unklerupert’s knee

Apple today approved and released the Wordpress iPhone app. Hopefully this will persuade me to post a bit more than of late, have been a bit busy drinking wine see.

First impressions are very good. Setting up blog access took minutes, as did creating a new post and adding tags and categories. Now can I add a pic?

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Came across diigo this evening and am converted immediately. Waiting for del.icio.us v2 and not hearing much detail or eta. One of the main problems I have with del.icio.us is the lack of a facility to securely share bookmarks with colleagues, diggo takes care of that and a hell of a lot more, video here tells you all about it:

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It is 00:21 on the 26th of October 2007 as I write this. All Apple whores rejoice, today is Leopard day, the long awaited release of OS X 10.5 will be over @ 18:00 tonight.

Apple have had a great year with the introduction of the iPhone, the iPod touch, and increased Mac hardware sales above projection, now with the release of Leopard, it’s ease of use, simple but powerful built in backup with Time Machine, things can’t get much better.

But wait, how about a celebrity endorsement, from a lovely young lady with a new tech podcast to help us all out, yep, that will provide the final push to help Apple take over the UK home computer market, probably.

So, without further ado, get yourself over to Byte Me TV and check out episode 1, where Keeley Hazell wrestles with the choice between a PC or a Mac with the help of Byte Me TV resident puter guru Gary Schwartz .

It’s a tough choice, with well constructed arguments on either side of the question, but Apple just about swings it, welcome aboard the Mac bus Keeley :O)

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Search for a plugin to post a minifeed of t’blog to facebook profile and ye shall find.

Added another of Rob’s wordpress plugins Wordbook so now I am cross platform baby, combined with Robs facebook application, it means that I do posting action here, and a minifeed on facebook profile is updated, hey presto, traffics gonna hit the roof now.

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Updated the social links you see at the bottom of each post with new plugin Slashdigglicious
Previous plugin was missing facebook link, which seemed a shame as I’ve been playing with facebook for a few weeks

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You may or may not have noticed the blog went a bit wonky (in tech speak). This was due to a few issues with regards upgrading the wordpress installation, and then the K2 templates that I am using. So, just in case anyone comes across any of my issues, hopefully this will help you:

First off I installed an auto update plugin from Keith Dsouza which I hoped would make the upgrade process easier, and less scary. Plugin installation went without a hitch, but on activation I received:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 46080 bytes) in /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-admin/admin- functions.php on line 864

When trying to access the admin panel. Eeek! The site carried on serving ok, which was a good thing, but I could not access the admin to write new content etc, what to do??? I dropped Keith a line, Keith got straight back (thanks Keith) with a suggestion:

This is probably because their host has allocated less memory for php to run and has to be rectified by your host.

</FilesMatch>

I tried this, no joy, scratched head, checked error again and realized that there must be some setting in the php installation that I could update to sort the lack of memory that php was reporting.

A quick google and I found that I could edit the php.ini file in /etc/ to adjust how much memory php has to play with, amended:

memory_limit = 8M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (8MB)

To:

memory_limit = 16M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (16MB)

Saved the file and tried to access the blog admin panel – Huzzah!

So that was nice, thank you Google and the peeps that post help on forums :O)

Now I had me site back, it all looked a bit cack though, another quick Google to find that there is a new release of the K2 templates HERE. Grabbed that and an accompanying plugin to disable WP now standard sidebar widgets HERE to make sure the K2 doodads all work nicey.

Now we I am back to where I want to be. With the added bonus that I have a great autoupdate plugin that takes all the stress out of the Word Press update process, although why WP don’t include this by default is beyond me? Maybe they should speak to Keith Dsouza.

Hope that helps anyone else that may have similar issues.

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Since moving to wordpress I have gained a hell of a lot more flexability in what I want to achieve with this. Now after playing around for a few weeks it strikes me that the posts may seem a little random in subject matter to you. You may have arrived here to read an Apple related article, but are not so interested in what socks I have been wearing this week, and what I did over the weekend.

A quick mooch reveals that Wordpress also have another application, WordpressMU (Multiple User) with which I could create multiple blogs, each dedicated to it’s own specific categories. I might as well dive in and sort this now before this site grows too big. I had a nice adventure in upgrading this installation of wp last night and hosed the site for a few hours, luckily I backed up the important files, so it didn’t take long to get back up and running again, so now I am in the mood to get hands dirty and upgrade to an even more flexible platform.

So what do you think? Feedback appreciated, I am currently using Google analytics to measure site traffic, so I know it’s not just mother checking in once in a blue moon.

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The blue light shining out of the Nintendo Wii disc slot can only mean one thing, new stuff from Nintendo. Today sees the release of the full Opera internet browser (previously we been using a beta version). I could wibble on about it, but here is a video to explain it better than I ever will.

I found this video btw on youtube whilst browsing about using the Wii browser. Suprisingly easy to use actually, great for watching game reviews and other doings.

As I play the Wii on an Apple iMac using an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid, I have no real need for a web browser on the Wii when I can just minimize the Wii window and use Firefox to much better effect, it is none the less well implemented, and is running youtube videos happily in the background at the moment while I throw this stuff up from the iBook.

Opera browser for Wii is free through the Wii Shopping channel until June, at which point it will cost 500 Wii points (about a fiver?).

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Can’t wait to keep up with the latest wiffle that pour out of my head? I know, I understand. Why not use a newsreader? Google have created a nice online jobby here. Sign up and add a new subscription using ye olde UnkleRupert’s Knee feed adress:

http://blog.pro-creator.co.uk/feed

Is very easy, add some others and Hey bingo! You can access all your normal haunts in one stop Huzzah!

Well I like it anyway.

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As you can see there is a link to the “Social” page at the top there. Pop through and you will see a nice big kinda cloud of all my publicly visible bookmarks (I have got some secrets you know) that are managed through my del.icio.us account.

del.icio.us allows you to export and manage all of your internet bookmarks online, share them with other people, and integrate them with plugins like this nice firefox one. Doing this means you can always have your bookmarks to hand wherever you are, at home, at work, on holiday etc.

So I thought I’d share that, being nice and all that, feel free to send paypal donations of thanks to neill@pro-creator.co.uk :O)

If your using Apple OSX you can also use a nice app like cocoalicious to manage all your bookmarks (although development seems a bit slow on this one, it does the trick), you may need to tickle it a bit as well (see this)

Of course you might be using Windows, in which case, you have my sympathies.

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