10 Nov 2011 by Dave.

Sometime, you just have to use a Wordle, here’s mine of this blog, as at today.

Posted in wordle, tagging, blogging | No Comments »

01 Aug 2011 by Dave.

About owning the Wordpress install and using 1and1 hosting services. I am preparing to change the look and feel of this blog, and have a shadow blog. This is installed using ftp of a wordpress distribution. My hosting povider is 1&1 which has a FAQ on how to in install a private copy of wordpress into one of their hosting accounts. I was having some problems geting the shadow blog to use the self updateing tools; I was trying to install WPtouch, a theme that optimises the look and fell for small screen devices, and the wordpress adminstration page/frame would go blank, or take the background display colour .

 It seems that wordpress needs to access PHP5 for these functions to work properly, while the 1and1 default is PHP4. I spoke to 1&1 to work out how to do invoke PHP5. I have inserted

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

into a fresh new .htaccess file.

The updates and add new theme dialogues now work.

Posted in php, 1and1, technology, wordpress, blogging, admin | No Comments »

19 Jun 2011 by Dave.

It was good to meet up with Mike Ramchand and Phil Harman last week at the Oracle User Group where Phil was presenting a talk entitled “Virtualisation Fever”. The conversation turned to personal web sites. Mike advised me to get off Snipsnap because its resource implications are too costly. It should be noted that there are a number of additional weaknesses due to its age.  It is written in Java and while it has an extensibility framework, using it requires Java and possibly Groovy, and I code in neither. Snipsnap’s tagging capability is cumbersome, the blog index uses the storage names not the snip titles, and only the blog generates an RSS feed, which is limited to the last 10 entries.  There are other small problems I have with it getting it to do what I need. It needs Java 1.5 and 1.5 GB of RAM to run the backups. It’s a jetty server and one needs ssh access to the host to administer the service, that’s why I am running it on IaaS.

Obviously I made the decision to move to move my blog to Wordpress some time ago and so I really need to get to grips with making it do what I want. I have just ordered Hal Stern (and others’) Professional Wordpress from Amazon. While thinking about what to do about the wiki, I looked at Ryan Barret’s blog, at snarfed.org, and he has moved his site from Snipsnap to Wordpress. Ryan published a number of articles and scripts for snipsnap and says on his blog that he was real fan, so if he’s moved off, then I think I’ll follow him. I plan to use wordpress as my new wiki, I’ll install a second instance, one for the blog, and one for the wiki. Ryan has several scripts that I hope will be useful.

Posted in wiki, technology, snipsnap, wordpress, blogging | No Comments »

20 May 2011 by Dave.

My bliki, snipsnap, is now back on line, hosted by Amazon. I have had to disable the Disqus comments on the bliki; they break the backup. I copied the bliki from the development server using tar on the whole installation build. I plan to write up how I recovered the site and also plan to continue to use the wiki to record my notes and things of interest to me. The blog from the bliki is forwarded to both my mingle and my friend feed, and I expect to write the occasional post detailing what new articles have been added to the wiki. I have considered using delicious to tag the blog feeds to create a tag cloud for the blog, but we’ll see, since life is a bit short. I had decided that ability to review and retrieve old bliki articles from a snipsnap blog was a serious disadvantage to using it which is one of the reasons that I’ll remain blogging at this address.

This blog, Well Red, is also available as feeds at

• both google reader, http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/http%3A%2F%2Fblog.davelevy.info%2Ffeed%2F
• and feedburner, http://feeds.feedburner.com/davelevy/ZYIj .

Posted in technology, snipsnap, blogging | 1 Comment »

22 Dec 2010 by Dave.

Since I don’t have full control over the look and feel of this blog, I had a look at userstyles.org. I have downloaded stylish and installed it into one of the copies of Firefox that I use. I then made some changes to my test site and installed a user style locally in Firefox, so it all worked quite well. I need to examine how to upload a style to the internet and allow a page to offer the download, as do some of the style pages in the gallery on their home page at userstyles.org.

The two use cases I was considering were

1. offering you a different user experience while reading this blog,
2. seeing if a user style, embedded in Chrome would make consuming the blog, and static site easier on an Android phone.

I have a feeling that since I control the HTML & CSS for my static site, user styles are not part of the answer and that taking full control of the blog so that I have control over the HTML & CSS is a better answer for the blog.

I  might however write a user style for the NWN Vault, whose visual style, I find old fashioned and cluttered. I was reminded of how bad it is  since I have used some of my xmas break to catch up on some playing time in Neverwinter Nights; I was using the vault to find some new games.

Posted in user styles, technology, blogging | No Comments »

12 Dec 2010 by Dave.

I’ve not been to Technorati for a while, and the process of claiming one’s blog and site have changed a bit. I hope that now I am using Wordpress that it’ll be easier; roller, my first blog technology at Sun was a pain, and snipsnap which I used from August ‘09 untill last July was impossible. (It’s one of the reasons I decided to adopt Wordpress, most people develop for it).

Posted in blogging, admin | No Comments »

10 Dec 2010 by Dave.

I have decided, that despite progress towards the resurrection of my now defunct 2nd blog, a Snipsnap bliki,  that I can’t wait until then to start blogging again. So I have started this blog. BTW that blog was available a http://davelevy.dyndns.info and some the posts are available via Google Reader, [RSS/ATOM],

I have created the categories  admin and silly, and shall shortly add Politics &  Technology, which should give you an idea of what I plan to write about, although the silly stuff can usually fit into 124 characters and thus is more likely to appear on twitter, may be with a bit of help from http://www.twitlonger.com. I will probably create a category for my rants on Intellectual Property Law, and also on Economics. If my first blog hosted at Sun Microsystems is anything to go by, I should also create a category on travel, but my current job doesn’t require as much, so it’s what I can fund myself, and I usually post a photo-blog to my photostream on flickr.

This blog is hosted using a canned service from 1&1 and uses Wordpress. The fact that it’s a canned service means that I have limited control over the look and feel which is why I shall be reading in some detail their FAQ article, How do I install WordPress via FTP? . I had come to the conclusion that I was going to move to WordPress anyway.

My experience with Snipsnap, and looking at Alistair Campbell’s blog as he struggles to avoid using it suggested that all the things that I have been saying and listening to about open source are true. The rate of innovation generated by a community of developers outpaces most corporations, and certainly outpaces me. For instance many WordPress blogs are optimised for small screens, mainly Apple IOS devices, but Android is coming. (WTF are Nokia and Opera so slow to get adoption? It’s going to kill them).

Anyway, welcome, or welcome back, hope this is interesting or useful.

Posted in silly, snipsnap, wordpress, blogging, admin | No Comments »