https?://([^.]+\.)*(twitter|wordpress|blogspot|flickr|blogger|feedburner|youtube|dailymotion|bit)\.(com|net|ly)/.*

Luckily, however, I was happy to come across a website called iplayerconverter which provides links to the same audio streams available in the iPlayer but in Real Media format rather than the protected flash format. Whilst Real Media format audio streams are far from ideal, they can be successfully recorded to file in Linux.

I found the stream I was looking for on the above website and sure enough, was able to play it on my ubuntu box, now I just had to find a way to record it. After a bit of research, I whipped up a small shell script that would allow me to record any stream from the BBC iPlayer and record it to an uncompressed 16-bit PCM audio WAV file before compressing it to MP3 format, here is the code I used.

#/bin/bash
#  Created by Jonathan Lumb (http://sprayfly.com).
# This shell script will record a 'Listen Again' program from the BBC website to MP3 format.
# URL= Real Time Streaming Protocol (rtsp) address of the radio programme (see http://www.iplayerconverter.co.uk)
# NAME = file name
# VBR = Variable bitrate quality setting (0-9) 0=highest quality, default=4
echo "Please enter the Stream URL for the program you wish to record, eg. http://www.iplayerconverter.co.uk/pid/b00hhn4z/stream.aspx"
read URL
echo "Please enter a name for the program"
read NAME
echo "Enter the variable bitrate for the MP3 file (0-9), 0 is the highest quality."
read VBR
mplayer -cache 2048 -bandwidth 9999999 -playlist ""$URL"" -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast:waveheader:file="$NAME".wav
lame -V "$VBR" "$NAME".wav "$NAME".mp3
rm "$NAME".wav

To use this script simply open up a terminal on your ubuntu box and enter the following:

cd ~
nano iplayer.sh
(paste in the above code)
save [Ctrl]+[O]
exit [Ctrl]+[X]
chmod u+x iplayer.sh

To run the script, simply enter:
~/iplayer.sh

Now follow the instructions provided in the script – notably you will need to provide the RTSP URL for the stream you want to listen to (which can be found on http://www.iplayerconverter.co.uk and a name for the program you are recording (you can make up anything you want). You can also enter a value for the VBR rate – which determines the quality of the MP3 file the script will create. Once the script is finished (it can take some time) there should be an MP3 file saved in your home directory.

A few things to note:

You will need to have the following things installed for the above script to work:

• Mplayer (to install, enter sudo apt-get install mplayer in a terminal)
• Lame (to install, enter sudo apt-get install lame
• Some audio codecs such as ffmpeg

The recording may take a while but shouldn’t be in real time – hence if you are recording an hour long program it may actually only take 10 or 20 minutes to finish recording.

Good Luck, let me know how you get on!

Basically, after you update to 2.6, the WordPress admin panel will notify you that you are able to activate Google Gears. If you choose to activate this feature, WordPress will then install it and you will be prompted to grant permission to Google Gears to access your WordPress installation. Google Gears will then automatically start to store necessary WordPress files and all of your posts on your local computer so that you can work offline.

Thats it, once transfer is complete you can open up your computer anywhere in the world and whether or not you have internet access you will always be able to access and edit your wordpress posts from your web browser.

Screenshots are available on Anieto2k’s post (Spanish)

Attention Seller:
In order to maintain a safe trading environment, selling limits are occasionally placed on accounts. Your eBay account has been restricted from listing this item at this time until you have verified through PayPal.

1) To verify your PayPal account, click on your country of eBay registration below to understand how to complete that process.

2) If you already have a verified PayPal account, and are still receiving this message, you need to link it to your eBay account.

For instructions on how to become PayPal Verified or how to link your PayPal account to your eBay account, please click on the site of your eBay registration below:

I proceeded to follow eBay’s instructions and followed the steps on the Paypal website to become a ‘verified’ seller. I then followed the below steps to ‘link’ my paypal account with my eBay account:

1. Sign into My eBay
2. Select the ‘Paypal Account’ link from the left-hand menu
3. Click on ‘Update Profile Summary’
4. Log into Paypal

This should link your account to eBay.

After following the above steps, if you are able to offer worldwide postage, you are indeed lucky. I was not and so next tried the following:

1. Log into Paypal
2. Click on ‘Profile’
3. Under ‘Selling Preferences’ click on ‘Auctions’
4. If your eBay account name isn’t present then add it.

Unfortunately, this still didn’t solve the problem (although it may solve yours). I did some more searching around and found another possible solution:

1. Sign into eBay
2. Go to My eBay
3. On the left hand side, underneath ‘My Account’, select ‘Addresses’
4. Click on ‘View all postal addresses’
5. If your ‘Paypal Address’ is present then make that address your primary address (Hit the ‘Make Primary’ link on the right hand side.
6. If your ‘Paypal Address’ is not present then you will need to scroll down to the ‘Add PayPal Addresses button’ below the list of available addresses and ‘link’ your eBay addresses to your Paypal account.

This last solution did the trick for me and I am now able to offer worldwide postage of my items on any eBay site (US, UK, Ireland etc)

Hopefully this guide will help anybody else out there who has encountered this problem find a quick solution.

