So, this blog (for its sins) is running on WordPress 2.0.5. That’s a bit out-of-date. The main reason is because it has all sorts of jiggery-pokery to make it work the way I want – a tagging solution based on Jerome’s Keywords that was modified when I moved to 2.0; all sorts of template hacking to make the beautiful breadcrumb trail at the top you see work.

I’ve resisted upgrading due to the hell that was hacking plugins and templates into future versions of WordPress. Until now, that is. WordPress 2.3 (finally) introduces a proper tagging solution – entirely separate to the “categories” system. Well, not quite, as we’ll see – but it finally means that the architecture of Infovore.org is now entirely possible within WordPress itself.

Of course, now you’ve got to convert your custom tagging solution to the new schema. I’ve written a small script to do this for myself – only took about an hour, and that’s mainly because I was exploring the schema, and my PHP is a little rusty. Of course, now I know a reasonable amount about how tagging is implemented in WordPress 2.3, and felt I should write this up properly, so that anybody else converting custom tagging solutions might save themselves some time.

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I bought an Airport Express this week. They’ve been around for a while now, and I’m sure they’re probably going to end up being refreshed in the near future, but I couldn’t hold off any longer. For various reasons, it made no sense to put it off any longer.

So far, I’ve been really impressed with it. Not so much what it does; it does exactly what I ask of it, which is exactly what the site said it will do. What’s impressive is the way it does it. The experience of owning it, of using it, has been excellent.

Wireless networking is complicated. It’s not designed to be user friendly. It’s not too hard to get a router/modem up and running and sharing around a nice, public, stealable connection, but fine-tuning and configuring it is a total pain for most users. The terminology is complex and unintuitive.

To make matters worse, almost every router (wireless or otherwise) has a miniature webserver in it running an administration interface. This sounds like a good idea for most users: the controls and interactions are familiar, and no special software is required. But in practice, it’s a disaster.

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Seaside

25 August 2007

I’m off to the seaside on holiday. To Whitstable, to be precise (which still isn’t in Dopplr, despite the remarkably good gazetteer update). Looking forward to it a huge amount. I’ve been a bit burnt out in recent weeks, with piles of work and other things. Means I’m behind on uploading photographs, writing about things, putting things out into public.

Never mind. I’ve got 7 days on the coast to read, walk, eat, and recharge my batteries.

And then we begin again.

It’s hard to describe how much I’m looking forward to this. The beautiful weather can only be a good sign, right?