Conor’s Blog – A blog about Ant, Java, Politics, Whatever!
I figured it was time to start blogging again.
Since I last blogged, we’ve bought a house. It turns out that owning a house requires more that just “owning”, you have to maintain it too. So I’m giving this as my excuse for not blogging much.
As ever, tempus fugit …
One of the blogs I read regularly is Robert Rapier’s R-Squared Blog. I always find it an interesting read as it is a little different from the computing blogs I tend to mostly read. His blog covers an increasingly important topic and I appreciate his honest appraisals.
Anyway, one of the things he resolved to do was to read at least 40 books in the year. I don’t expect I can read that many books so I’m setting a more modest target of 12 books. The books can be of any sort or style but must be read completely. I’ll keep track here.
Actually, I set this goal privately last year but I’m pretty sure I didn’t make it. It’s funny because I read a tremendous amout but it is either online blogs and magazines or I tend to read just the bits and pieces I need from software reference books, etc. I’m hoping that making a public declaration will give me some additional motivation.
As I noted in a previous entry, I used the Rewrite rules suggested by DrBacchus. I’ve just now updated them to handle the monthly archives as well as the single article archives. I also made these rewrites work as permanent redirects. Javablogs updated my feed info automatically which was nice. Here are the rewrites I am using:
RewriteRule ^blog/archives/(200.)_(..).html$ /blog/index.php?m=$1$2 [R=301]
RewriteRule ^blog/archives/00(.*).html$ /blog/index.php?p=$1 [R=301]
mod_rewrite rocks.
I’ve finally updated my Blog software. It took me a while. I looked into a few packages and finally chose WordPress. It seemed to have all the features I needed and is provided as an option by my hosting provider which is one of the best webhosting, which is nice but not a major factor.
I’m hopeful the change should be relatively seamless. I have redirects in place for the old MovableType pages and feeds. It took a bit of hacking to get right. I worked on my Fedora box, using a site backup to test out the various options. I learnt a bit about Rewrite rules in the process. Thanks to DrBacchus’s Journal for some useful information.
Of course, the main feature I was after was the measures to avoid comment and trackback spam – we’ll see how that goes. It’s ironic that as I was thinking about upgrading, WordPress.org ran into some bad PR, relating to gaming Google. After reading the various explanations, I was happy to go ahead with WordPress. Everyone makes mistakes …
Unfortunately, my blog has begun to attract a lot of spam comments. I’ve been cleaning them up as they come in but enough is enough – I’ve now disabled comments. Any better solutions for Moveable Type?