thomas fitzgerald.net

Wishing everyone a happy new year and a prosperous 2008.

I’m just trying a new theme on the site for today to see if I like it or not. It’s a pre-made wordpress theme called i-theme by ndesign studio. I don’t know if I like it or not yet, but the dull grey of the other one was starting to annoy me. Fickle, I know. Anyway, until I learn enough html / css coding to fully write my own, I’ll have to stick to modifying others or using pre-built ones. Comments or feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks

Once again apologies for the lack of updates. I have been a bit unwell the last week or two and work has been extremely busy also, but I hope to return to regular blogging soon.

Apologies for lack of updates this week. I’ve been hit with a bad cold/flu and I’m currently wrapped up in a duvet with lots of lemsip and what ever other cold relief drugs I can find. It’s hard enough blogging every day when you’re well, but being under the weather I just don’t have the energy, so again apologies.

My service provider is having some issues with latency on the server at the moment so please excuse the slow load times on the site. It’s out of my control unfortunately.

After some feedback on the way the feeds for this site have been summarized rather than giving the full feed I have changed some of the settings inside feedburner so you will now (hopefully) see the full article inside the RSS feed, and hopefully HTML links will no longer be stripped out. I may put ad-sense ads into the feed to make up for traffic reductions to the actual site, but if people find it really annoying I’ll see what I can do.

I was having some problems getting Net NewsWire to refresh properly because it was synced to NewsGator but once I turned it off it was fine. Im not sure what exactly was going on, but If you’re using NetNewsWire and are having refresh issues, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Thanks for your patience as I work all this stuff out.

Thanks to this very cool wordpress plug in, when you visit this site now you’ll get a version formatted for the iPhone / iPod Touch. If you have either of these check try the site on it and let me know what you think.

In case anyone was wondering why I have had no posts this week, it is because I am on holidays (vacation) in the country in the south west of Ireland an have no internet access. I’m writing this on my treo which is painfully slow, but anyway. I’m getting a much needed break, even If technology withdrawl is setting in! regurlarly scheduled programming will return at the weekend.

I’m giving twitter yet another go. Rather than try and fight the seemingly pointlessness of twitter, why not try and make use of it. Anyway, if you wish to follow my status here’s the link.

Just so that people know the downside to running a blog, in the 6 months or so since I installed it, my server side comment spam filtration system (Akismet) has, as of today, caught 15,707 spam comments. You just couldn’t run a blog and have comments on without some kind of spam filter. It really is reaching epic proportions.

After what seems like a very long time of both working extremely hard and being ill at the worst possible time, I am finally seeing some light at the end of the Tunnel and hopefully soon will be able to get back to giving this blog some attention. It’s a real pain because I had developed a good readership base which dropped off considerably in the time that I haven’t been able to update regularly. Anyway, I just wanted to thank those who have stuck around, I really appreciate it. I hope to be back to regularly scheduled programming in the next couple of days.

For the last mont the weather in Ireland has been deplorable. It’s been raining pretty constantly for the last 4 weeks. Although we don’t usually have great weather it has never really been as bad as this. Officially it has been the wettest July and June on record (and July’s just started) so needless to say this is playing havoc with people’s health. I had hoped I would escape but unfortunately I’ve been struck with a bad case of influenza so It’s unlikely I will be posting for a couple of days. If anything major happens I’ll try to post commentary on it in my fevered state but it will probably just me more iPhone news and speculation.

Apologies for the extended period of web site outage this morning. Once again it is out of my control as my service provider has “issues” with their SQL database. It seems to be back up and running now.

It has been pointed out to me that having registration a requirement to post commentary is a big turn off for potential readers, and while I couldn’t agree more, it is an unfortunate side effect of the amount of spam that I get. I do have a spam filter on my blog but even with that I get a lot of comment spam. Much of this is due to having a couple of articles posted on digg. Anyway, I figured I would give it another try with the registration turned off so please let me know if you think having to register to post comments is a big pain or if you don’t mind. Hopefully if I’m not totally deluged I can leave it off. Fingers crossed.