotation (at 1000×288 pixels)

New (Blue) Header 1000x288

 

Dreamweaver: A Leap of Faith…

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As the number of sites that I manage (and host) has grown, I have become increasingly frustrated with Microsoft FrontPage. Although I started off (a few years back) using FrontPage Extensions to do some clever* stuff, I find myself increasingly editing the HTML directly nowadays and using ftp via my desktop to upload files.
* well, I thought it was clever at the time…

Recently, I have been looking after www.YouTuba.org which is my son Chris’ tuba quartet’s site. He puts this together on his MacBook and as far as FrontPage is concerned, might as well not exist. He has struggled with the Mac’s built-in application as well.

Now we both have Dreamweaver – me for the PC and him for the Mac, which should make joint management and updates a lot simpler.

I have started to convert www.PhilRead.org (including a new eCommerce platform) and will move on to my other sites:

www.nirvana-motorcycles.com

www.classicbikegallery.co.uk (includes old eCommerce platform)

www.total-trust.com

www.YouTuba.org (includes old eCommerce platform)

Comments

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Spam comment posts have reached 50 per day (all captured by Aksimet so never came anywhere near the blog) so I have changed the setting so that commenters must register and login before posting. As most of my commenters are already members this probably won’t affect too many.

I’ll give it a few weeks and see how it goes.

Steve

Update

24 hours on and no spam comments.  Success!

I’ll switch it back on and see how long it takes them to find me again.

Update 07-Dec-10

Comments switched back on – let’s see what happens…

Update 10-Dec-10

50 spam comments per day 🙁

Site Hacked 23-Feb-2010

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For those of you who got Error 404s from www.nirvana-motorcycles.com over the last couple of days, this was cause by a hacker who used the trojan/virus called Gumblar to add links to malicious sites in the scripts.

Luckily, the hosting company (www.names.co.uk) has automated systems that detect these types of attacks and took the site down while they reinstalled back versions of all the page.

Guestbook Gone…

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I finally deleted the Guest Book from Nirvana due to the hourly spam and porn postings.

It seems that, even if I “hide” the Guestbook in a different folder, the spammers can still find it and post directly into the database. So I’ve given up.

1-0 to the bastards!

More on the IE6 Problems…

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I reckon that IE6 has a problem with automatically resizing pictures and frames.

My post on riding Triumph 900s uses some pretty large pictures which all get reduced to fit on Firefox.

Good old IE6 puts up this:

This is the original size of the picture of the Trident Sprint.

Problems with Blog Display (IE6?)

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Does anyone out there see this?


All I can think is that my work PC uses IE6 (I use Firefox)

Any ideas?

[EDIT 10th May]
Could be the screen settings.

At home I have an old Ilyama LCD (from about 2000) which operates best at 1024×768

My work Dell (new) is set to 1280×1024. Could that be the reason?