After comparing the old and new style.css files for this theme, I noticed that the following line was missing from the new one:

pre {display: block; overflow: auto; background: #f3f3f3; padding: 5px; margin: 20px 0; font-family: monospace; border: 1px solid #dadada;}

I enclose all of my code snippets in HTML “pre” tags – the above code (written by myself) wraps them in a nice little box on the page – using a horizontal slider to deal with the overflow issue experienced. It seems I made changes to the original Cleanr theme – but completely forgot to change the new code after performing the update.

Hopefully everything should look a little nicer now

Many of you will already be familiar with reCAPTCHA via other websites – where it is often used to block spam comments on blogs or on user registration forms. Basically, it requires you to recognize two words in a picture and to type them into an input box as a means of proving that you are a human and not a spambot. You can see an example of reCAPTCHA in action in the screenshot provided.

I currently have the plugin setup so that it is activated on:

• New user registration
• Creation of new pages
• Anonymous edits that contain new external links
• Brute-force password cracking

If you are interested in implementing the plugin on your own blog, there is more information available here. It is a very straightforward and simple procedure.

For any interested parties, the hide/show function works using the “Scriptaculous” javascript library. I have to admit that I got this idea from Duane Storey’s personal blog – so I’m sending him some link love

If you would like the code, just look at the source code for this page. If you still don’t understand then just leave a comment.

Luckily, my friend Jacob over at jdpictures.co.uk was also a former Heart Internet customer itching to move to a better host. He had done some research and recommended Media Temple’s Grid Service hosting to me. Whilst I’m not going to go deep into the details of this new state of the art hosting technology, basically it means that if your site gets a spike in traffic, the server setup will immediately adapt to deal with it – meaning that your site should never slow down or be suspended. Media Temple also allows you to map multiple domain names to one hosting account for free (so sprayfly.com, inchina.co.uk, jdpictures.co.uk etc. can all be hosted on one server). This basically means that me and Jacob are able to share a hosting package with Media Temple (and share the costs) without having to make any compromises whatsoever.

Jacob decided to sign up for the service and give it a test – since then we have both been progressively migrating our files and databases over to the new server and making changes to the DNS records. Finally sprayfly.com, inchina.co.uk and radotages.co.uk (i.e. all my sites) are now hosted on Media Temple and I will shortly be cancelling my Heart Internet account for good.

So far, I have encountered very few problems during the migration and am impressed with the speed of the new servers. The Media Temple control panel is very smooth and easy to use and some of the new features that weren’t provided by Heart Internet have already come in handy. I have been using an SSH shell to transfer my files between servers (using rsync) and also used the shell for database dumps and imports which has made the transfer a breeze. It is of course possible that there are a few hiccups that I’ve not spotted – so if you notice anything unusual then please let me know (leave a comment).

To think that I have been forking out so much cash to Heart Internet each month when all along I could have got more for less is quite frustrating – but at least I’ve made the move now…

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