Yesterday I declared my blog reopen for blogness and today I republished all of my old posts. Last year I removed a lot of posts as I wanted to depersonalise my blog. I decided to put them back today for 2 reasons:
A. To restore any broken links on the site
B. To see how much extra traffic I pull in through the extra posts

photo credit: ShironekoEuro

The traffic on this blog was growing steadily last year until I stopped posting. Although I'm not too worried about traffic on here, it's just an experimental thing to see how many extra hits the site gets over the next month after fixing broken links and by re-publishing old content.

I recently completed my PGCE in Secondary ICT and I am now a qualified teacher. Due to the commitments of the PGCE course, I didn't have time to commit to blogging over the last 10 months. I have however, spent some time blogging on theleavingcert.com (a site I partnered up on with Sean MacEntee last Summer). Recently myself and Sean purchased a second leaving cert related site (leaving-cert.net) so I'll be dedicating some time to both those sites over the Summer months.

photo credit: mag3737

I may also do a complete re-design on the theme for my blog if I get the time and relaunch some sites that I'm currently involved with. Hopefully I'll get back to a regular blogging schedule too, to keep all 3 of my readers happy

I've wanted to switch this blog across from the current Windows hosting solution to my Linux hosting account for a while now. I thought this was going to be a nightmare but it went really smooth (i think) and took less than an hour. For anyone look to do the same here's what I did:

1. Backed up all my wordpress files currently saved on my windows hosting account. To do this I just FTP'd the entire root folder that included all of the wp-content themes and plugins as well as any image and resource files that I linked to.

2. Backed up the database stored on my windows server. To do this I followed the Wordpress Codex doc on Backing up your database. Really easy to follow. I downloaded the .sql file to my hard disc.

3. Switched my website hosting from Windows (IIS) server to Apache (Website) from within the control panel that links to both my Windows and Linux hosting packages. The switch took about 5 minutes. This left with with a blank webspace on my linux server.

4. Uploaded the latest version of Wordpress (2.9.2) to my linux web space.

5. Set up a new database on the linux server.

6. Edited wp-config.php in the root of my Wordpress installation to point to the new database settings and also uploaded a .htaccess file to the root of my wordpress installation.

7. Used the Famous 5 minute install from Wordpress to install Wordpress on my Linux webspace. I then had a blank installation of Wordpress with the default Kubrick theme.

8. I uploaded all the wp-content files (themes, plugins etc.) from step one into the new installation.

9. I then imported the original database that I downloaded in step 2 using the restoring your database guide from Wordpress Codex. I was slightly confused as to how this would work before I done it as I did not keep the same name and settings for the new database on the linux server. This didn't cause any problems though and it simply imports data into the new database from the old one.

That was it. Simple and a hundred times more painless than I thought. As far as I can see everything is working perfectly. I don't know if it will have any effect on rankings in Google but I wouldn't think so. All in all I would say the site was only down for about 10 to 15 minutes so I'd be a lot more confident about doing this next time. Hopefully I won't have to do it again though as my reason for switching is that my Windows hosting solution is due shortly and I am not going to renew it as it's easier to have everything stored on Linux.

That's all for now...

Update : 6th of April 2010 : I had said that the switch was seemless but I did notice a problem with the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files associated with the all in one Seo plugin for Wordpress. Any new posts such as this one were not being written to the sitemap files. I corrected this by CHMODing the files to make them writeable.

How to be funky .... A while back I posted about how I created my header image using BeFunky.com.

I had a bit of time on my hands so I decided to have a look at how to create a cartoon image using BeFunky. First up go to the BeFunky.com. Here's a look at the BeFunky website on April 2010.

To get started you need to click on the blue 'Get Started Free!' button on the menu at the top of the page.

When you do this you'll get to the main BeFunky image editing page. First thing you need to do is hit the Upload button and select 'Upload from PC'.

Then browse to the image that you want to make into a cartoon image. When you browse to the image that you want you'll see the upload window showing progress of the image upload.

Here's the original image I uploaded of Muhammed Ali:

When the image uploads successfully you'll see it inside the Be Funky website like this:

If you want to zoom in or out the toolbar is located on the right hand side of your screen. Here's an example of zooming into the original image of Muhammed Ali looks:

That's uploading and zooming in to you image taken care of. Now we will look at how to add effects to your image. On the left hand side of the page you'll see the be funky photo effects menu. It's very easy to add effects to your image just mess around with the different types of effects until you get the desired result. Here's how the charcoal effect looks for my image:

There's loads of other styles available too. Some examples are: Cartoonizer, Sketcher, Stenciler, Motion Picture and Pop Art. Some are free and some you must subscriber to Be Funky to use. When you choose an effect you can then format some of the settings to edit your image. To do this press the small cog button beside the desired effect. Here's an example of where I changed the colour and sketch detail of my Muhammed Ali image. You can see the setting pop up box in the image below.

When you achieve the desired effect on your image the last thing you need to do is save it. Press the Save button on the menu at the top right of the screen and select 'To Desktop' (see below).

Browse to where you want to save the image to and save it as a .jpg file. You'll see the save to deskop pop up like below and that's you done!

Here's the finished image. Obviously I didn't go into too much detail on changing the effects but it just goes tot show how easily you can create a cartoon image of someone in less than 5 minutes.

When I was writing this post I was playing about with Be Funky and here's another image I can up with using the Color Pinhole effect:

BeFunky.com is definitely one of my favourite free web apps.

I won't have time to update this blog until at least June 2010, so for now I'm calling it a day. I've de-personalised this blog (for personal reasons ) and I've archived all my original posts. It might seem strange to some that I've taken them down but I want to re-launch version 2 of this blog sometime in the future with a blank canvas.

Many thanks to everyone who's visited, commented on or contacted me through this site over the last 5 months (May to Septemer 2009).

I have a new project in mind and hopefully I'll be back to give it a mention here sometime next year.

Bye for now....