Neither release is critical – both plugins should continue to work without applying the latest updates. However, seeing as several functions used in these plugins were depercated in 3.0, this may mean the older versions may continue to work with future WordPress releases.

Just so you know.

Essentials 1 to 6 can be found here.

7. Bin Bags
Bin bags have 1,000,001 uses, least of all to keep stuff dry. Its rained hard and the ground has gone all muddy? Take a few with you to lay out and sit on. Got caught in a rainstorm and your clothes are drenched? Throw them in a bin bag till you get home to stop them getting all the rest of your dry stuff damp. Starting to rain and you’ve forgotten your coat? Tear a hole in the top and sides, slip it over your head and voila! Instant poncho! Plus if it does rain hard and you find the inside of your tent getting progressively more and more wet/muddy, throw all your nice, dry clean clothes in a bin bag so they stay that way.

8. Plasters (ideally good quality waterproof plasters)
Ideally, you should also aim to bring a couple of different sizes. The main reason for adding this to the list is blisters – most of us don’t usually spend 12 hours a day on our feet, and it can come as a shock to the system – hence, blisters after the first full day are fairly likely. Now I won’t lie, its going to hurt regardless of what you do – but putting a decent plaster on it should at least minimize the pain. Also useful for impromptu cuts, which – if it rains and everything gets muddy – are screaming out to get infected. Note – you can probably get these from the medical tent, but they’re likely to be the cheap plastic ones that die as soon as they get wet.

9. Sun cream
This one’s really down to you and depends on 2 factors: a) Do you sunburn, and b) Is it going to be sunny. If the answer to either of those questions is yes, I’d advise picking some up before you go. Bearing in mind the festival is at the peak of the english summer, and if/when the sun does come out, its usually scorching. Its likely at some point this will happen and you’ll find yourself in the middle of a field with nowhere to shelter. Again, available from the medical tent but – can you be bothered walking up there every 2 hours?

10. Toilet paper
In the last couple of years Glastonbury has got better and better in this respect – I’d say at least half my toilet visits I’d see paper on the roll, which is impressive. But its not there all the time, and to avoid getting caught out I;d advise at least taking 1 roll yourself – just rip off a dozen or so sheets when you leave the tent and keep them in your pocket, just in case. And you’ll thank me for suggesting it – especially if you’re stupid enough to get the chilli fries after a night drinking. Also teams up with the wet wipes as a makeshift towel after your festival shower…

11. Torch
Only essential if you feel any sort of guilt about kicking someone’s guy rope out at 3am, or if you’re the sort of person who insists on walking to the toilet in the middle of the night. But also very, very useful once you’re in the tent – once you’re in there and the door’s zipped up, its pitch black. Seeing as you can pick up torches for a couple of quid from homebase (and most motorway services petrol stations apparently), there really is no excuse.

And there you go – between this post and the original, I think we have a fairly comprehensive list of camping essentials. If you think I’ve missed anything, let me know in the comments!

For that reason I’ve decided to hold back on my yearly tradition of publishing a spreadsheet, as I didn’t want to have to be updating every couple of days between now and June. However, it doesn seem to have stabilized enough now to feel confident that I won’t have to fix it too many more times.

If you’re wondering why I bother doing this every year, its because I like to have a alphabetically ordered list with me when I go. Thing is, I already know who I want to see by the time I get there, and when I forget what time/stage they’re playing on its a pain in the arse having to search through 3 days/20 stages of line-ups to find them. Thats why I’ve always preferred to have a alphabetically ordered list handy so I can quickly find when/where a band will be playing. Simplez.

I’ll update the spreadsheet when I hear word of bands being added/removed from the lineup, and as the details of more stages are released.

Enjoy! And see you at Glastonbury!

Extra kudos for the “meet the people” footage around 2m30s. Pure genius.

The re-sale of cancelled tickets for Glastonbury 2010 will take place on Sun, April 11 – info at http://bit.ly/tixresale

Tickets will be on sale from 9am. Don’t count on them being available for long!

So there you have it. Put in your calendars, set your alarm clocks and make sure you’re up in time!

Good luck!

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.

Update (16/3/2010): Resale date has been announced! More details here.

