Well, we are, and there are loads things still to do. Not all are related to going on holiday but the holiday has an impact on them all.

1. I’ve not even considered packing but then you do get rather blasé about it when you are returning to the same place, and will be frequenting the same haunts (for new readers; my father-in-law lives in Spain, and has done for a few years now). We don’t even bother with anything ‘smart’ as we eat out at the more local restaurants than anything fancy, and that’s when we eat out at all.

2. Then, of course, the iPod needs to be loaded, books need to be chosen, and I really MUST start using that alarm to make sure I get to bed on time as we need to be at the airport at 4 a.m. on Friday morning… which means leaving the house sometime around 3 a.m. which in turn means that I am seriously considering just staying up.

However, on Thursday, which we both have off, we are heading up to Perth for lunch with a family friend, nipping in to the butcher to buy some rib-eye steak for my father-in-law, and then I’m hooking up with friends in the evening for dinner and some diet cokes, whilst Louise will be acting like a teenager again and going all wobbly for some oik called Justin Timberloch, or something…

3. Of course there are somethings that need done on this site (search not working?), and that’s before I even bother my arse about thinking about email addresses and whatnot – I reckon I’ll stick with my ‘name’ domain for that, and leave the email address for this domain dormant for now.

And yes, I’m still looking into the whole “coloured name” for my mum (which for some reason is harder than it should be!).

4. Ohh my head, too much going on. I have a new guy starting today, and loads of stuff I really need to get done to give me a reasonably clean slate to come back to, although why we continue to do that is beyond me, what difference does going on holiday make, there is ALWAYS stuff to do.

5. I have a package that I’m quite keen to get my hands on which, currently, looks like it will arrive at my office on… ohhh go on, guess which day…

6. I’m also hoping to pre-publish a few posts to carrying things over whilst I’m away, one of which is quite intriguing, if I say so myself, so keep yer peepers peeled people!

7. The great Scottish Blogs cleanup continues and, whilst I’ve had over half the batches back now, I’ve yet to sit and go through the database and start whacking dead sites. It’ll be a long slow job that one, and I’m not sure I’ll have the time until I get back from my holiday. Ohh and the blogmeet is now organised, Edinburgh, 19th May at 2pm in the Jolly Judge. Be there!

8. Last but not least, I can’t for the life of me get some simple CSS floats to work. A sidebar on the right, main content on the left and the sidebar KEEPS DROPPING BELOW THE MAIN CONTENT!! It’s killing me, and no end nor combination of tweaking margins, padding, widths, nor clearing left, right or all, is making the blindest bit of difference. ARGH!

And breeeaaaaaaatthheeeeee…

Finally, before I dash off, some links/apps that I’ve found useful over the past few days.

1. If you are moving your WordPress installation, to a new domain, or just to a new directory, you must must MUST head over to this wonderful site. This is the page I used to move my WordPress domain, and it went without a hitch. All in it took me about an hour to do, tops.

2. That alarm thing I was asking about the other day, well Banshee Screamer Alarm seems to fit the bill. Ignore the fugly look, it meets all my criteria. It has a “start with windows” option (ok, everything has that via the Startup folder but hey, it’s worth mentioning), minimises to the system tray, needs set only once and will repeat on chosen days at the set time, can start an application or open a URL when the alarm time is reached, and can be used silently.

It’s currently running, and will launch a custom HTML page I knocked up which states, in large red (not yet blinking) letters GO TO BED.

Many thanks to B-Rad for suggesting it.

3. Thinking Rock is a GTD style application which I’ve been using for the past few weeks. I’ve mentioned it before but it’s getting a second mention because, frankly, the past couple of weeks have been frantic and without it I’d be lost. Whilst I have been busy over the past couple of weeks, knocking quite a few things off my to do list, the number of items and tasks that I needed to capture grew exponentially and Thinking Rock has helped me keep on top of all that.

Case in point is the site move, with multiple little things to remember, and new items being triggered as I stumbled across something else I hadn’t considered, the ability to quickly dump a one line ‘thought’ into Thinking Rock, processing it later on to add more detail and group it with other similar items, has been a life saver.

