Unfortunately I came across a slight problem with WPAU (WordPress Automatic Upgrade). After a bit of google-ing I found other people have had the same issue. Mosher’sUnimaginativelyEntitledBlog thankfully came to the rescue.

This may only be a coincidence, but we seem to both be using 1and1 as our webhosting provider. The issue seems to come down to there being more than one version of PHP on the server. This confuses WPAU, which tries to use the wrong version. This can be forced to use the correct version by adding the following to your .htaccess file:

# Ensure PHP5 being used
# For WordPress auto upgrade
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

This also seems to have had the side-effect of speeding up page loads from WordPress as well. May have been causing more problems than I had realised.

Now the upgrade is completed, I can start blogging on my latest project!

Note: I take no responsibility for you messing up your .htaccess file. You should take backups before making any changes.

I managed to find a couple of sites that had some information on this subject.

The first site, Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks, has some good background information, but not much detail on how to configure this.

The second site, EvilRouters.net, has a example of using communities to influence an ISP’s routing decisions. This is the one I found most useful. The example focuses on a customer that has a multi-homed connection to a single ISP. This ISP publishes a list of communties, that can be used to affect the connection used to connect to routes advertised from the customers network.

BGP communites in-effect tag a prefix (or set of prefixes). Once these prefixes are tagged, operations can be performed on that group of prefixes, rather than having to identifiy each prefix. Route Maps are heavily used in BGP communites and are used to both classify the prefixes and to set what actions occur.

One use for a BGP Community could be to determine which prefixes are not to be advertised out of your AS – Autonomous System. All internal networks could be tagged with a certain community at the point they are distributed into the BGP AS if they are to remain private. On your exit routers you could then have a route filter that will stop any prefixes that are tagged with the specified community from being exported out of the AS.

Hopefully this makes sense, but if not then please leave your comments and I will try and answer them.

The proof can be found here:

http://www.iphonematters.com/article/chuck_norris_claims_invention_of_the_iphone_nominated_for_nobel_peace_899/

In other Chuck Norris and iPhone related news two new facts have been brought to my attention:

1. Chuck Norris can Copy & Paste on his iPhone.

2. Chuck Norris created the iPhone, when he swalled a 1970’s rotary telephone whole he excreted a brand new, fully packaged iPhone four minutes later.

For all you Chuck Norris facts, visit ChuckNorrisFacts.com

Unfortunately, being based away from home for this week I didn’t have ready access to my webspace to perform the upgrade. Thankfully I found the perfect Plugin, WordPress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU).

Maybe I’m a bit cynical, but I doubted that this would be able to do what it claimed on the tin, but after a bit of Google-ing I decided to give it a go. How wrong can you be?!? This worked amazingly!! Not sure I’ve had an easy upgrade on any other bit of software (and this included commercial products). There was one tiny issue, with my Plugins not being re-started, but further investigation showed that there were newer version of these that I should have been using, so this may have actually saved me a load of hassle.

All in all, very impressed and look forward to my next upgrade!!

Host Name: smtp.o2.co.uk
User Name: [O2 website username]
Password: [O2 webiste password]
Use SSL: Off
Authentication: Password
Server Port: 25

Gave this another try and worked straight off. Quite quick as well over 3G.

Now just have to transfer my contacts, which in my haste I forgot to move over to the iPhone. Looks like I’m going to have to use the U600 again

http://portableapps.com/

One of the problems I currently have is that on any given day I could be using any of at least three seperate PCs (depending on whether I’m on-site, in the office or at home). This makes trying to set-up a development environment for Web Developing a bit tricky. I could just use my web-hosting space, but don’t always have FTP access.

Thankfully I managed to find a solution. Having recently purchased a 4GB USB key I decided to start looking for apps that could be run from it. These would then not need installing on all the machines and I could take any updates between machines without any problems. Having used LIVE CD’s before for various Linux flavours, I knew this would mean packaging the software and making executables to run.

In my search for answers I stumbled accross PortableApps.com. Here you can find pre-packed apps that will run strainght from a USB key. Amazingly this includes XAMPP that includes Apache, mySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin, etc all in one package. You can also get Notepad++, which has proved to be a big help with coding PHP and CSS. There is also a version of GIMP for editing images.

There are versions that can be installed to your USB key to give you all the apps and user settings you want, from any PC you care to use. However, I have found just using the individual apps meets all my requirements.

Overall, a very useful set of tools. Check out the PortableApps.com website for a full listing of all the apps.

Enjoy!!!

It appears that Firefox does not use the <object> tag in the same way as IE. Further investigation has shown that an <embed> tag can be used inside the <object> tag to allow this to work with both browsers.

Some rather interesting results were also seen with the CSS in Firefox. Most of these could be resolved with a bit of Googling. ONe main problem was with the way the main pag container had been centered on the page. Originally I had used a text-align: center in the <body> tag. Fine for IE, which is more tolerent of these shortcuts, but no so good for Firfox. This was solved by removing this code and replacing with auto margin sizes for both left and right margins. However, this didn’t seem to work too well in IE.

This left me with a slight problem, how to have two style sheets. Thankfully, I managed to find a pre-coded PHP class for browser detection. This was found here: http://apptools.com/phptools/browser/ With this I have managed to have seperate CSS Stylesheets for each of the offending browsers. More code to manage, but I’m only worried with the main stream browsers.

So after all this, the website is now up and running, with only a few changes to be made after a meeting with the customer. A lesson has also been learnt, develop in Firefox and bodge it for IE later!

Based in Wilstead, near Bedford, Drummond and Russell is a well established local building company with over 30 years experience.

They cater for domestic and commercial customers in Bedfordshire and the surrounding areas and can offer  a complete range of project management services for new builds right through to basic refurbishments.

The site can be seen at:

http://www.drummondandrussell.co.uk/

The actual criteria is that exams are valid for 3 years from the date of completion, so if I get into gear properly I have until the beginning of 2010 to complete both my CCNP and CCDP!

Thought this might be a useful fact for other people following a similar path.