Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

The BBC are encouraging bloggers and website owners to display this web badge to show support for and spread the message about the plight of journalist Alan Johnston, who was abducted in Gaza in March. More details here.

I’ve recently revived my skateboarding blog after leaving it for over a year, I won’t repeat my reasons for doing so here, as it’s all on that site. It’s another wordpress blog - migrated from the old blogworks xml blog using RSS import. I created a wordpress theme based on the old site - not quite finished- and I haven’t copied the comments over yet - i’ll need to write something to do that manually unfortunately. I also have a load of static content, photos and video to move over too at some point.

When I first started this blog years ago I was detailing various (mostly failed) experiments with running linux on an old Time (Fic A430) laptop of mine. The machine is long past it’s prime - screen doesn’t work, no battery and was last in service as a windows 2000 mp3 jukebox at work until the harddrive failed. I decided to get a new bargain harddrive for it and have one last stab at milking some life out of it. I installed Ubuntu linux, which went on like a dream, recognising everything including onboard soundcard which always used to be a problem and the machine is now happily (and quietly) sitting at home as a general email/ web machine (plugged into external monitor, keyboard etc) and also functions as a backup server - taking nightly backups of a few remote mysql databases I have, and an ssh gateway to my home network. If this proves to be reliable, then I will feel much better about the stupid amount of money I spent on it seven years ago!