Kamikaze attack, a Wasp and Wordpress
Man its hot out thar! Temperatures were hitting 28c outdoors and 30c in my room this weekend.
It was so damn hot that on Friday, a rather large fly decided to try and cool off by doing a kamikaze run straight into my left eye and completely knocked me out during a lunchtime walk by the side of the lake near my workplace. It was lodged in my upper eyeball and I could feel the bugger moving around but could I get it out?! Could I heck… I ended up walking home partially blinded, crashing in to random people as a result. I had to take a different route home too - it would be too embarrasing walking through Harrow town. Suffice to say that I eventually removed it, but fark me did that hurt! 
On another note I was woken up on Saturday morning by a strange buzzing sound. It turned out to be a flaming suicidal wasp who preferred my cool pillow to the rather hot air. Needless to say this took me by complete surprise and saw me crash off the bed. A few hours later I was working under my desk rerouting some cables, and guess who I bumped in to down there? The blasted wasp was back and sent me fleeing to the nearest air freshner can. Coupled with a lighter it would be toast! Sadly the bugger had vanished by the time I had returned…
Sunday saw me writing a review for a new toy that I have, when I decided to take a break and upgrade this blog to
Wordpress 2.5.1 and the latest RC6 build of the superb
K2 Wordpress theme. Wordpress installed smoothly enough but K2 RC6 has caused a few issues. Wordpress 2.5.1 works slightly differently now and reads CSS in a different way so it took some getting used to.
Currently this blog fails to render properly in Internet Explorer 6 and 7 - I can’t fix this without further investigation in to this issue. It is fine in Firefox and Opera as expected though. All this faffing about with Wordpress meant that I failed to finish my review by Sunday night. Great
I can’t even adjust to the new look
dashboard…
I haven’t really written much on this blog lately so that is going to change from this point onwards. I’ll spend a lot more time tinkering around and adding new toys yay! 
It’s that time of the month again
Wordpress 2.5 arrived rather quietly overnight last night so it’s time to look into upgrading this blog again. For those who aren’t clued up on how big a upgrade this is take a look-see at the Screencast and the screenshots of the new dashboard interface.
A list of 2.5 compatibile plugins can be found Here. So next weekend I shall attempt to upgrade this blog, with possibly disastrous results. I may need to move to the latest K2 build at the same time I predict. Hoorah!
Wordpress 2.3.1 and K2 RC3 up and runnin!
On a weekend where I was meant to be writing an Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect review for the 360, I’ve ended up doing other things instead. My horrible addiction to Mass Effect continues to make me lose focus of other things in life, and as a result I ended up playing it for 8 hours straight on Saturday night until 2am!
Today I was meant to finish at least one review but noooo, I ended up deciding to upgrade the blog. Now I initially avoided Wordpress 2.3 because it had some major changes that I knew would break the blog, and it did. Infact, it almost completely destroyed it when I did a ‘test upgrade’ when 2.3 first arrived a month ago, as it buggered up all my tags and deleted all my categories. Obviously I had to take the plunge so I installed it today.
Naturally my tags went haywire, so that now involves me re-tagging every sodding post I’ve made. I have now just realised that my categories have also gone a bit nuts so I have to re-categorise every post. Aside from that, the latest K2 theme has knocked me sideways in terms of flexibility. I normally hand code my sidebars, but the one you see on the right has been done completely via K2’s drag and drop sidebar manager and is an exact replica (well almost) of my old one.
Bits of the blog will still be flaky and inactive as I start trawling through code I haven’t looked at in months. Now, back to work!
4+ hours of work and counting
I was expecting this. I took a day off today after literally getting pee’d on by the British weather as I walked ran to work yesterday morning. This morning I felt like hell as a result with a major headache since I was drenched silly from the mad downpour.
Anyway, I woke up this morning to find that Wordpress 2.3 had been released. I was half dazed as I began to install this. I should know better than to install an upgrade to Wordpress, without doing some research to see what problems others are having. In the past Wordpress upgrades went ultra smoothly, however the team have recently begun adding features that most blogs rely on trusted plugins for. As a result those plugins get annoyed upon encountering an almost identical one and things go wrong.
