Tonight, I got round to upgrading my other test blogs and they didn’t go well at all.

Initially on 2 of them I got as far as “Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.7.1.zip” and that was all; it just sat there doing nothing. OK, so I looked on the forums and saw a suggestion that it might be plugin related, so I disabled all the plugins on one of the blogs, this then got to the next stage “Unpacking the core update” and sat there doing nothing. Hmm, this was strange it worked on the first blog. I tried the update on my last test blog and this worked automatically in seconds. The mystery deepens!

Then I had a thought, back in July, when I was working on the problem with Firestats, I found a resolution by adding a line to my .htaccess file:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

This causes php pages to processed by my host 1and1 using PHP 5 instead of PHP 4. Looking at the test blogs that had worked, both had this line in the .htaccess file. Ah, could it be this simple?

I downloaded a copy of the .htaccess file from one of the failing blogs and wasn’t happy to find that WordPress (I guess) had reset it to the default file with only the WordPress rewrite section. Anyway, I added my redirects back in and added the line for PHP 5 and uploaded it.

The automatic update then worked fine. I did the same for the other failing test blog, which also had a default .htaccess file (I’m glad I keep copies) and that also worked. So it looks like the automatic upgrade works with PHP 5 and not with PHP 4

In addition to re-launching this site, I had to add code on all my sites this morning when I found a Russian site that had basically taken and translated every post on my blog into Russian and was presenting it complete with all my (hotlinked) images and style sheet. I have now added code in my sites’ .htaccess file preventing hotlinking of images and my stylesheets from other sites. I checked David Airey’s blog post How to stop image hotlinking and bandwidth theft before adding the code.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([a-z\.\-]+)?ianhedges.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([a-z\.\-]+)?ijhedges.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([a-z\.\-]+)?ijhedges.co.uk/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([a-z\.\-]+)?cre8Buzz.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg|png|css)$ - [F]

I’ve allowed cre8Buzz, as I hotlink my profile images from my gallery.

***Start Copying Here***

Here are the rules:

1. Write a short introduction paragraph about what how you found the list and include a link to the blog that referred you to the list.

2. COPY the Rules and ENTIRE List below and post it to your blog. To avoid duplicate content and increase the amount of keywords your site can accessible for, go ahead and change the titles of the blog. Just don’t change the links of the blog.

3. Take “My New Faves” and move them into the “The Original Faves” list.

4. Add at least 3 Blogs that you’ve just added to your Technorati Favorites to the “My New Faves” section. Remember to also add the “Fave Me” link next to your new blogs (i.e. http://technorati.com/faves?add=http://www.yourdomain.com)

5. Add Everyone on this list to your Technorati Favorites List by clicking on “Fave the Site.” (Please FAVE EVERYONE on the List prior to posting the list or a Kitten will Die Alone in a Dark Alley Tonight). Those who want good karma will fave you back. If not, you will for sure get the benefits of faves from the bloggers who continue this list after you.

My New Faves

Tech Bold – Fave the Site
Six Degrees of Inspiration – Fave the Site
Randa Clay Design – Fave the Site

The Original Faves

Gary Lee – Fave the Site *
Dosh Dosh – Fave the Site
Nate Whitehill – Fave the Site
Ms. Danielle – Fave the Site
Jeff Kee – Fave the Site
Scribble on the Wall – Fave the Site
Jimi Morrisons Head – Fave the Site
Jon Lee – Fave the Site
Samanathon – Fave the Site
Eat Drink & Be Merry – Fave the Site
The Man of Silver – Fave the Site
Hannes Johnson – Fave the Site
My Dandelion Patch – Fave the Site
Nathan Drach – Fave the Site
SiteLogic – Fave the Site
Julies Journal – Fave the Site
Tea & Slippers – Fave the Site
Pencil Thin – Fave the Site
Garry Conn – Fave the Site
Stephen Fung – Fave the Site
Ed Lau – Fave the Site
QMusings – Fave the Site
The Thinking Blog – Fave the Site
Google Tutor – Fave the Site
TV Cells – Fave the Site
eWritings – Fave the Site
Mommy’s Getaway – Fave the Site
GR8 Egypt – Fave the Site
Divya Uttam – Fave the Site
Sean Dinner – Fave the Site
O Salepito – Fave the Site
Kyle Beabo – Fave the Site
Failure is the key to success – Fave the Site**
* – Train Engineer
** – Last Wagon
***End Copying Here***

Wow, that took a lot longer than I thought it would.

So, I placed a Support ticket with Technorati this evening not really expecting to get a response. While I was reading the automated acknowledgement, I got an email from Tonette Wong at Customer Services with the resolution.

It turns out that when I was making changes to the blog’s layout, I had made the entry title into a link and this was different to the link in the feed.

I have made the two links the same and now Technorati like me again. So, unlike many other people, it seems I got a very quick accurate response, Thank you.

Some of the changes include:

The header image has been replaced with a wider image.

The RSS button has been increased in size and an email subcription added.

The add comments page has been modified to also include the entry on the page.

It works fine in Firefox and Opera, and after a bit of hassle, also in Internet Explorer.

If you have any comments please let me know through the comments.

I have just realised that after over 18 months, I have never explained why my blog is called ‘Failure is the key to success’.

One of the sayings of Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the Japanese martial art of Aikido, is ‘Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something.‘

When I was looking for a name, this seemed very appropriate. Everyone has failures in our lives and only by learning from them do we improve ourselves and succeed in our goals.

