Aquila Online

Awesome sauce

// November 28th, 2011 // No Comments » // Blog Stuff, General

For some reason I always approach a database core upgrade with some trepidation. Perhaps it is because in the past, I’ve had to spend hours fixing the entire site – see A minor refresh as an example of what happened in April this year.

This time I was (a little) more prepared. Armed with fresh backups, copies of all kinds of code snippets and a healthy dose of arabica coffee I pressed the automatic upgrade button. Less than 10 seconds later – Success!

No pain, no mess, no fuss. Awesome sauce!

I’ll be monitoring the situation, but if you do happen on a broken link or any other anomaly, please let me know.

A minor refresh

// April 30th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Blog Stuff

As I mentioned in my previous post, the latest WordPress core update did not play nice with the theme on Aquilaonline. Suffice to say, I’ve had to do a minor theme refresh to get the various elements, plug-ins, widgets and other bits of code to work again.

In the process, I’ve had to kill some of my favourite (read: labour of love tinkering) widgets.

One of these used to show album art of the recently scrobbled songs on Last.fm. Took me ages to “perfect” the look and feel of the album covers, together with the placement on the site and corresponding links back to the track and artist info on Last.fm When I think about it, I wonder if anybody was really interested in what I was listening to? I guess the same could be said for people posting their top 5 artists/songs of the week on twitter/facebook or wherever.

Other than showing off to family members or providing some minor spectator value for the casual blog browser, I’m not sure the mere automated posting of recently played tracks actually influenced anyone enough to click and listen/buy/recommend the track/album/artist to others. Does a recommendation about a particular song or artist carry more weight in influencing others to take action?

I think the answer is yes. Personal recommendations and word-of-mouth referrals do carry a lot more weight. Perhaps instead of just automatically posting my recently played tracks, the focus should rather shift to genuine recommendations, research, interesting info that may be relevant to the audience.

Hmm… What do you think? Interested or not?

Hopefully most bits and bobs are up and running. I will however still be tinkering a bit with the theme until everything is satisfactory again.

** Update 10 hours later **
I finally managed to track down the problem.

If you’re using the Irresistible theme from WooThemes, the biggest issue when upgrading your WordPress core is that the idTabs jQuery script also needs to be updated. The old js file basically broke a tonne of my widgets, but after much tinkering (and referencing my regular backups) I got it all to work again.

Along with the fix to my tabs, I also managed to restore and restyle the fmTuner plugin . Now I can bore you a bit longer with my bad taste in music.

So that went well. Not.

// April 16th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Blog Stuff

Thought I’d do some housekeeping on the blog. Backup, upgrade, refresh the widgets, clean up links, update the pages that Google Adsense does not like (more about this some other time) and more.

The upgrade to the WordPress core and SQL files went well, but alas, my theme did not like it so much. Save for me having to go through pages and pages of code to upgrade all the bits that broke and get the theme up and running, it might be time for a bit of a refresh.

Watch this space. You might see some interesting and not so interesting things happen in the next few hours/days.

The emperor’s new clothes

// March 5th, 2009 // 8 Comments » // Blog Stuff

Well hello there. This post is long overdue. After much of a hiatus from blogging due to many, many boring and not so boring factors (lets’ not get into the detail here – that’s a post for another day), I’m happy to announce that I’m back. For those of you still subscribed to the RSS feed, my deepest gratitude for holding on. Those of you who have not yet subscribed, perhaps now’s the time to do so.

“Why?”, I might hear you ask. To be honest, I’m not sure. I could make promises to blog every day. To share my personal life and the things I find interesting or post some of my own images, but we all know that resolutions go out the window once we hit work deadlines and other personal commitments. What I can say though is that we live in interesting times and these need to be documented. And what better place than right here on this blog?

For a long time I’ve been nudging, winking and searching for a new theme for AquilaOnline. To me the site was getting a bit stale, clearly evidenced by the lack of posts, visitors and comments. Many weekends, delicious tags, downloads, sandbox tests ensued to get that perfect theme.

I wanted something a bit grungy, textured, yet clean and pleasing on the eye. Apart from creating my own, I finally settled on one that works for me. It might still be refined somewhat over the next few days, but for now I’m happy.

I guess it’s somewhat like the story of the Emperor’s new clothes. Even with or without a new theme to the blog, the bottom line is that I’ll still be baring my thoughts, ideas, interests and stories to you, the reader. (Hopefully you won’t find it pretentious in any way).

PS: Let me know what you think of the new design and features, which is quite a departure from the previous one.