Archive for the ‘IT’ Category

WordPress 2.3 – Canonical URLs and “/page/1″

Posted on Monday 1st October 2007 under IT by

Well, the motiveAuto website is up and is based on WordPress – and because WordPress 2.3 is now on GA I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade before the launch. Big mistake; yes, it is a good idea to be on the current release, but not without  some serious integration testing.

The biggest problem arises from the tidying up of URLs used to access posts, Canonical URLs. The author of these changes Mark Jaquith blogs the background to these changes and makes a good case for them. The first problem is that www.motiveauto.com/page/1 is no longer a valid URL; this is unfortunate because this is a commonly used method of accessing the posts from a static home page (see using WordPress as a CMS). The correct (i.e. valid) URL is now www.motiveauto.com/?page=1

OK, lesson learnt, but it is a pity that it took four hours to find the cause of the problem – WordPress documentation is – shall we say – “loose”.

The next problem relates to the “share this” plugin; this encourages linking to he social bookmarking sites and also emailing a page to a friend. The CSS form doesn’t seem to work (possibly because of a new version of prototype.js) but should degrade gracefully to a web page. Unfortunately this doesn’t work if the source is a WordPress static page rather than a post. URL rewriting again? Looks like it, but I can’t quite put my finger on the cause.

Laptop Processors

Posted on Monday 18th June 2007 under IT by

A list of laptop processors, ranked by performance.

Firefox Add-ons

Posted on Tuesday 10th April 2007 under IT by

My currently installed Firefox Add-ons;

Fastererfox

Adblock Plus

eBay Negs

Web Developer

British English Dictionary

IE Tab

Firebug

FireFTP

Colorzilla

Limiting SYN connections in Windows XP SP2 – Event ID 4226

Posted on Thursday 1st March 2007 under IT by

Well, here’s something I hadn’t spotted before, and in retrospect it makes a lot of sense: Microsoft introduced a cap on the number of SYN (half-open connections) for TCPIP.SYS to 10 in XPSP2. Yes, that would explain the slower P2P and Fasterfox browsing then…

David Kaspar’s blog post describes the symptoms, how to demonstrate that there is a problem using the event log, and links to a patcher which raises the cap to 50 connections. The tone of the post starts off a little hystericaly, but settles down into a good description of the issue and the fix.

UTW URL rewrite problem

Posted on Thursday 25th January 2007 under IT by

Various solutions to this problem are discussed on the UTW forum.

Domesday 1986

Posted on Monday 15th January 2007 under IT by

I have found it – and it finally works – the 1986 Domesday Project rescued from laser disc and available on the web here.

Somewhere in there is an article written by Christopher as a child – I vaguely remember something about canals, but I haven’t found it yet.