Mr Mist’s Blog

We’ve moved house! Cats and all. Moving day went okay really, largely because the removal firm (Speights) were really good (originally quoted for 3 men, by the end of the day we had 6 people working!) We had a brief kerfuffle waiting for keys, because a) the sales office wasn’t open like they promised it would be and b) our money seemed to get mysteriously lost in the system for about an hour. Apparently this is not uncommon.

Wardobes are meant to be going in today. Waiting for the people now. They are not here yet. We have the cats contained in the lounge just now. Yesterday I went up into the loft to check out where the tv aerial will go, and Suzy followed me up the ladder This led to much frantic shouting of “Suzy!” and eventually me grabbing her and pushing her into a washing basket that Laura was holding below the hatch. Suzy will not be allowed in the room again whilst the loft is open.

I think we have changed the address for mostly everything. Let me know if you can think of some companies that we might have forgotten.

Blog updates should return soon. We’ve had the internet since Sunday, activation day is tomorrow.

Almost another week goes by and we are still waiting to find out exchange and completion dates on the move. Apparently now we are waiting for head office sign off on the part exchange (which they already have a buyer for so why that’s taking a long time is anyone’s guess.)

Meanwhile I can’t decide if I should deploy WordPress 2.3 or not. There seems to be mixed reports of good and bad things. Some improvements I guess but also some issues with compatibility and some folk have seen server-killing problem queries. erk.

To be continued.

In other news, I had some attempted fraud on my Barclaycard. Bit disturbing as not used for ages and everything gets shredded, so you have to wonder where they got the details…

It seems as though my comments have been broken for a while. I’m not quite sure how long. It seems to be related to an issue with the comments expiration plugin, so I’ve applied some code hackery to that and comments should be working once more. (If you still get comment closed messages please let me know with the contact form!)

Also I’ve had intermittent problems connecting to the mysql server, which, unfortunately, puts up an obtrusive error message for you readers. Hopefully that is resolved now, too.

Mashable has an entry comparing MovableType4 with WordPress 2.2. Fairly interesting, they draw WordPress as a winner just now but expect close competition. I used MT for quite a few years, and got on with it fine I suppose, but, having made the switch over, I think I would take a lot of convincing to go back. I find WordPress to be much more accessible, and I think that it has a degree of flexibility to it that MT lacks.

The Pages system in WP means that I can integrate things into the rest of my site much more easily than I ever could with MT, and, what’s more, if I want to use any of the blog features outside of the directly controlled pages, all I have to do is a php include to the header files, and the full WP functionality is exposed. *very* simple, plus it’s all written in PHP rather than perl so I actually have a half a chance of understanding it.

I’ll test out MT 4, because we will need to do that anyway for Laura’s site, but I most likely won’t change. I noticed in the mashable article that they mark down WP because its anti-spam solution is not built in. Kinda true, but then that adds flexibility, and the Akismet system is very easy to install as a plugin (in fact the plugin is distributed with the initial download, you just need to get the API key.) And, what’s more, it’s been a lot more effective at stopping me seeing spam than MT ever was.

So there you go. Blog wars. hah.

In other news, today marks the 25th birthday of the CD. Happy birthday CD! Gosh, where would we be without those shiny bits of metal, eh? Vista would sure fill a lot of floppy disks.

I’ve updated my plugin Bad Behaviour Log Reader to version 1.1.

Really just a patch for organisational reasons, it shifts the main plugin page under the “Manage” menu, and adds a link from the dashboard.