mou.me.uk

Glastonbury 2010 ticket payment deadline extended – official resale date to be announced soon

mou — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:59:27 +0000

In what will be welcome news to those who got too wasted this weekend and forgot to pay the balance on their Glastonbury tickets before the 28th February midnight deadline, Glastonbury organisers have announced on Twitter:

48 hour grace period for those yet to pay the balance of their tickets (you have until Tuesday night) – http://bit.ly/cdGIxr

So anyone who paid their initial £50 deposit and have not yet paid the rest of the balance now until 23:59 on the 2nd March to get their final payments in. How you read into this if up to you, but an announcement like that seems to suggest that a lot of ticket balances are still unpaid. if this is the case, its great news for those of you that didn’t manage to get tickets the first time.

In somewhat related news, in response to a tweet with regards to Glastonbury ticket resales, GlastoFest have also announced:

We’ll be announcing the resale date in advance here and on the official site …[snip]

More great news for those of you looking to get Glasto tickets the 2nd time round. In previous years its been a case of simply "keeping an eye" on the website and waiting for the "Buy Tickets" link to reappear. This year, it seems, the Glastonbury organisers are taking steps to be more transparent and give advance warning to those that are actively checking the website or Glastonbury twitter page.

Some have even gone to great lengths to give people a way of keeping an eye on the ticket page status - the banner below, written by GlastoWatch, checks the SeeTickets ticket page every 5 minute and builds the banner based on the message on the page. Very elaborate, and I applaud him for doing this, but the fact people had to go to these lengths shows that a change in policy from the Glastonbury Festival organisers was long overdue.

I have a few friends out travelling at the moment (currently in Thailand) who I promised I would let know as soon as I heard tickets were back on sale. For them, advance warning could be the difference between getting them or not (as I’m sure is the case with a lot of people) so hats off to the Glastonbury organisers for being more pro-active and transparent this year and not springing the resale on people.

The one down side to all this – all this talk of Glastonbury is making the remaining 4 month wait seem even longer!

Update (3/3/2010): Some rumours are flying around that SeeTickets customer services have stated a resale date of April 11. However, as noted, this wouldn’t be the first time they’ve made something like this up so don’t take this as fact! I’ll be sure to add details here when I hear more.

Server move complete – Linode rules!

mou — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:58:20 +0000

Anyone who visits this site regularly will probably have noticed the page load time has decreased about 10 fold. I’ve been with Media Temple for nearly 2 years, and I decided enough was enough. Slow load times, dodgy password policies and a rather high profile server wide hack was enough to convince me that it was time to put my new found sysadmin skills to use and move all my sites over to another host.

And so, as from this week I am now hosted on a sparkly new, lightning fast Linode VPS (feel free to register with that link and I get a free months hosting! w00t!). It comes with everything you’d expect from a VPS, including some of the most responsive and helpful customer service I’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with (see here). Its also hosted in London, so although my US visitors may not be seeing the same speed I am, my UK visitors should be seeing a HUGE performance boost. Even then, the response time from the US to my UK Linode is still faster than from a US ISP to my old US based Media Temple host, so everybody wins.

But the best part is the price. You get a fair bit for an unbelievable price compared to similar service offered by VPS hosts such as 1&1, and you even get the added bonus of being able to choose what OS you use from a fairly comprehensive list.

And so I embark on my Linode adventure. May our sordid love affair be a long and pleasurable one.

Contact form…

mou — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:06:57 +0000

…appears to be broken. Had a quick check and it looks like it may be something to do with some custom rules in my .htaccess.

Unfortunately I spotted it a few minutes before I was due to leave Leeds for Glasgow for a couple of days, so I don’t have time to fix it.

Sorry to anyone who’s tried to contact me over the past couple of days!

Edit: Now fixed.

Adding custom share / bookmark links on posts & pages in WordPress

mou — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:39:11 +0000

While putting together the recent redesign for this site, I decided it was high time I stuck some share/bookmark links on posts. As far as driving traffic towards the site goes, making it as easy as possible for people to share links to my posts is a no brainer.

The problem I had up to now is that the most obvious solutions (ie, ShareThis) involved including JS files from other sites, which I found was leading to the site loading slowly (and sometimes not at all), and other plugins were a bit ugly and didn’t really fit my design.

The end result was me doing a bit of research into the links each of the popular sharing services used, finding a funky icon pack that would actually fit the site and not just looked like I’d tacked a ton of other peoples logos at the bottom of each post, and a bit of CSS for positioning and blending them into the background. Add the necessary HTML to the top of comments.php and voila! Share links on every page, without the need for a separate plugin.

So, for the benefit of anyone looking to do the same, here’s a breakdown of how I did it:

Find some icons

You’ll need to dig around for some free icons (or you could steal mine, I’d link you to the originals except I forget where I got them from!). Another nice set I found is here.