After googling around for a while, I managed to find the below solution on twhirl’s blog which seemed to do the trick for me:

Go to Start > Default Programs > Set Program Access and Computer Defaults
Expand Custom, select the radio button next to the application you want to set as the system-wide default browser (there will be a few options – such as IE, Safari, Mozilla) and apply the setting.

Hopefully all your links should now open in Firefox and not in IE.

The WordPress upgrade went smoother than expected. After backing everything up, I used ‘rsync’ to update all copies of WordPress on the server and then followed the upgrade instructions for each site one by one. To my surprise, all the plugins worked fine and some even updated themselves automatically. Much smoother than I had expected!

Regarding the new design – I was fed up with the old one which was ugly, cluttered and difficult to navigate. I therefore downloaded a very mimimalistic WordPress theme called ‘Simpla’ which i then modified to add a few new features (Flickr badge, Search Box, Twitter Feed, Site Links, RSS Feeds) and its all up and running now.

As usual, please let me know if you encounter any bugs. I’d also love to hear anybody’s opinions on the new design.

Thanks

More recently, whilst making a few postings on this blog and others (all running the latest version of WordPress), I discovered that whilst I was pasting links to postings on friends’ blogs into the body of my posts, no pingbacks were appearing on ANY of those blogs. I began to investigate and soon found out that not only were pingbacks not working to external sites (or my own blogs for that matter) but any outbound trackbacks were also unsuccessful. On the other hand, all incoming pingbacks and trackbacks were displaying fine – as they had been doing for a long time.

Convinced that this must be some problem with the setup of my WordPress installations, I disabled all running plugins, checked all relevant options on the Admin panel and tried posting pingbacks and trackbacks to various well-known trackback/pingback testing site (such as TestTrack)… however all this was still to no avail!

Finally, I decided to prove to myself that this was not me just being stupid and made a new clean install of WordPress on my server and tried using that to post trackbacks and pingbacks. As I had expected, even a brand new and shiny WordPress blog was unable to successfully send outgoing trackbacks and pingbacks. This left just one possibile source of the problem… my webhost!

So… I searched around to see if anybody else was experiencing the same problem – lo and behold there was another WordPress user in exactly the same situation. Here is the thread he created in the WordPress support forums.

I’ve just installed WordPress 2.0.4 and cant get pingback to work (trackback does)
My hosting company (shared server) are wondering if its because they block port 80…could this be a problem?

This sounds vaguely familiar to me!

Yes, it is. The trackback is an outbound connection on port 80. I would see if they could allow it for your account.

Um, 2.0.4? You do know that there are much newer versions, right?

Uh oh… sounds like trouble!

Ok – thanks – yeah I did know about version – but my hosting company www.heartinternet.co.uk has a one-click install version which happens to be 2.0.4!

Ooohh! How strange indeed – this other user is hosted by nobody other than Heart Internet. Could this just be a pure coincidence…? Anyhow, I figured a quick support ticket to Heart customer support should do the trick… just ask them to open up outbound connections on port 80 and we’re sorted… right?

Well… actually no! Here is the response I received:

Thanks for the reply. Sorry but I can’t do that, it’s a global change and so not something I can do for you. That’s disallowed to prevent recursive loops from occuring to the benefit of all customers on the same hardware.

Ouch! Whilst I do understand their point of view here, I would argue that its not just me who would benefit from this change. I’m sure that what with WordPress being the most popular blogging software out there and Heart Internet being such a big host, there are plenty of other dissatisfied Heart Internet customers who would also like to see their copy of WordPress working properly. To add to the shame, Heart even provide a one-click install option for WordPress, have a look at their description:

WordPress is arguably the most popular blogging software available today! It’s easy to install and use and will allow you to have a great looking blog in minutes. Please note that this feature will use one of your MySQL databases.

Ahem, so even the guys at Heart Internet admit how popular it is… yet they insist on keeping outbound connections on port 80 blocked… tut tut tut! Most other popular web hosts support outgoing port 80 connections, I really can’t see why they are being so stubborn?

So… it looks like for the moment I have hit a dead end and for the short term will be unable to make any outgoing trackbacks and pingbacks using the WordPress platform. Heart Internet support said that they would “gladly pass long [my] comments” to the guys in the suits but whether this will really have any outcome remains to be seen. My only other option is to move hosts, which I am reluctant to do. As I have already said, until I hit this problem, I was quite satisfied with my web host.

Anyhow, let this be a warning to anybody out there looking for a new web host. If you want to use WordPress on your site and would like to be able to make the most of Trackbacks and Pingbacks… I would suggest that you don’t visit http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/ but rather that you take a look elsewhere…

As a result of my post comparing various WordPress caching engine plugins, Duane Storey, the creator of ‘Viper Cache’ got in touch to offer me a beta version of his plugin for testing. It has to be said that what with it being in ‘alpha’, the installation process was a little ‘thorny’ and the cache files didn’t save themselves to the directory I had specified, however the plugin did perform fairly well.

I’ve dug out the stats for the other caching plugins to make a comparison:

Statistics: Viper Cache
Memory: 174.0 KB
Completed Requests: 1330
Request Time: 22,556 [#/sec]

There are also some comparison graphs available too:
Memory Consumption
Completed Requests
Request Time

The number of completed requests certainly draws my attention.

I look forward to getting my hands on the plugin for testing once it has come out of its alpha state. Hope the translation was useful to somebody (although the graphs say it all really!)