I’m still not sure what has happened but my Extended Live Archives setup went totally wrong and threw a major wobbly, which resulted in me disabling the thing, then Ultimate Tag Warrior went a bit mental. The Archives page looks a bit poorly now as a result. Just when I thought I had everything under control I noticed that all my blog Categories had gone missing so now all my posts were filed under Misc! That is a colossal amount of posts that I have to now re-edit and re-assign categories to. Total time to correct all my posts = 5hrs.
For those fearing an upgrade, don’t. Most of the time Wordpress upgrades are completely flawless. It depends entirely on how complex your blog is in regards to theme template, plugins and any hacks/tweaks you’ve done. I have made heaps of tweaks to various bits on the blog so I knew it wouldn’t be a smooth ride.
More Site Updates
Kainzy.org is back from a few days of downtime after moving to Vidahost.com. I’ve upgraded Wordpress to the latest release (v2.1 codenamed Ella), and at the same time I’m fine tuning the latest version of the lovely K2 theme. Everything has gone extremely smoothly and I’ve only got just one mis-behaving plugin at the moment giving me some grief.
She cannae take anymore!
While I’ve been beavering away in the background of this blog fixing errors and minor bugs here and there, after upgrading the K2 theme, I can’t help but notice a colossal increase in traffic heading my way. These hits are definitely not coming from search engine bots as I’ve blocked most of the more annoying spider bots out there. Most of it seems to be coming from the Xbox 360 Reviews that I’ve been doing lately and I’m quite frankly stunned at the responses some of these reviews have had. I’d just like to say thank you.
The monthly hit rates for November hit 17,891, while October was 5,452. The previous record was 9,991 set in February 2006. The Gears of War review has attracted just over 3000 hits, and the 360 Wireless Headset write up has had 2800. Due to such a large increase in traffic (and I’ve not even started churning out the reviews yet) I can predict things will get a lot busier as I add more reviews. Guess I need to contact my good hosts JSW Freelance and upgrade my current package over the coming weeks. 17k of visitors may not sound much compared to most blogs out there, but for an average blog like this one it’s a lot in my opinion
I’ve also had a lot of emails from readers asking why they can’t comment on my reviews. Well here’s the answer to that - I’m not exactly sure. The K2 theme as I understand it supports Page Comments, and I have ‘Allow Comments’ ticked on the pages I write my reviews on, so I don’t understand why commenting just doesn’t work. I’ve looked at the code and it seems fine too. I am looking into this though but I doubt I can fix it, as it is well beyond me. For now, your best bet is to post a comment on the main review related snippet I’ll post whenever I upload a couple of games reviews.
Nowt broken yet
I’ve received my Xbox 360 Wireless Headset earlier today, so I’ve done a quick review of that. You can find it in the reviews section. I’ve also upgraded the K2 theme for this blog. It’s taken me a good month or so of tweaking before I could bring it online, so some portions of this blog will still be missing, or dead. Lastly, I’ve re-enabled the Rolling archives feature, so you can seamlessly navigate through the older pages of this blog. Bear in mind that it’s a bit flaky, and doesn’t like the Opera browser one bit (not my fault!), it should work fine in Firefox and IE6/7. Please give me a shout if anything isn’t looking quite right. Ta!
Another WordPress upgrade
I’ll be upgrading this blog over the next two weeks to a newer version of the K2 theme that you see in use at present. Also being upgraded will be Wordpress itself to v2.04. This could result in the blog being a right utter mess over the next few weeks so bear with me here. To be honest, I’ve been wanting to move away from it so I could switch to something less complicated, but since I’ve more or less built this blog around the theme it’ll be hard recoding certain sections of it to another one.
I do have a stunning theme which I have been tweaking for the past couple of months during my spare time and I may possibly bring that online for a couple of days although I’m not sure.
Finally, I have had a few emails asking me to put up a gallery. I had already decided to add one to the blog but ran into problems months ago and I never looked at it again. To add to this, I’m so busy with my job that I hardly take photo’s as frequently as I once used to do anyway. Landscape photography was something I loved doing but I never showed off any of my work!