For this example, you’ll need an image for Email, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Posterous, Stumbleupon, Friendfeed, Google & RSS. You can add more but of course you’ll need to find the relevant links.

Next, you need to put them somewhere on your site. If you know HTML, you can put them wherever you like and simply change the URL in the example links below – otherwise, ensure there is an images folder directly within your theme folder, and inside there create a share folder. Inside there, put the images to each of the bookmarking sites, naming them as [service].png – so twitter would be twitter.png, delicious would be delicious.png, etc. If your icons aren’t .png files, then you’ll need to use that instead (twitter.jpg, etc) and slightly alter the links in the example code below.

Set the permalink, title & short permalink (if available)

First, open up comments.php within your theme folder. Now, at the very top, you want to set the title, full permalink and shortened permalink.

A lot of this is a vanity thing – on some sites I want to use the full permalink, but for things like Twitter its better to use a shortened link than to force the user to shorten it themselves. Also, whereas some sites I may want to just show the post title, sometimes I want to tack the site address onto the end. I couldn’t say why I do this exactly, it pretty much comes down to personal preference.

Note: Shortened permalinks are only available if using the . If this isn’t installed, the short permalink will just be identical to the same as the long permalink.

Add the share links

Now we have the URLs and titles ready, we need to add the actual links to the page. In comments.php, underneath where you added the code above, add the following code:



/images/share/email.png" alt="Email this post" />


/images/share/twitter.png" alt="Tweet this post" />


/images/share/facebook.png" alt="Share on Facebook" />


/images/share/delicious.png" alt="Bookmark on delicious" />


/images/share/digg.png" alt="Submit to Digg" />


/images/share/posterous.png" alt="Share on Posterous" />


/images/share/stumbleupon.png" alt="Submit to Stumbleupon" />


/images/share/friendfeed.png" alt="Share on Friendfeed" />


/images/share/google.png" alt="Save to Google bookmarks" />


/images/share/rss.png" alt="Comments RSS feed for this post" />

Woah! What the hell does all this mean? Unfortunately, if you don’t know HTML then you’ll just have to take my work for it that the links are right. For each one, its simply a case of passing through a URL encoded version of the link back to your page, and the page title. When clicked, each site knows what to do with the info you pass it.

Style it!

I’ll leave it up to you how you want to do this, but as a tip, adding the link p.share { text-align:center; } to your stylesheet will set you well on your way…

The end result – check at the bottom of this post (above the comments).

Hope this is some help to someone. I’ve tried to make it as simple as possible, but inevitably you may need at least a vague understanding of HTML to get this to work. If you’re really struggling, remember there are other options in the form of plugins – such as ShareThis or Add To Any.

New site design – moumeukv4 hits the web

mou — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:33:49 +0000

Seems like years since I last updated this site (18 months in fact), but after so long my photoshop trigger finger was starting to itch a little and I decided it was time for a change. And so I bring you – moumeukv4, the latest of the mou.me.uk WordPress themes.

Up to now I’d followed a similar pattern of design, so this time I’ve gone all out to mix things up. Gone is the black text on a white background, gone are the heavy layout graphics on every page and gone are the ridiculous sidebars that span 9 or 10 screens down.

Key differences are:

A completely reworked homepage, designed to take put some of the focus onto the rest of my online life. I’m posting a lot of photos at the moment, both on momentile and flickr (for the dailyshoot project) and I’ve always played a lot of xbox, so it made sense to have all of those featured at the front of the site. That along with my blog posts, my mobile blog and the place I seem to spend a lot more of my time nowadays, Twitter. Last.fm and a latest projects section will be added soon.
The all over “dark” look. Its something I’ve really fallen for over the last year and this was the perfect opportunity to see what I could do with a black/grey colour scheme. I’m still not sure how well the link colour works against the shade of grey used in the background, so either of these may well change in the next few weeks depending on how much they bug me.
A smaller header/logo etc. After checking the old site on an 800×600 resolution I developed a sympathy with people that were forced to see nothing but my site logo and a title on every page load, so now there’s a lot more visible above the fold.
A brand spanking new 404 page, starring the gorgeous Lissa. Thanks for modelling for me!

I also had to write a couple of plugins to get the homepage looking the way I wanted it, running alongside my Momentile on WordPress plugin (shameless plug). Most notably the Xbox recent games plugin took a bit of research to get the info I needed, so once I get some time to tidy up the code and add an options page I’ll get it released.

And thats about it. Hopefully the design won’t start pissing me off in a few weeks, and I can go another 18 months without getting “the itch”!

Resolutions for 2010

mou — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:32:26 +0000

Most “new years resolutions” fall by the wayside – at least, they do for me. The problem is that saying you’ll do something because you’re celebrating an occasion, and not because you want to, are just doomed to fail. Thats why this year I’m labelling them as resolutions for 2010 – and I’m refusing to start them on the 1st January.

