Well, that went fairly smoothly. Other than a slow FTP program, I haven’t come across any major issues. There was one display problem which was easily solved. Woo! Please let me know if you notice any problems. It’s certainly swish behind the scenes.

Going to try to upgrade to WP 2.0. Things may break, and I may use the default theme while fixing plugin problems.

Btw, Wordpress 2.0 is out. Looks very interesting - I’ll most likely have a play with it tomorrow. Not sure whether I’ll be able to resist the temptation up upgrade, mind…The site may break for a while!

The Wordpress blogging software that powers this site is very, very close to reaching version 2.0. Apparently release candidate 3 was released yesterday, and they’re looking at today or tomorrow for the final build. It’s looking very swish, with advanced caching features as well as WYSIWYG post creation and viewing. Not much difference for readers, other than the inevitable b0rkage as some plugins get scared and flee the server, but it’s exciting for geeks like me

I like making the site all jolly¹. I had falling snow for a while, until I found it was crashing Firefox. For a festive desktop, I recommend TwinkleBulbs, which is quite remarkable in its ability to polarise opinion - you’ll either love it or completely despise it.

1. Don’t like the decorations? There’s an option to turn them off here. [↩]

Anybody reading via the RSS feed will note that it’s gone crazy. Sorry ’bout that. Should be a one-time only thing. I’m playing with the FeedBurner settings, you see.

I normally have just under 100 unique website visitors per day, most of which arrives through google searches. Since I posted about the 75 Bands image, though, the traffic’s increased dramatically. This is largely because I was 4th when searching for “75 bands” in google, although I’ve now dropped to 8th.

After a few weeks of trying to pin down the settings for stopping comment spam, things seem to be working well. For the last week or so all spam has gone straight into the Akismet bin, while proper comments are processing quickly and without any false-positives so far. The problems were due to the wordpress blacklist options. IP addresses in the blacklist caused everything to break, and removing them fixed the problem completely.

Apologies for the downtime; Textdrive had a couple of problems.

If you’re in the UK, I urge you to head on over to the Children in Need website and donate whatever you can afford. I’ve been too busy with NaNoWriMo to participate as I normally would - sorry about that. The whole of the BBC, as well as thousands of people across the country, will be working for free this evening to raise money for children that desperately need the help. £1 is enough to make a difference, and if you Gift Aid it it’s even more (providing you’re a taxpayer.) So please go give £1, pretty please?

IE6, in all its wonderful standards-compliant glory, was expanding the comment box to the entire screen as soon as anything was typed in it. Following the advice from this page, I wrapped the entire form in a 100% width div, and it seems to be working now.

Comments are still rather dodgy, btw. I don’t know whether it’s Akismet being over-zealous or a configuration issue¹, but there’ll be delays on comments appearing as I manually check the spam folder I’ve again emailed support, and hopefully they’ll be able to help.

1. more likely the latter, given everybody else’s success with Akismet [↩]

Oops, comments were broken. All fixed now Upgrading to the latest version of Akismet fixed the problems I was having with it, as well as releasing a few from the queue that I didn’t realise were stuck in limbo.

Just fixed a few IE6 display bugs with the page layout - it should look much neater now. Only annoyance is the half-hidden frappr image, which must be an IE6 bug¹ and is very annoying. Also, the page finally validates as valid XHTML. Well, the front page, anyway. I’ll look at the archive pages later.

1. the h3 header below has negative margins to the right and left, but IE6 seems to be applying them above [↩]

I feel terribly vain doing this, but I can’t resist posting that I was mentioned on the Guardian Culturevulture blog on Tuesday, as part of a post about NaNoWriMo. Only discovered it just now, when browsing through referrer logs. Not that I’m up at 0115 on a Friday night looking at website statistics. Oh no.

The blog should now be all moved over, and links should be backward compatible. Phew. I know there are still a few bugs, but I wanted to get it all transferred so that I can concentrate on writing from Tuesday. The domain name has changed from wandwaver.co.uk to wongablog.co.uk, as various people, including me, were typing that in by mistake. The RSS feeds should have moved transparently.

I hope you like the new design - feel free to let me know any thoughts! It should work fine in IE6, Opera 9.0P1 and Firefox 1.5, albeit with the odd quirk in Firefox. Navigation should be way faster, too. There are a couple of bits and pieces left to implement - tags and the header bar spring to mind - but nothing too taxing.

That’s enough metablogging for the moment. Back to normal posting tomorrow, I hope.

I’m getting there on the website rebuild, but it’s slow going! It’s quite fun, though. I’d forgotten how quickly time passes when editing websites - I barely noticed this afternoon.

We spoke to my solicitor this morning. The flat situation is worse than I’d realised, as it turns out the lease specifically states that I have to pay all of the maintenance fees, instead of 1/6th - I thought that was just a possible interpretation. The landlord’s solicitors are still refusing point blank to change it, too. There’s also the matter of upcoming asbestos searches on the building’s communal areas. My solicitor says that if damaged asbestos is found and the other 5 tenants leave or declare themselves bankrupt, the landlords could legally demand I pay for the repairs. As such, her professional opinion is that I should not go ahead in the current position, and the Halifax will not sign off on the mortgage without her approval¹. We spoke to my estate agent later - he’s hoping to be able to convince the landlord’s solicitors to change their minds. On the bright side, anybody’s solicitor should pick up on this issue, so it’s unlikely the buyer seller² will pull out. I hope.

1. not that I’m planning to, but even if I stated I’m happy to go ahead this would be irrelevant - my solicitor has to give her professional opinion to the Halifax regardless of what I’m willing to accept [↩]
2. edited for muppetry [↩]