Simon Scullion

Last night I managed to find the 5 minutes I needed to upgrade four WordPress blogs to the newly released version 2.6.

Possible thanks to the excellent “one-click” install setup provided by Dreamhost.

Very quick and entirely painless, just how upgrades should be!

So unfortunately I can’t go into details on how I upgraded, there really is nothing more to tell!

For anyone who hasn’t already seen the video demo’ing the new version, here it is.

Now to learn about all the new features!

I just updated my about page, and cut this section out, as it didn’t feel relevant anymore, though I thought it’d be nice to keep as a reminder of why this all started!

Objectives

The main aim of this blog - apart from finally registering my domain name - is to give me some focus in my thoughts and opinions on what I see, hear and read relating to the IT industry generally, and my areas of special interest in particular. I enjoy writing, but am largely out of practice and it is something I would like to improve.

I don’t pretend to gain much of a voice, particularly as part of the vocal Lotus blogging community, where I have been a long-time lurker. I have gained much from the incredible depth and breadth of experience to be found out there, and while it would be nice to be able to give something back one day, I’m making no promises!

It happens to all of us from time to time. Relationships suffer their ups and downs, their moments of frustration and happiness.

Well here at casa Scullion, we’ve been going through a bit of a rough patch. I seem to be in a bit of a rut, and that is having knock-on effects and taking its toll. I have also been very busy lately and haven’t been able to dedicate enough time, and to be honest, haven’t felt much of a need to either.

This cannot continue, its a road to separation. We must work this out somehow!

Hey, wait a minute, I think you’re getting the wrong end of the stick!! Things on the wife front are fine and dandy, thanks!! No, the strained relationship is that with my blog!

You see, I have been rather absent here for a while now, and my blog hasn’t had much love. Time to change that, and mix up those boring link and tweet posts with some other equally boring content!

So I missed posting on my blog’s anniversary, shame on me! Saturday marked a year on ‘nternet for simonscullion.com!

It wasn’t that I forgot - honest! Just had rather a lot going on, and something has to give, sorry blog!

I got around last night to upgrading Wordpress last night to version 2.3.

I survived a mild scare when Vitor Pereira contacted me to say the blog was giving errors! It turned out the tagging plugin I had installed wasn’t compatible with the new version. As I hadn’t bothered reading the upgrade instructions, plugins weren’t disabled! Deleting the plugin got things back on track, and things appear to be working smoothly. I do need to reapply the CSS changes I had made.

Tags are now managed natively with Wordpress 2.3 and includes some nice functionality to migrate from other tagging solutions. This worked nicely without any issues, and I have included a tagcloud in the sidebar. This has caused me a housekeeping task to sort out all those currently tagged “uncategorised”! I’ll get there!

I have also added the ShareThis plugin. Not sure whether I like it or not yet, I’ll leave it for a while and see whether it adds any value to the blog.

As always, comments are welcome, let me know if you spot any glitches!

Many thanks to Vitor for his help when I messed up!

Tags: wordpress, blog, sharethis, tags

Finally got around to signing up to Feedburner, and moving my feeds, it was something I had been meaning to do for a while.

In the end it was a painful process, with a plugin doing the magic on the Wordpress end.

So, to my faithful reader, please feel free to re-syndicate my content again via the new feed!

Here are the links:

• Content: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SimonScullion
• Comments: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SimonScullionComments

Many thanks, and apologies for the inconvenience!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: rss, feeds, feedburner

Now that Flock is out of beta and getting some good reviews, I thought I’d give it a whirl.

So far liking it a lot.

It is dead easy to configure with the major social sites, so the trial blog post!

I can see myself sticking with this for a while rather than Firefox.

Blogged with Flock

Tweaked the fonts a little, as I always thought they were a little small and therefore difficult to read.

Inspired after reading this article on dive into mark.

What do you think? Is it better? Any other suggestions for tweaks?

No promises mind, I don’t have as much time as I’d like to play with this, real life gets in the way!

Technorati Profile

We’re already two posts in, so I had better get an introduction out there before its out of place!

I won’t repeat all I have included in my About page, just a little flesh on the most interesting bones.

I have been working in the IT industry for nearly ten years, the last eight or so with Lotus technology in particular. I read a lot on the web, particularly on areas relating to my work. I like writing, and this blog I hope will give me some focus for my thoughts and opinions. However I am rather out of practice and it is something I would like to improve. So don’t expect too many large articles or in depth analysis, at least to start with!

Check out my About page if you would like to know more about me, or even better, hang around and chime in on the discussion.