So anyway, I’ve made a list of the things I’m aiming for in 2010 – in the hope that posting them publicly will encourage me to keep with them rather than risk the shame of quitting!

Finish all ongoing web projects

I’ve got his unfortunate knack of having these great ideas for websites/apps, getting them about 80% finished before I forget about it and it disappears into my ever-growing list of eclipse projects. I think I’ve blogged about it before and I’ve certainly moaned about it on Twitter, but in 2010, thats going to change.

First on my list are my commitments to WPSynergy. I’ve been working on polishing off the PigNews theme, a free magazine style theme for WordPress built around my side project, the SynTOF theme option framework, and plan to release the first beta version in the next few days. Then I plan to switch over to version 2 of OneRoom, a theme originally created by Jeremie Tisseau, and then finally onto version 2 of Modmat, a theme crafted by my own fair hands back in February 2008.

Sometime during then I also plan to launch my own blog redesign. I spent a week before christmas mocking it up on Photoshop and I think its looking pretty sweet, so when I get a few evenings free I’ll throw that together.

Then I plan to move all my sites off the Media Temple gridserver onto my Linode VPS. Once I’ve figured out how/where I’m going to keep everything backed up, it should be ready to go.

After that I have a couple of Glastonbury related projects to finish, including an interactive map (more details to follow) and a few others. Mostly stuff I don’t want to announce just yet.

Get my fitness back

When I was 21 – a mere 7 years ago – I was relatively fit. Over time that degraded through general neglect and smoking until August 2007 when I decided I’d had enough and signed up with Fitness First. After 6 weeks of 5 day-a-week gym sessions, I was already starting to feel better and I’d more than quadrupled the length of time I could run before my lungs gave out (remember kids, smokings bad, mkay?) until disaster – a freak accident and I broke my knee and my left leg was completely out of use for nearly 6 weeks. I worked on getting back to being able to walk normally again, but never pushed myself the extra mile – end result is I haven’t run or even jogged fully for over 2 years and my left knee is a lot weaker than it should be. I was an idiot in that regard, I admit, and 2010 is the year I put that right. I’m paying out of pocket for some more Bupa physio sessions and see what I need to do to achieve that.

Smoking, smoking, smoking

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve “quit smoking”. Its usually successful for a few months and then some event will just trigger it off again. Last time it was the day of Robs Wedding when I went into panic mode before I gave the best mans speech, and another time was the day I broke my knee.

So the problem isn’t quitting, its staying quit. I haven’t worked out how I’m going to achieve this yet – maybe invest in some hypnotherapy or something similar. Maybe check out the Allen Carr easyway clinics. I’ll think more about that another time.

Blog consistently

To be honest, I’ve promised myself every year since I started this blog that I’d post at least once a month, and until 2009 I managed that. My aim for 2010 is to not only post at least once a month, but try and keep it relevant – ie, I want to keep away from writing stuff just for the sheer hell of it. I do enough of that over on Twitter.

So there we have it – my aims for 2010. I’m quietly confident I can manage them, as they’re all things I’ve been promising myself I would do for a while. Whether or not I keep to them or not is anyones guess – I’ll report back in a year.

Fixing Eclipse in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

mou — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:10:17 +0000

After an upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) I noticed a few random issues in Eclipse has popped up. Most notably, I was no longer able to click the OK buttons on pop up windows – I had to highlight them with the mouse then hit either space or enter on the keyboard to select them.

Other symptoms included the “Install new software” window not listing any options when I entered an update URL (the options were there, but just not visible – clicking randomly within the selection box seemed to activate/deactivate them). Also the buttons were missing from the search view, so I was no longer able to scroll through the results after a full file search.

Initially, I thought this may have been a Java incompatibility with Karmic – I’d installed the Beta version on the my desktop PC weeks before and experienced the same issue, but assumed it was because the OS wasn’t finished.

But after a bit of digging around, I found a bug logged on the Ubuntu Bug tracker. A post by Holger Berndt seems to confirm the bug is in Eclipse:

Starting from 2.18 on, GTK+ changed some of its internal behaviour (google for “client side windows”). This change is intentional, and needed for other development. It doesn’t make any difference to programs using GTK+ correctly, but it makes problems with programs that use GTK+ in weird ways, making wrong assumptions that only accidentally worked in the past. So, to ease the transition until those programs get fixed, an environment variable has been introduced to simulate the old behaviour.

Reading through the rest of the discussion, it turned out that ~~won’t~~ shouldn’t affect copies of Eclipse checked out from the Ubuntu package repository, but seeing as I was using a copy of PDT I’d got straight from the Eclipse website, I was seeing the problems.

