Category: www.nickhodge.com

Legacy posts from the old blogging engine

Site Design Temporarily Reset

Time to upgrade to the latest WordPress. Time to remove many old plugins that were causing nastiness. A better designed theme will return, soon. For those reading through RSS, ignore this post.

Some other things are going a bit haywire. In the midst of fixing this now. I must admit I feel better on WordPress 2.1.2.

The RSS feed from this site through Feedjumbler/Feedburner are working OK, links on this site to the Feedburner needs to be created.

Need to find a wide design where I can customise the header image. Need to re-architect the old data from the old mungenet web site. Maybe render this to static elements. Not sure of the approach here yet. Re-add Plugins that do the cool things (history, archives, searching) – oh, and Google Adsense so I can pay for this web site 🙂

Interesting Historical Statistics

As a part of the transition of my blog entries from the old PHP-based Mungenetengine to PHP-based WordPress I’ve needed to categorize and title my older posts.

It has been interesting noting certain milestones:

  • Total blog posts: 371
    Which totals 5.6 posts per month, on average over the last 5.5 years.
  • Started Weblogging: January 2000
    5.5 years of blogging, more if you go right back! to 14th July 1997. That’s over 9 years personal presence on the web. Also, as a point of reference, www.nickhodge.com is still not as large at the Fairfax@Atlanta site dynamically assembled through 5 intense weeks in the internet dark-ages of 1996. The web is 15 years old today, so I’ve been publishing for 66% of the “life” of the www.
  • Implemented under self-coded PHP with MySQL backend: December 2001
    The decision to put data in a database has rewarded this site many times, although not in ways originally intentioned. A code review shows some lines and functions being 5 years old. Oh the horror of some of the PHP.
  • Implemented SOAP for Neil Finn Lyric Server: June 2002
    As web services started to emerge, I’d decided to see how difficult they were to implement. With various clients on different languages and platforms, and struggling with WSDL – this service is still working today. At as last night, the server had processed over 100,000 requests.
  • Implemented RSS Feed: July 2002
    Before feed-readers were parts of browsers and operating systems, and before I really knew why I was doing this – coded a RSS feed for this site.
  • First Moblog Entry: July 2002
    Implemented a quick gateway for SMS-to-Blog entry system, and tapped out an entry from a remote device.
  • First Wikipedia Reference: October 2003With the recent world awareness of Wikipedia, my first posting and reference is way-back. According to Wikipedia, the number of entries was less than 200,000.

photo blog experiment

To the right of the front page of www.nickhodge.com is a quick experiment: the Photo Blog Experiment. Now that MMS is working from my Sony-Ericsson phone, I can email to a special process running on this web server. The photo is de-attached and inserted into the database. Within 5 minutes of taking a photo, it is published here. This extends the SMS to blog system I created in 2002.

Wow

Newsgator to Mungenetengine via Metaweblog API

To explain the previous post. As I “live” in Outlook 2003, and finding less and less time to browse web sites, I’ve invested in Newsgator. Version 2.0 has this useful “blog” posting feature that was too good to leave alone. There is a plugin mechanism to Newsgator; and I’ve installed one that has a Metaweblog API interface. Writing a PHP and XMLRPC stub on the server, I can now easily post from within Outlook 2003.

InDesign Plugins

Thanks Andrew for spotting this: For InDesign 2.0 and CS: MultiDo: To celebrate the launch of EasyCatalog, we are offering a free plug-in that allows you to perform multiple undo or redo operations in one step using new undo multiple and redo multiple menu options. The menu will dynamically update to reflect the 100 most recent operations.

60th Anniversary of D-Day

60th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings. You’ve probably seen the deservedly saturation coverage on the TV news. Sadly, the 60th is probably the last major anniversary that the veterans will experience. As Stephen Ambrose has said, this generation was probably the greatest.

To give D-Day an Australian flavour: we did have sailors and airman who served during the Normandy campaign. In Arromaches, there is the Mus�e D�barquement. Inside the museum is a RAAF Hawker Typhoon pilot who died during the campaign (18th June 1944, flak). 25 year old Pilot Officer Don Mason from Wagga Wagga, NSW. He served in the 198th Squadron, RAF, Manston. His remains and plane were recovered in 1942. His service uniform was donated to the museum by the family.