gerard's blog

I’m doing a little blog consolidation work at the moment. Maybe I mentioned in the last post that when I started blogging, I went to town registering domains and starting random blogs.

That’s a rookie mistake that I don’t intend to make again. For a start, maintaining all those separate WordPress installs at once, is a lot of work. Even with a dormant WP site, I still feel compelled to apply security updates in case there’s a chance the site gets hacked.

Plus, I can’t stand owning so many ghost town blogs. So, I’m working on a masterplan to consolidate all those blogs and domains into a manageable block of 3-4. For example, I’ve migrated all the posts from an old tech blog of mine to this one, and then finally redirected the domain so that all the traffic comes to this site.

On Wednesday 24th September, I handed in my notice at work. As of the 1st of November, I'll be a free agent. And I'm not going back into paid employment for the moment - I'll be working for Unreality TV.

A little over three years ago, Lisa and I started a little blog about Reality TV. I was working for Cleaver Fulton Rankin and doing a bit of web design work in my spare time to bring in extra cash.

Unreality TV has had its share of ups and downs. The first year was the worst, as we balanced the growing readership with the relatively poor revenues the site would bring. We toyed with having a forum. The forum failed twice, then caught on in its third incarnation.

We spread ourselves too thin, trying to start blogs in different areas, then realising that we didn't have the time to commit to them all. After a crisis discussion, we decided to scale back massively and concentrate on Unreality since it was our biggest (read: only) successful brand.

Two years of further hard work (mostly on Lisa's part) have resulted in a very successful site, averaging a million pageviews per month and a couple of thousand forum users.

Let it be known that yesterday - 10th September 2008 - officially ended my relationship with FIAT.

Somewhere on the Antrim Road, on the way home from work, the car stalled. Given that the car stereo was drowning out the engine, it must have been sixth sense that told me something was wrong. Turning the radio off confirmed that the engine was no longer running, so I tried to turn the key a couple of times to get it started.

As the clock had struck rush hour, I was aware that my stationary car was in the way of other drones heading home. I approached the taxi driver in the car behind me for help pushing the car into a nearby side street.

"Sorry mate, not being funny, but I've got a condition. Can't help. Maybe those traffic wardens over there can give you a hand?" and he pointed out the red-uniformed gentlemen walking up the road.

I've been weighing up two blogging/CMS platforms recently with a view to launching a new community site. Those platforms are Drupal and WordPress MU.

Drupal is a leading open source content management system. With the aid of some nifty add-on modules, Drupal is capable of becoming just about anything your imagination wants. Blogs, wikis, forums, event calendars and much more.

I know it's been a while since I posted on here. I've been slowly updating the photo gallery, but rarely finding the time to cobble a few words together. Hell, I've been to Italy for a fortnight, started working on a Windows Vista course and am undergoing an intensive but interesting audit at work.

A cracker story from work this morning - I've just pulled into the office car park, and the security guard is chatting to one of the inspectors. As I approach them, the inspector points just beyond my head.

Not initially realising what he's pointing at, I look back, slightly bewildered, and ask him what he's on about.

"Not very observant, are you?" comes the reply, "I'm pointing at that big ferry sailing down the channel. I'd love to be getting on that right now..."

I can't blog right now, which is ironic considering that's exactly what I'm doing.

I think I have the cursed writer's block, brought on by a general malaise about blogging in general, the quality of news reporting and the full-on futility of blogging for money.

Mozilla FireFox and Opera both have a nifty bookmarks feature which allows you to give a bookmark a shortcut, sort of like speed-dial for websites.

Here’s how it works: Browse to a website you visit often, say this one. Bookmark the site by either pressing CTRL+D or going to Bookmarks / Bookmark this page.

Lifehacker has a post about dragging unlinked URLs to the address bar to navigate.

Let’s say you come across an URL that hasn’t been linked. Select it (careful with spaces at the start and end) and drag it up to the address bar. Release the mouse and FireFox will automagically jump to that page.

In fact, you can even drag regular links to the address bar for the same effect.

I’m throwing in the towel with Dreamhost. The downtime problems that started in the summer and seem to be intermittently reappearing have caused me to completely lose hope in DreamHost.

I signed up for a Media Temple Grid Server (affiliate link) account a few weeks back and have been gradually porting my blogs across one-by-one. With other people following suit, I thought I’d share my notes for moving a WordPress install over to Media Temple.