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.

UPA North Meeting, Manchester

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I will be going to the next UK Usability Professionals Association (UPA) North meeting at Cafe Muse at the Manchester Museum on Thursday 8th December. This time we are very privileged to have Prof. Alistair Sutcliffe from University of Manchester to present the main event.

The Main Event – Alistair Sutcliffe on ‘Designing Attractive Web Sites’

“This talk will present recent research that attempts to unpack the current debate about user engagement and aesthetics in web site design… The end point, I hope, will be to foster discussion of concepts of engagement and aesthetics in web design and when such concepts are really important in delivering effectiveness and commercial success.”

If you are interested in usability, aesthetics and e-commerce and how it all fits together, you really SHOULD NOT MISS THIS!

The B Feature – Steve Potts on Website Accessibility Evaluation Techniques

Steve Potts will give a brief tour of the techniques and pragmatic perspective applied when evaluating websites for accessibility.
“In this presentation we’ll investigate how to address website accessibility evaluations from a technical perspective, highlighting the difficulties imposed by the wide range of collective technologies accessing the web, and the criteria by which we measure the objectives of an evaluation.”

Steve is a good friend of mine and someone I admire and respect. Steve’s presentation is another reason you should not miss this event.

As ever, the meeting will provide an opportunity to network, chat, have a drink and meet new people.

Venue and Date Details

  • Venue: Cafe Muse, Manchester Museum, Oxford Road, Manchester,M13 7QQ Map at http://tinyurl.com/byj4u
  • Date: Thursday 8th December 2005
  • Start Time: 6.30pm for 7.00pm
  • End Time: Around 9.00pm and then drinks at Cafe Muse and Kro Bar.
  • Cost: Free

You do not need to be a member of the UPA to attend this meeting.

RSVP: It helps us if we know how many people are coming, so please email to book using northern.usability [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

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!