28 December, 2023
The productivity paradox
I came across this chart recently and it gave me pause for thought as someone whose life work is designed to improve productivity. It shows that from 2008, although we know technologies have been growing in power, productivity growth suddenly dropped away from the trendline following the global financial crisis. Why? This is where I […]
16 November, 2023
Off-Cloud Backup for Heroku apps – a possible answer
The Heroku platform is an absolutely fantastic way to have to not bother with devops within a small development company. We’ve been using it at interconnect for years now, and whilst it’s not entirely perfect, it takes away one set of headaches and does so at a reasonable cost. All the services offer backups, and […]
15 February, 2022
Interesting times in the world of software
About a decade ago, I was at a conference and talking to a fellow developer (I still call myself one, even though I don’t code so much these days) when he giddily told me about the funding he’d got for building a new piece of software he was hoping would make it big. It was […]
2 April, 2013
Twitter is about to die. Here’s why.
Something odd has started to happen on Twitter for me, and it’s cutting my usage of it down quite dramatically. Why? It’s because it seems the spammers are winning… @majorie6474 @davecoveney haha you bite so easy Toye :P Actually my mac is arriving tomorrow :P — Nick Hanson (@nrhansonp) April 2, 2013 @prestonrupemo @davecoveney haha […]
11 July, 2011
Getting Quicker
One of the most important things that gets forgotten about when running a WP site is that performance is important. We see many sites with page load times way in excess of 2,000ms per page. Often the site just gets progressively slower over time and the change isn’t really noticed. That had happened with mine, […]
10 July, 2011
Blog “Reboot”
Hello – here’s the refreshed blog. I’ve decided to revert to a more typical blog format, after many months of soul searching on the issue. I previously had a layout based on a framework we used at interconnect/it for a couple of clients But not only have I opted to switch to a blog layout, […]
19 July, 2010
WordCamp UK – Great Stuff + a Little Controversy
I went to WordCamp UK 2010 in Manchester… this is my write-up of the event, and its controversies along with my presentations…
12 July, 2010
Live Threaded Commenting on WP
At Interconnect IT / Spectacu.la my colleague James has developed a new version of the popular Spectacu.la Threaded Comments plugin. It’s not yet in release form, but you can grab it from the WordPress.org repository via svn if you know how at http://svn.wp-plugins.org/spectacula-threaded-comments/trunk/ I’m bringing it up here because I’ve decided to trial the plugin […]
19 May, 2010
WordPress Performance, Make it 3x Quicker!
I’d started to notice that my site could often be slow to load – other sites on the same server weren’t suffering the same way, so I wanted to document a simple way in which one can identify performance issues on the site. This is one of them.
19 February, 2010
Of WordPress Training and Learning
Over at Interconnect IT, where I work, we’ve found that demand for our WordPress Training Courses has shot up over the past year or so. And it’s certainly interesting to see where the work comes from. Curiously, it’s very polarised – we either work with smaller one man band companies like Jason Nevin who runs […]
18 January, 2010
Is WordPress Slowing My Site Down?
I noticed on my pingdom stats recently that this site has been slowing down recently. But why? Is it WordPress? Some plugins? Time for research!
20 July, 2009
What it’s Like to Present and Attend at WordCamp UK
Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff. I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.
8 June, 2009
Five Things Bing Does Better than Google
MS have, at last, come up with what appears to be a competent rival to Google. Here’s five ways in which it beats Google.
25 May, 2009
mySQL Database Search & Replace With Serialized PHP [Updated]
Ever needed to migrate a database to a new server or website (especially with WordPress and other PHP applications) and been stuck because when you do a search and replace some of the data seems to get corrupted?
5 May, 2009
Slow Posting Performance in WordPress 2.7
An interesting problem today – WordPress posting on this site was sloooooow. Some other back-end tasks were also incredibly slow. Adding a post or page would take about 30 to 60 seconds. Unacceptable. I did the usual job of deactivating plugins, and even resorted to a different theme for a few minutes but no, it […]
Handy Tip for CSS Reloading
CSS not refreshing in the browser can be a pain – Mark Jaquith has come up with an elegant solution to this for WordPress coders.
18 April, 2009
Broadcom B57nd60x 10.10.0.0 performance problems (Dell XPS especially)
CPU spikes were making my laptop less fun to use – a nice online guide and a quick bit of sleuthing with MS’s sysinternals tools and I soon had the answer. The laptop is now faster, quieter and has better battery life.
2 March, 2009
PHP Serialization Fix for WordPress Migrations (& other applications like Expression Engine)
Serialization of data loaded into an SQL table is a dreadful thing and makes WordPress migrations harder than they should be, but it happens and so we must deal with it. I’ve knocked up a rough and ready bit of code which does its best to resolve the problem.
Wordcamp UK 2009 to be in Cardiff
If you’re following the various WordCamp lists, you’ll already know about this event. But many won’t. If you use WordPress professionally, or with a great deal of enthusiasm, WordCamps are a great way to meet with other users, developers and designers who really understand the system. There are useful presentations, social events and activities based […]
6 January, 2009
Pros & Cons of Software as a Service
SaaS rocks, but it’s not the be all and end all. But it is hot right now (again) and will continue to be so for quite some time. However, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) driven by the likes of Flex and Silverlight could be returning us to a Client Server paradigm and is probably the way forward – bringing SaaS and local processing benefits to users.
22 July, 2008
iPhone Blogging and WordPress
As anyone who knows me can confirm, I’m always interested in the latest tech and software. So at the WordCamp UK at the weekend I was interested to learn about a new iPhone client for WordPress. And this is the result.. I’m blogging by phone. Ok, so it’s not perfect…formatting is limited and the picture […]
31 May, 2008
Very Cool Camera Tracking Technology
The chaps at Cam-Trax have come up with a rather nifty bit of software that can turn practically any easily visible object and a cheap webcam into a game or PC controller. I wish I could code that sort of stuff…. Now I’ll get back to working on SQL queries when I should actually be […]