The fix is relatively simple. Create a file in your home folder (or wherever you want) called eclipsefix.sh – open it and add the following lines:

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true
/opt/eclipse/eclipse

(where /opt/eclipse/eclipse is the location of your eclipse application file).

Make sure you make it executable (chmod +x ~/eclipsefix.sh) then go to whatever shortcut you usually use to open Eclipse and change the command to point towards the file you just created (ie,/home/mou/eclipsefix.sh).

Now whenever you open Eclipse using this shortcut, the script will run and eclipse should work as expected.

According to the eclipse bug tracker, this issue should be fixed in Eclipse 3.5.2

Update 11/11/09: daYmo has commented that to get it to work he had to use export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1, so if you have no luck the first time it may be worth giving this a try.

Oooh an angry email!

mou — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:23:43 +0000

I got a great email through this week. Someone took the time to use my website contact form to send me this mesage:

im gonna find out your address you little douchbag, you can bet it.
rip another post from my glasto blog and i will come to your house and rip ypur fucking head off
i shit you not kid
—–
steve jones
stevejones3185@googlemail.com

Thanks for your email Steve. Well, I tried to respond to clarify what you thought I’d “ripped” and to ask for a link to your blog, but I received a “mailbox not found” bounce-back so I guess you gave me a fake email address (and probably fake name).

So, I decided to have a little dig about. Seeing as you’re the only person who used my contact form on October 6th at 9:15pm, I know your IP address is/was 86.4.227.172, you use BT broadband and you’re probably based around the Runcorn area.

I’m also fairly certain you use Windows Vista, and you’re using the Chrome browser (version 3.0).

So I had a quick look through your route through my site and came up with this:

21:08 – Homepage
21:11 – About Me page
21:12 – Glastonbury page
21:12 – Contact Me page

Which suggests to me that you must have seen something on my Glastonbury page. So based on that, I’d like to know which of the following I stole from your site (bearing in mind you didn’t click any of the links and so don’t yet know what the pages contain):

The text at the top of the page
The picture of Rob
The sitemaps
The line-ups

So seeing as you didn’t manage to give me a real email address, feel free to send me another email but this time elaborate a bit – we both know nothing on my site has been ripped from anywhere, but I’d be interesting to see what you think is yours. Or if you really want to stand by your claim, why not post a comment below so everyone can see it?

Oh, and a quick proof read of your message next time wouldn’t hurt. Failing on words like “your” just make you look like a bit of a tit. Petty I know, but its just another reason why I’m not sure whether I should take you seriously or not – 12 year old trolls aren’t really worth my time. *

* Edited 21st October 2009

Glastowatch forums online

mou — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:03:08 +0000

This is a bit of old news, but I do have a habit of blogging about things a few days too late.

The Glastowatch forums are now online. I have pretty high hopes for them as I know the guy that runs it is a bit of a hardcore Glastonbury obsessive (like moi), and generally a sound bloke.

As he put its:

If you’re looking for information about the festival or just want to chat with other people who’re also going, check it out.

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Off to Glasto this year? Sign up and get posting!

Also the Twitterbury list has been reset for the 2010 festival. If you fancy meeting up with potentially hundreds of other twitterers at the festival, tweet @glastowatch #twitterbury and you’ll be added to the list. Last years meet-up was on Thursday at the Jazz World – I managed to miss it through general drunken behaviour but I plan to stay sober enough this year to remember.

Got my tickets

mou — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:31:51 +0000

Looks like I’ll be off to the 2010 Glastonbury festival, after a shakey few hours waiting for confirmation.

The new SeeTickets traffic management system sounded good on paper, but in fact was as big as fail as previous years – if not bigger. The key point was that in previous years, their server set up allowed a “once you’re in, you’re in” type scenario – so you keep hitting F5 and eventually the page loads – at that point you’re able to fly through the ticket buying process.

Not so this year. Instead, virtually every refresh took me to a “you are in a queue” page, which considering how sporadically I was let on the site and dropped again, sounds like full on bullshit to me. Its just a nice PR spin on “our servers are too busy, please try again later”. And if you’re lucky enough to get a form page, you submit and are thrown back into this mysterious “queue”.

Also (through poor planning perhaps) the “you are in a queue” page was set with a 20 second meta refresh. This is great as it means you can leave the page to keep trying to connect itself – except after you’ve entered your second set of details, you’ve submitted a form – so every modern browser won’t instantly refresh, but rather pop up a “do you want to resubmit this form” box with OK & cancel options. Fail.

Then to make it a little worse, it took nearly 16 hours to send out my confirmation email. So for that time I’m left with nothing but a screenshot of a reference numberless page telling me I’d be emailed shortly. Also at this point no money had been taken. So of course when I hear in the evening that tickets are sold out, panic starts to set in.

But aside from the epic seetickets fail, I’m booked up for another year. Just another 8 and a half months to wait.