Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

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.

all my personal mail now directs to my gmail account. Gmail seems to do a very good job of filtering out the spam emails as hardly any get through. When one does get through I like the way that there is a “report spam” button. This makes me feel empowered about binning those tempting offers of “life” enhancing pharmaceuticals, and takes some of the chore out of it.

I like to think - rightly or wrongly - that because I have proactively “reported” the spam back to google, their anti-spam machinery immediately takes note and stops any other gmail users from recieving the same piece of spam, either from the same source or containing the same content.

I get a similar feeling of usefulness when I report comment spam back to akismet (via my wordpress akismet plugin) - I like the fact that because someone tried to leave comment spam on my site they are immediately blacklisted by all the other blogs that use akismet, making my site more like a honeypot to trap spammers rather than an unguarded doorway for them to try and sneak into.

Thankyou very much for the unprecedented amount of comments I found in my moderation queue over the last few days. Very informative, but just so you know I don’t need any of the gambling facilities or drugs you all recommended. I’ve just activated Akismet to see how that goes - I was very impressed that it comes as standard with this version of wordpress (2.0.3). All I had to do was sign up at wordpress.com to get an api key.

this is the internet equivalent of trying to organise my CD collection - wait- that’s not too difficult, i’m giving most of my cd’s to a charity shop as I prefer digital only these days. I think my “readers” are getting a bit confused when I jump between posts about coffee and posts about geekery. no. those two go together perfectly. Anyway, i’m going to add some categories, and try to retro-categorise some of the old posts over time. RSS subscribers may see old posts reappaer for a few days/weeks/months/years

so if all has gone to plan, my hypothecate.co.uk RSS feed should have burst back into life and anybody subscribed to my old RSS should now be reading the feed from www.rickhurst.co.uk, my new personal blog / portfolio site, running on wordpress.

so lets get this right , I spent hours and hours migrating hypothecate to plone then binned it and went for wordpress instead? yep. For the last six years or so I have always used (much appreciated) free webspace from people I know, but this always tied me to a platform - first ASP, then zope/plone. Now I have another personal project running on Plone (www.dfrskatezine.com - ironically currently offline while I migrate it from plone 2.1 to 2.5), I thought I would stump up for some paid webspace so I could run some php/ mysql stuff without relying on favours and harrassing people to install and configure stuff for me.

The new site has a bit of a portfolio on it, as I am pimping myself for a bit of non-plone freelance work (out of hours - i’m still happily esconced by day ploning away at netsight hq), so any bits of web development work you need doing, contact me and I might be able to help you out, and you might be able to help me replace my dying car

Now I have working blog software again, I might even start posting a bit more often - still on the same theme - web technology with random inane drivel thrown in.

The old site will eventually redirect here, and I will do my best to not leave any dead links, by setting up some redirects. In an ideal world I would retro-categorise all the imported content on here.

As for quills etc have I completely given up? no - quills should make an appearance on the skate site in the near future.