Even if you don’t ascribe to the GTD method, it’s worth a look. You WILL need to understand how the app works though as it’s maybe not immediately obvious, but the site has some good info on that front. Think of it as GTD-ish..

Right, that’s enough for now. Things to do, coffee to drink.

But sometimes things happen and plans need to be adjusted.

I received a somewhat alarming email from 34sp, an ISP I use for a couple of sites I run, including this one. Apparently a couple of my sites were hacked recently. I don’t visit the sites in question very often so it wasn’t something I noticed, although as they were both only ‘down’ for a few hours I seriously doubt that anyone else noticed either. Thankfully both sites have now been restored to their previous state.

Of course this mean that I’ll need to change my FTP passwords and review my internet security in general. I very much doubt that my machine has been hacked, and I’m fairly careful when sending emails around but it pays to be vigilant, and a few additional precautions won’t do any harm. Of course I don’t want to go over the top but it’s funny how these things make you more paranoid than usual.

And whilst I’m at it I need to get the miniblog working again. I’ve tried a couple of plugins and neither have worked. Admittedly I think recent changes to WordPress haven’t helped much, but until things settle down on that front I’m just gonna go with some custom code. More hassle for me but at least it should work, and will protect me a little the next time I upgrade WordPress.

These things were not planned.

However I did manage to go out for a run this morning, that WAS planned, and there will be more on that, later.

This is what I have setup for my WordPress Theme folder (wp-content/themes/MYTHEME/) but I guess it’s likely to be similar if you have a custom WordPress install. I had loads of problems not being able to edit files through the WordPress admin interface, and various timeouts and 404 errors. I’ve not had any problems since I did the following:

Set the permissions (CHMOD for tech speak users) for the theme, or WordPress, FOLDER to 755.
Set the permissions for all the FILES in that folder to 776.

And that should help. Maybe. As ever with these things, YMMV.

To do this using FileZilla users, connect to your site, then right-click a folder or file, and select File Attributes. In the dialog that is displayed, type in the appropriate number and click OK.

Here’s hoping it helps. Someone.

Two posts today, both of which may hold limited appeal. First up, a few questions about my RSS site feeds, and later a nice tale about good customer service.

If you don’t use the RSS feeds, then I’d ignore this post.

Right, still here? Good, because I have a question for all of you who don’t bother your arse to visit this site every day, instead preferring to view my glorious content using some poxy news reader which will no doubt strip my delicately laid out prose and dump it into something akin to.. *shudders* plain text. Bloody heathens. Ehhhh… anyway.. what I meant to say was would you LOVELY people who are currently reading this site via an RSS feed be so kind as to pop along to the site itself? I’d like you to answer a quick question. Please?

And to my even lovelier readers (ohh yes, we grade our readership here, didn’t you know?) who value my site enough to visit it “properly”, you are more than welcome to read on and offer your opinion too.

And if no-one answers I’ll just do what I bloody well want!

I’ve been playing with the RSS feeds a little, some of you have already spotted some of the changes, and I am going to rationalise them a little. However, as I don’t really use them all that often, it’s really up to you to tell me what you want (would like).

The Question:

• Which RSS feed do you currently use? (title or URL would be handy)

That wasn’t too painful, was it? Ohh but I’m not finished yet. Read on for some explanation and more options.

Why are you changing things again?!

The way I post to my sidebar (the miniblog on the left there, uh, unless you are reading this in an RSS reader, obv.) has changed. I used to use Blogger to publish there, but I switched to using a category of WordPress, which has brought it’s own set of issues, but I digress. Because of that switch the default site feed now includes miniblog posts as well (by default). However, as I don’t really use my own feeds that’s not really a problem.. for me.

So I’m thinking of tidying things up and offering only the following three feeds:

1. Main Feed – the normal feed, as it is at the moment, with ALL categories of posts from the site. That gives you the main posts and the miniblog posts in one feed.
2. Link Feed – Miniblog posts + del.icio.us links which would give you, in essence, my full “linkblog”.
3. Super-duper trough of information feed – All posts + del.ico.us links + Flickr photos + anything else I can crowbar in there (recently played tracks from last.fm if I can get it to work).

