Well, you may have noticed the slight re-vamp of the TechHead website.  It’d been quite some time since I’d last updated the look and feel of the site so felt it was about time I do something about it.  Over the course of last weekend I did a lot of research into how best update it, especially how to implement a more modern, and better coded, Wordpress theme.  I didn’t want to change things too radically as I generally quite liked the layout and look of the original site – it just … [Read more...]

Are you looking for a simple and effective way of monitoring the uptime and responsiveness of your website or blog?  If so, this will be of interest to you.  I’ve been experiencing a few issues with the reliability of this web site recently.  It ends up that it was probably an issue with a memory leak in one of the plug-ins for caching that I used.  Up until recently I used to monitor the website from my home lab, though after recently re-building this lab I hadn’t yet got around to spinning … [Read more...]

I recently migrated the TechHead blog to a new hosting company, and doing so proved to be a far from straight forward.  As the site has now been running for a number of years the number of articles (almost 1000) means that the Wordpress database  containing all the blog post text and associated metadata has grown to be quite sizable. When using the “standard” method of exporting and importing the Wordpress XML file, which contains all your blog post, category and tag information, there is a 2MB … [Read more...]

I had a pleasant surprise the other day when I discovered there had been an update to my all-time favourite blogging application, Microsoft Live Writer.  It is included as part of the Windows Live Essentials 2011 release which can be downloaded from here. One thing that has always amazed me is that with the Apple Mac always being popular with the more ‘creative’ used-Converse wearing ‘creatives' amongst us, why isn’t there a decent blogging application for OS X?  Sure there are a few … [Read more...]

After a problematic month where the TechHead site gets taken offline without notice by my hosting provider for consuming between 5-10% of CPU resource it was time to start looking for a new home for TechHead. In fairness I had probably outgrown the shared hosting platform the site was running on as the site now receives close to 85,000 hits per month and moves over 100GB of traffic.  The issue I had however was with the site getting taken offline without so much as a warning email ! … [Read more...]

This ended up being quite a find for someone like myself who runs their blog on WordPress but has no clue when it comes to PHP.  I wanted to make a couple of minor tweaks to the code of the site and found the information in this basic PHP tutorial by Adam Brown valuable and thought it worth a mention. So if you, like me, have limited knowledge of PHP and are thinking of having a dabble on your WordPress press site or similar  it’d be well worth checking it out. Technorati Tags: … [Read more...]

I've been meaning to do it for weeks and have finally upgraded the Tech Head blog to WordPress v2.5.1. I thought I'd give this neat little automatic upgrade plug-in called, funnily enough, the 'WordPress Automatic Upgrade' plug-in a try. It claims to be pain free, backs all important files, downloads the latest WordPress release and then installs it. I made my own manual backup of everything before hand - not that I'm untrusting.  Yeah, right...  But this proved completely … [Read more...]