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2009 Irish Blog Awards Nominations

I’ve been quiet lax on the blog front for a while now, both in terms of producing and consuming blog content. Curse you Twitter!
So it came as quiet a surprise while reading one of Matt’s blog posts to discover my humble blog had been nominated in the Best Personal Blog category of the 2009 Irish [...]

# shutdown -h now

I’ve just shutdown the beige box that was home to this blog for just over a year and a half until I started renting a VPS.
I had intended to shutdown this machine since the start of the year but never got around to it and after a techie chat on IM with Dave Dripps earlier [...]

Updating WordPress via Subversion

I read a few months back that Stuart Langridge was using Subversion to keep his WordPress up-to-date and I thought: “that’s clever” and didn’t do anything about it.
Today I was talking to Matt and he mentioned updating one of his WordPress installations and I noticed I was due an update myself. I downloaded the latest [...]

New site theme at last

I finally got around to replacing the default WordPress theme. Now it doesn’t look like I don’t care about my site
With so many freely available themes I found it difficult to choose but I stumbled upon plaintxt.org and my mind was made up: I needed one of those minimalist themes and I opted [...]

Site migration

I’ve just finished migrating sickbiscuit.com from my home development machine to my new VPS.
DNS records have been updated and decaf is now handling mail and web traffic for the domain allow the only thing I’ve copied over is this blog.
Hopefully this will give me the motivation needed to spruce things up a bit as the [...]

Google Analytics

I got speaking to Matt this morning when I arrived in the office and he demonstrated to me the wealth of information provided by Google Analytics. It was really interesting stuff and I could see why he was so excited about it.
I recently upgraded to Apache 2.2 on my development machine, substance, to “easily” get [...]

MySQL upgrade

I finally got sick of not being able to use SQL subqueries and decided to upgrade my MySQL installation from 4.0.x to 5.0.x.
I had wanted to do this previously but was afraid I’d end up breaking something and be left without a working development environment or a website either, for that matter, so I resorted [...]

Site update

Over the past bunch of days I’ve been back into web-development land and seeing as I was staring at code for prolonged periods I decided I might aswell “enhance” this site a bit too.
I started with tweaking the frontpage: I rearranged things a bit and instead of displaying my latest blog entry in its entirety [...]

Security Enhancements for Dummies

I read a thread over on linuxquestions.org recently about server “hardening” and got thinking about my own security measures and the lack there of. Here’s an example of the content of /var/log/auth on the machine this site is hosted on:
Jan 24 13:43:33 substance sshd[14182]: Invalid user test from 203.242.160.193
Jan 24 13:43:33 substance sshd[14182]: error: [...]

WordPress 2.0.5

I’ve been spending the festive period with my family and have almost enjoyed not having a computer, online and logged in, within eyesight for the majority of my waking hours. I’ve read and responded to my email and forums and was checking my blog when I noticed I wasn’t running the latest version of WordPress, [...]