How does that sound? (ohh, that’s question number two then).

I want something different!

Well tough.

OK, not really, I just love you guys and gals too much I guess. If you aren’t happy with any of the above options, you can also monitor all of the following feeds separately, although I won’t be offering them as default feeds from the site:

• Miniblog posts only
• del.icio.us posts only
• Flickr photos only
• My recently played tracks (from last.fm)

WordPress tip: Did you know you can monitor a feed for ANY category in a WordPress site? Just visit the category link in a post, and add feed/ to the end of the URL.

For example, here’s the feed for my “before blog” posts.

I’m confused!

Yeah me too.

Basically, of the three options I gave you —Main Feed, Link Feed, Super Duper Trough of Information— I just wanna know which one you’d prefer.

The comments await, have at it.

• I’m beginning to see the appeal of the iPod Shuffle (the new ones come with newer headphones ya know) since getting Louise one at Xmas. The simplicity of it, plug in and press play, hits home hard during the past few weeks of hectic activity. Yes, choosing a playlist has become a hassle. Yes, I am one lazy bastard. I’ll have a blue one please.
• Creating a theme for WordPress has been hugely rewarding. Mainly because I now understand more about the platform than I had previously. Still some way to go, but there will be some spiffy new pages coming… soon.
• Still jogging, and currently trialling lock laces (bought from the wonderful wiggle). They were too tight last night so some minor adjustments required but I liked them. Yes, my ‘gadget’ fetish knows no bounds!
• Still not taking that many photos though. However I still find it odd when people compliment me on my photos as, honestly, I don’t think they are all that great. Don’t get me wrong though, compliments are good.
• Post of the Week is moving along nicely. Still got some bugs to fix and new features to implement but on the whole I’m quite pleased with the design and functionality. You are visiting, aren’t you? And I’d encourage you to take a turn being a judge as well. The site is very much BY and FOR the people.
• That reminds me, I must add a Post of the Week link/badge to my sidebar.
• Which is much easier to do as I have finally sorted my access permissions on my server, I can now edit my WordPress theme files using the WordPress admin page. If you visited a couple of nights ago and the site looked funny, that was me mucking about with CHMOD settings.
• The football transfer deadline wasn’t that exciting, but the rolling BBC page tracking the gossip was hilarious. Amongst various players being seen all over England the best ‘spot’ was reported around 9pm, I’ll let you read where Robbie Fowler was spotted.
• Switching hosts – following on from Ian’s recent move I’ve started to look into doing the same. Like him I’m finding 34sp a little limiting, and can get better deals elsewhere. Multiple databases will allow me to install web apps on MY server, something I’m wanting to do more and more. I’m truly becoming a ‘web worker’. A Small Orange is in the lead at the moment, but other options are welcomed.
• And finally a new version of a ‘must-have’ app has been, um, launched. Launchy now supports plugins and comes with some default examples including a web search, calculator and a new way of quickly navigating your computer. Yes, it takes a wee while to get used to but when I used another PC the other day I was amazed at how much longer it took me to get stuff done without my favourite little app. AND it comes with documentation, better than a little of open source apps I’ve tried.
• New music filter – none, nada, nothing. Will be picking up the new Arcade Fire album and… well I’m out of the loop. Who should I be listening to this year??
• Holy shit. It’s FEBRUARY!
• Air Travel Tax has gone up. Why the hoo-haa now? It was announced last year, and let’s be honest, an extra fiver on a trip sure ain’t gonna stop anyone from flying. What was the aim of this tax? If it was to reduce flights then it should have been bumped up to something more substantial, £30 say? More? At what point would it start to have an impact on the number of flights? Of course it’s not about that at all but I wouldn’t doubt if that becomes a reason to hike the tax higher in the future.

Yeesh. That was longer than I thought it would be… I do prattle on, don’t I.

[Ed: Yes you do, I thought you were supposed to be writing better posts these days, you know, concentrating on the writing? You'll never win a Bloggie posting random lists like this.]

Coming soon, a post about the Bloggies, and possibly a list or two (yeah yeah, big surprise).