My connection with aikido goes back to the 1988. Several of my friends had joined a local martial arts club and talked me into coming along. Now, I had never seen myself as the next Bruce Lee or anything like that, but thought I would go along for a few weeks to keep them company. One of my friends, Dave Long, was a 1st Kyu (brown belt) in Shotokan Karate, so I figured that if he thought it was worth going to, it was probably worth looking into. I turned up the first night not even knowing the name of the martial art that they were doing.

What I found was a martial art that didn’t rely on strength or flexibility (although the latter comes with time). It uses a combination of wrist locks, pins and throws to deal with your opponent. You take your opponent’s balance and use their strength and momentum against themselves. I never saw myself as a slugger in a fight situation and the almost analytical approach to how the techniques work appealed to my logical mind. So much so that I outlasted all of those who talked me into going.

When training, you take it in turns to be uke, the receiver of the technique, and tori, the person applying the technique. The relationship between tori and uke has been similar in all clubs and courses where I trained; uke provides a honest spirited attack and then, if necessary, helps tori to understand where the technique is failing to have them falling to their knees in pain. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that, the wrist locks, twists, pressure on nerves can all be quite painful. You have to be mad; you pay for the privilege of having someone else inflict pain on you.

Anyway, after I had been training for about 3 years, when I was a 3rd Kyu (green belt), I was asked if I would be a reserve uke for Joanne, one of the club’s lady 2nd Kyu (blue belt) who was taking her 1st Kyu (brown belt) grading. I was second reserve, so there was little chance of being needed. That was until, in the same week, the first uke twisted his knee on a building site and the first reserve had a hospital appointment for an operation on a longstanding shoulder injury. Suddenly it was real and I was going to be thrown around in a grading. After getting some extra training in, we discovered that my breakfalls weren’t quite correct and it was a small miracle that I hadn’t broken anything yet. So in the months before the grading, not only were Joanne’s techniques polished, but my breakfalls were completely taken apart and relearned. This took me from turning up once a week and enjoying myself, to seriously getting involved and travelling around the country to courses.

So, that’s how I met my wife Joanne; she spend several months throwing me around a mat before her grading to get her brown belt. We eventually ended up running the local club for a few years and learnt from and trained under many instructors from the UK and abroad. During my time training I received technique many hundreds of times. However when being thrown, I can count on one hand the number of times when I was thrown without being aware of it. What I mean by this is the attack gets so redirected that you feel no force when you are thrown, one minute you are attacking (grab, strike etc) and the next you are flying through the air thinking ‘what happened?’ This has happened once with Jo and twice with Sensei Tony Sargeant the head of Takemusu Iwama Aikido Europe, another time was from Sensei Mike Smith who was the head of our association the Kai Shin Kai.

Aikido is not a quick martial art to learn. It is only at dan grade (black belt) that you really start to understand how to use it effectively. I am sure there are some people that would disagree with this, but this is my personal opinion. I stopped training about 10 years ago due to other commitments. I renewed my membership annually for another 3 years, before I accepted that I had stopped training for the moment.

Anyway, as you can see, aikido has had quite an effect on my life and so it seemed natural to look to the sayings of Morihei Ueshiba, known as O-Sensei, for a suitable name.

However, when I started to look at my style sheet, I could see a few changes that I wanted to make.

I have changed the blog so that the title of a post takes you to the entry page with any comments on. On the entry page the categories list has been moved from the right hand side of the screen to the left, leaving more space for the post and the post font size increased. On all pages, the post area is relative to the window size, not a fixed size.

I have increased the font size used for the comments, so a magnifying glass is no longer required.

If I have broken something or you think it has improved, let me know through the comments.

Tags: blog comments blog design

This got me thinking, if MyBlogLog disappeared, would I be able to find all the blogs that I have started to follow. So partly for that I have decided to list the blogs that I am currently watching.

Thanks to JMB, scan man, Sarabeth, David Airey and Jonathan-C. Phillips who have all left me comments on previous posts.

[Edit] Changed the link for ilker’s ‘The Thinking Blog‘

[Edit] Changed the link for David Airey’s ‘Creative Design‘

I think a post a few weeks ago by John Chow was a prime example of this. He was explaining about using a typewriter to write a letter and was asked “How do you copy and paste with that?”

So, for anyone how needs to know, here is a quick guide to copying text from a webpage and pasting it into a blog post. The details may vary slightly depending on the blogging software that you use, but the concept is the same. I will use my last post Book Meme as the example.

Find the text on the webpage that you want to use, in this case it was from sarabeth’s post Book Meme 2. Move your mouse to just before the text that you want to copy.

Press and hold the left mouse button, then drag the mouse pointer, which will have probably changed to look like a letter ‘I’, over the text that you want until it is all selected, then let go of the left mouse button.

At this point you either go to the Edit menu on your web-browser and select Copy or you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL C (press and hold the CTRL key, then press the letter C, then let go of both). This copies the selection to the computer’s clipboard.

In your blogging software, choose the place in a post where you want to put the selected text and left click with your mouse in this place. Then either on the Edit menu choose Paste, or you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL V (press and hold the CTRL key, then press the letter V, then release both).

This pastes the selection from the computer’s clipboard to the location that you selected.

After this you can reformat individual sections by selecting them and choosing Bold or Italic or changing the colour as required.

[Edited for spelling]