So some of you may have noticed a brief hiatus there whilst the site was down. Basically technolabs.co.uk (which hosts all of our lovely domains) was getting towards the end of its life. Over the weekend the hardware was replaced, data was transferred, and surprisingly little has been lost in the process. I’ve fixed a couple of permissions issues and we’re good to go again. For those geeky people out there the new hardware is:

Machine: Sunfire v120
CPU: 650Mhz
Memory: 2GB
OS: FreeBSD 6.2 Stable
Disks: 2x34GB SCSI (GEOM Mirrored)
LOM: Sun Lights Out Management

And I can confirm that the truly abysmal response of WordPress has improved significantly.

Cheers Andy for sorting all this out!

Well the migration went really well actually, thanks to the excellent Nucleus to WordPress importer I found here http://sourceforge.net/projects/nuc2wp/

What you don’t see behind the scenes is the amount of spam signups I have to fight on this blog. Whilst I’m running the latest version of Nucleus (the CMS behind the site), providing I allow people in the configuration to sign up for an account, then I get 100’s of signups a week, no matter what steps I take to prevent them from doing so. Clearly there is a little loophole in Nucleus that allows this, and I don’t like it much, nor after having a look around the modules can I see a solution to this problem.

So I’m going to try to migrate the site to WordPress. Whilst I like Nucleus at the back end (a lot) I think it’s actually lacking some more standard blog features that I’d rather have in the core distro, rather than rely on plugins for. WordPress seems to be a de facto standard amongst my friends (although I did seriously consider using Drupal given how much we rely on it in work), and I guess this will make it my 3rd CMS backend for this site..

Yes, well as you may have noticed the old site design has gone. I hope this is a little cleaner and more readable and generally more pleasant. I will have a customised banner up after the weekend, rather than the (nice) stock photo that is currently there.

I’ve also upgraded the CMS backend, so if you notice that anything is broken please let me know!

17/11/2005 was my first entry. Can’t believe I managed to keep it up for a whole year!

I’ve got quite used to the concept now, I have been toying with changing the blog engine to something with a bit more pizazz, maybe something for the new year, but I need to find something that will get my Nucleus database into another format..

WordPress looks quite tasty..

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it? Where would we be with that attitude? Probably stuck at 0.99beta..

Sorry for the slight interruption in service – we lost /var on the server yesterday. The machine has been partially rebuilt and we’re purchasing a new server next month to replace this venerable old machine. Fortunately pretty much everything survived the transfer with the exception of the database that runs this blog ;) Of course, being a good computer user, I had this weeks backup to restore, so we’ve lost a couple of comments (sorry Nic!) and a couple of posts (which Google hasn’t bloody cached of course!) but that’s about it.

Thanks to Andy and Jess for getting things up and running at 2am this morning with the aid of a laptop and serial cable!

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