]]> http://mou.me.uk/2010/03/01/glastonbury-2010-ticket-payment-deadline-extended-official-resale-date-to-be-announced-soon/feed/ 0 http://mou.me.uk/2010/03/01/glastonbury-2010-ticket-payment-deadline-extended-official-resale-date-to-be-announced-soon/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/moumeuk/~3/cg6FsUObKPY/ http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/23/server-move-complete-linode-rules/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:58:20 +0000 mou http://mou.me.uk/?p=900 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.

]]> http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/23/server-move-complete-linode-rules/feed/ 2 http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/23/server-move-complete-linode-rules/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/moumeuk/~3/sDq0vRYISyk/ http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/15/contact-form/#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:06:57 +0000 mou http://mou.me.uk/?p=887 …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.

]]> http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/15/contact-form/feed/ 0 http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/15/contact-form/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/moumeuk/~3/ANqupxs5ch4/ http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/14/adding-custom-share-bookmark-links-on-posts-pages/#comments Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:39:11 +0000 mou http://mou.me.uk/?p=866 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.

<?php
$pageId = get_the_id();
$pageTitle = urlencode(get_the_title());
$shortLink = (function_exists('get_shortlink')) ? urlencode(get_shortlink($pageId)) : urlencode(get_permalink($pageId));
$permaLink = urlencode(get_permalink($pageId));
$longPageTitle = sprintf(
'%s+|+%s',
$pageTitle,
urlencode(get_bloginfo('name'))
);
?>

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:

<div class="shareIcons">
<a href="mailto:?subject=Check out this article: <?php the_title(); ?>&amp;body=<?=$permaLink; ?>" target="_blank" title="Email this post">
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/share/email.png" alt="Email this post" />
</a>
<a href="http://twitter.com/home/?status=<?=$pageTitle; ?> - <?=$shortLink; ?>" target="_blank" title="Tweet this post">
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/share/twitter.png" alt="Tweet this post" />
</a>
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<?=$permaLink; ?>&amp;t=<?=$pageTitle; ?>" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook">
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/share/facebook.png" alt="Share on Facebook" />
</a>
<a href="http://delicious.com/save?url=<?=$permaLink; ?>&amp;title=<?=$longPageTitle; ?>" target="_blank" title="Bookmark on delicious">
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/share/delicious.png" alt="Bookmark on delicious" />
</a>
<a href="http://digg.com/submit?url=<?=$permaLink; ?>&amp;title=<?=$pageTitle; ?>" target="_blank" title="Submit to Digg">
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/share/digg.png" alt="Submit to Digg" />
</a>
<a href="http://posterous.com/share?linkto=<?=$permaLink; ?>&amp;title=<?=$pageTitle; ?>" target="_blank" title="Share on Posterous">
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/share/posterous.png" alt="Share on Posterous" />
</a>
<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?=$permaLink; ?>&amp;title=<?=$pageTitle; ?>" target="_blank" title="Submit to stumbleupon">
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/share/stumbleupon.png" alt="Submit to Stumbleupon" />
</a>
<a href="http://friendfeed.com/?url=<?=$permaLink; ?>&amp;title=<?=$pageTitle; ?>" target="_blank" title="Share on friendfeed">
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/share/friendfeed.png" alt="Share on Friendfeed" />
</a>
<a href="http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=add&amp;bkmk=<?=$permaLink; ?>&amp;title=<?=$longPageTitle; ?>" target="_blank" title="Save to Google bookmarks">
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/share/google.png" alt="Save to Google bookmarks" />
</a>
<a href="<?php echo get_post_comments_feed_link(); ?>" target="_blank" title="Comments RSS feed for this post">
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/share/rss.png" alt="Comments RSS feed for this post" />
</a>
</div>

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.

]]> http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/14/adding-custom-share-bookmark-links-on-posts-pages/feed/ 1 http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/14/adding-custom-share-bookmark-links-on-posts-pages/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/moumeuk/~3/-iDZ3Bxl9Y0/ http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/09/new-site-design-moumeukv4-hits-the-web/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:33:49 +0000 mou http://mou.me.uk/?p=850 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”!

]]> http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/09/new-site-design-moumeukv4-hits-the-web/feed/ 21 http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/09/new-site-design-moumeukv4-hits-the-web/