Mr Mist’s Blog

Due to various random performance issues, I’ll be trying to move web servers shortly. So depending on how it all goes, you may experience temporary oddities. Normal service should resume as soon as possible.

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It’s reported that Captain Pickard, or, in real life, Patrick Stewart, is to be knighted in the New Year honours list. I can only agree, and say “make it so”. A very varied and talented actor, he is.

In other news, we are hearing more confirmation that Schumacher is close to an F1 return with the Mercedes team – though nothing yet from the man himself, or the team. I’m in two minds about this return. I wouldn’t want it to be a damp squib, because he left on a high, but nor would I relish the return to his utter dominance. A good scrap would be interesting.

Loads of peeps were trapped in the Channel Tunnel last night, after freezing temperatures on both sides of the tunnel contributed to a mass break-down of the trains. It appears that on-board staff had not been properly trained in what to do, which is not great. Think everyone is out now, but they were stuck for some time. Not great at all.

Lastly, WordPress 2.9 is out, with bucket loads of new functionality. If you run WordPress on your blog site, you should upgrade now. Make sure your host meets the new requirements first, though – the MySQL and PHP version requirements have increased to 4.1.2 and 4.3 respectively.

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It’s been a bit quiet here lately for two reasons, the first is because I’ve not had a story to write enough about to justify an entry, and the second is because I’m busy writing my next WordPress plugin. This one uses AJAX and all sorts so is a bit of an adventure into the unknown for me, so is taking up a lot of time. Hopefully I should be ready to release version 1 over the next week.

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Are you fed up of your comment-page-1 links showing as duplicate content? Well, never fear, Google has come to your rescue.

Google now support a Canonical URL meta tag.  This tag allows you to set the preferred URL for your posts, so that Google and other search engines know what the prefered entry route is. 

You can set up your own WordPress theme to include this tag fairly easily, just put something like this into your theme’s header.php somewhere near the other meta tags -

<?php if (is_single()) {
 echo '<link rel="canonical" href="' . get_permalink() . '" />';
} ?>

And it should add the tag in for you. Hurrah!

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Hi everyone. WordPress 2.7.1 has been released, which fixes a number of issues in the 2.7 release.

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