Category Archives: Blog

This blog, blogs in general, and blogging

WordPress Book Published

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The book!Wow! It’s hard to believe, but my first book is now a reality! Several copies of my first book — “Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress” arrived at my door this morning.

This is the book, published by Apress that I have co-authored with Robert T Douglass and Jared Smith over the last six months or so. It has long been my ambition to be published and when the opportunity presented itself earlier this year, I had to grab it with both hands. It has been quite a hard struggle; writing in a small amount of spare time is not easy, but I do think it has been worth it.

The result is six chapters on using WordPress to help build an online community. Although I wrote the book using version 1.5.x most of the WordPress chapters are version agnostic. This isn’t a “how to use WordPress” book (the excellent WordPress Codex is good for that). This is a book about how to use WordPress to help you build an online community.

You can buy the book online directly from Apress including in eBook form. You can buy from Amazon.co.uk or you can buy it from Amazon.com. I’m not sure whether it will be on the shelves of your local book store yet, but it will be over the next couple of days.

Apress have a good summary of the book (my emphasis):

Content management, blogs, and online forums are among the most significant online trends today, and Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress are three of the most popular open source applications facilitating these trends.

Drupal is a full content management system that allows you to create any type of website you desire, from an e-commerce to a community-based site. phpBB enables you to set up a bulletin board or forum. And WordPress is the software of choice for the exploding blog community. All three technologies are based on PHP and MySQL.

Jamie and I with the bookFinally, I think Jamie is quite proud of her Dad, Jan is just glad it’s finally published! I must thank them both for putting up with me while I’ve struggled through this. The next one will be easier! I have to thank Matt, Ryan, and the rest of the WordPress community, without whom I would have had nothing to write about!

WordPress Meet-up In London

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I’m looking forward to the WordPress meet-up in London tomorrow. Matt Mullenweg will be visiting the UK (for the first time?) on Friday. I’m quite excited to be meeting Matt and Podz amongst others.

There has been a conversation over at Podz’ blog about arrangements and timings.

The arrangements so far are a bit sketchy but the most concrete seems to be a meeting in Starbucks, Long Acre in Covent Garden. Though Matt is not yet confirmed to be at that one.

Here is Starbucks’ own map of the store complete with confirmation of wireless internet access!

The likelihood is that there will be another get-together in the evening. I’ll be in London from just after noon till late evening.

WordPress.com Now Open

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I see that Matt has opened up WordPress.com for signups without invites. So you no longer need an invite or a copy of Flock to signup for a WordPress.com blog

The service has been scaling very well since we got the problems from the move worked out.

This is very exciting news. I think there will be some great things to come out of this project. Especially the community aspects.

I also noticed that Google’s Gmail has removed the “invitation” block from the logged in screens. Though there isn’t a general “sign up here” notice on their home page. However like using Flock to get into WordPress.com, there has been a non-invitation route in to gmail for a while; you can sign up to Gmail via SMS.

Mike Little Joins The Apress Blog

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I have joined the Apress blog. In case you didn’t know, Apress are a book publisher. They publish “Books for professionals by professionals”. As one of the authors of the forthcoming book “Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress”, I received an invitation to join today.
Just in case you didn’t get that, it does mean that there is indeed a WordPress book coming! We are hoping the book will be out before the end of the year.

Update: Links fixed!

Server Downtime

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Sorry to those who missed my sites for the last day or so. My server started acting strangely and wouldn’t respond to any requests. It took quite a few support requests and a phone call before it was finally rebooted. It turns out there was an issue with the remote reboot:

Your server had problems with it’s startup and our datacenter wasn’t accepting reboot requests or setting up recovery mode. This was fixed, so it shouldn’t happen again.

In all, the server and thus all the sites I host and all email was down for a little over 36 hours. 🙁 If you tried to send me mail in that time, it’s likely I didn’t get it. Please re-send. It seems like I only got a small fraction (perhaps 10%) of the email sent during that period. I guess only the servers which retry were able to deliver.

The problem is, I don’t know what caused it to crash in the first place. I’ve not had a single problem like this in the 9 months that I’ve had the server.

I did wonder whether it had anything to do with the new experimental proxy page I put up on the 23rd. It has been incredibly popular, rocketing up the stats to become my fourth most popular page in just 5 days! It has racked up an incredible 13,000 hits in that time, notwithstanding that it was down for 36 hours too.

This also breaks my more-than-a-month blog silence!

Another WordPress MU Site

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I noticed a few people are reporting the new WordPress MU site webloog.com. I’d be interested to know which version of WordPress MU they are running, there is no version string in the normal output.

I also notice that the feature list from wordpress.org is included verbatim. Thus it mentions, Full standards compliance. Unfortunately none of the pages that I’ve tried to validate manage to be standards compliant! In their eagerness to include Google adsense adverts, they didn’t bother to insert them in a compliant way! There are other issues too.

It seems to be run by the same people who are behind Free.TV. You know, the free-set-top-box-but-you-have-to-buy-it-first-and-you-might-get-a-refund people! Hmmm… Proceed with caution.

Update:It turns out the domain owner is Ric Johnson the guy behind OpenDomain.org, and also connected with free.tv, however webloog.com is run by Scott Sykes who really needs to add some contact information to make things clear. Scott is behind some other community sites, including blogsforjesus.com and nationofchrist.com. He also runs a blog at vivablog.com

Technorati Number One

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When checking my stats for the last week, I noticed a spike in the number of visitors on Friday. My daily unique visits has been slowly growing to an average of 800 to 1000 per day. But Friday saw a record breaking (for me) 1556 visitors!

I looked through the logs to see if I could see a pattern and noticed lots of referrals from this story at Google Blogoscoped.

According to Technorati, this [zed1.com] is currently the world’s most popular blog.

Rather strangely, Philipp Lenssen there pointed his link at my terribly dull main site index, rather than this blog which Technorati indexes.

Being one of the links on a default WordPress installation means that there are automatically thousands of links into my blog. But Technorati removed the WordPress sidebar folks back in October 2004. I can only think that they must have been making some kind of adjustment and accidentally enabled the WP sidebar folks for a short while.

I remember that someone had mentioned it Wow, you’re actually the Technorati #1 blog on Friday. But at the time I only looked at my Technorati profile. I saw I was indeed ‘Technorati Rank: 1’, but within a short time that had changed to ‘Technorati Rank: 0’. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to look at the top 100 list, otherwise I might have got a screenshot.

With any luck some of those extra visitors might come back. I know I’ve had a fair bit of activity on my theme pages this weekend. Maybe it’s related.

WordPress Version 1.5.2

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A new version of WordPress ‘Strayhorn’ is available for download. This is a bug fix release that includes a security fix for users hosted on a server with PHP’s ‘register_globals’ setting turned on (a potentially dangerous configuration).

There are several other bug fixes and minor changes too. Owen has put together a plain English version of the changes.

As an aside I noticed that WordPress Strayhorn’s download counter is rapidly approaching the half-a-million mark.