Welcome to my blog

Well it’s been just over three months since I started training with my current school. I must say I’m still struggling; both physically and technically. My fitness has dropped off significantly since the Black Belt qualifier with Bushidokan; I struggled to do 20 push-ups last night. (more…)

I recently acquired a dead Dell 4700 desktop machine from my father. After replacing the power supply, adding some memory and a gigabit ethernet card, it was ready to go. I’d been thinking for some time of setting up a Linux-based home server for print sharing and backup. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 desktop and proceeded to configure the machine.

This article looks at how I configured the machine as a home print server, exploring the terminology and options for the un-initiated (like me).
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This blog has become schizophrenic; rather than blogging about one thing, it’s covering many aspects of my life. So I thought I’d find a way to present different views. I had already categorised my posts into general areas, now I needed a way to present the different views with some commentary. The best way was a set of category-based pages, with some text at the top describing the area of interest and then the category-based listing of posts below.

This post describes how I implemented a set of category-based page templates in WordPress, covering the design and implementation.
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One of the main parts of this blog is the Now Reading Reloaded plugin for managing the books I’m reading and have read. The plugin is great providing library, page, author, tag and search views. It also has a review/rating system where you can rate a book and write a review. However it does not provide a template to display favourites; like a “top 10″ list of highest-rated books. So I thought I’d write one. It was a bit of a challenge figuring out the URL structure, but once I did that, the template implementation was reasonably simple; the functions I wanted were already implemented in the plugin just not exposed in the provided templates.

This post is a summary of how I implemented the favourites page, including the URL structure required for Now Reading, how I added the new page functionality to the plugin code, and how I implemented the new template page…
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During my recent them upgrade I had some challenges with the Now Reading Reloaded plugin for WordPress and the frustrating “HTTP 500: Internal Server Error” messages. This took me on a journey of exploration into how the php modules used by WordPress and its plugins ended up as HTML on my browser and what logs were available to help me diagnose the 500 error.

The following article looks at how the pieces fit together in a typical Apache/PHP deployment (for WordPress and other PHP-based applications) and then shows how the pieces can be used to identify code problems….
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