I guess I am an early bird this time around. I upgraded to WordPress 2.6 only three days after it was released. Let’s hope there are no major security holes in this release.
Normally, I wait a few weeks, preferably till the x.1 release comes out. However, I liked the revision feature, so I made the jump.
Time for a change. The theme stayed the same (Gemini-Plus), but the blog colours and the photo up top changed.
I took the previous picture showing the Downtown skyline from Stanley Park in May 2002. Yep, that was quite a while ago. The new picture, showing Downtown Vancouver from Locarno Beach, is, indeed, brand new (taken on June 15, 2008), as evidenced by the presence of the Shangri-La Vancouver 
.
Looks like my server’s IP address is going to change at some point this upcoming weekend. I still need to coordinate the exact time when that’s going to happen. This change could result in an outage of this site for hopefully no longer than 1 hour.
Speaking of change, I also upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1. I was waiting for the first bug fix release after 2.5 before switching. I didn’t feel like getting hit by new security holes introduced with all the new features in 2.5, hence the delay.
The upgrade took all of 45 seconds or so (that includes upgrading the database after installing the new Wordpress version). I used the Subversion upgrade process again. It’s still a charm as ever. No need to manually fiddle with anything.
Also, all plugins still seem to work.
It took over a year to get 10,000 spam comments, but only six months to get another 10,000.
Not a good trend. 
If it keeps up, I’ll be hitting 30,000 in July.
I added Snap Shots to all external links on this blog. Don’t know yet if I’ll keep them or not. We’ll see. Maybe they’ll start annoying me after a while, maybe not. It’s pretty funky, though.
As for the technical details: I am using the Snap Shots Plugin for Wordpress. Very easy and straight forward. No programming work involved at all.
Today, my site exceeded the threshold of 10,000 spam comments — according to my Akismet statistics. It only took about a year for my blog to reach that crazy number. Can’t remember exactly when I installed and activated the Akismet plugin for Wordpress (at that time it didn’t come bundled with Wordpress yet).
I briefly had other spam protection solutions (can’t even remember at this point what they were), but switched to Akismet when it became available. I am sure glad I did. I also turned on “automatically delete spam comments from old posts” when that feature became available, and I am very glad about that feature, too.
Without Akismet, I would have been forced to either make it much harder for people to leave legitimate comments (captchas, enforcing logging in, etc.) or turn off commenting altogether. I can’t believe that blog spamming is that bad these days that my tiny blog receives 10,000 spams in a year. Big sites receive 100 times the amount of spam. Basically, spammers are attacking the third Internet technology now:
They are putting the burden of their money making on the e-mail user (who needs spam filters) and the blog/web site owner (who, too, needs spam filters), and so on, and so forth. I hate those bastards. Let’s hope they die out some day. Unfortunately, I’m afraid there’s simply too much money to be made with not much financial risk or any (serious) legal implications.
I upgraded the site to a new theme. Really, I did — even though it doesn’t look very different from before I switched from the original Daisy Rae Gemini (which was written for Wordpress 1.5) to the updated “next generation” Gemini Plus theme written for WordPress 2.x.
What’s the difference? Well, Gemini Plus understands Wordpress 2.2 widgets, which makes it easy to customize the side bar. Other than that, is using better written style sheets that — at least I personally — find easier to wrap my head around, compared to the original Gemini CSS.
I still need to custom tweak the layout it a little. I don’t like the frames that are showing up round the pictures in the menu bar.
Hard to believe that a full year has passed since I started http://blog.mmayer.net. But it has. Quite a few things have happened, but it still seems like time is just flying by.
Some items in this list are fairly small, others quite important. The list is somewhat chronological.
Undoubtedly, there are a lot of things that I missed in that list.
Not all that happened was good, of course, but over all I think I am a very lucky guy. Thanks, my sweetie pie, for sharing your life with me and participating in mine.
I finally did it. I have been working on integrating Gallery 2 in my Wordpress installation on and off for the last little while.
I have done it before, for our Wedding Website and it worked (and still works) flawlessly there, but I was running into weird issues, here on my blog. Not anymore. So here we go, pictures are up. Enjoy. Please also note the new Random Image section in the side bar to the right.
A whole bunch of older pictures is not available online yet. They have yet to be uploaded. Stay tuned. The individual albums I have up so far are:
For those who really want to read the technical details, please read on. For the rest: enjoy the photos.
I switched to Wordpress 2.1.3. Except for a minor issue in the side bar that now causes an SQL syntax error, it seems to have gone perfectly.
Did I mention that I love upgrading Wordpress via Subversion?
One command, that was it — other than going to the admin page and clicking the link to upgrade the database.
Update: The SQL syntax error is now fixed. The blog roll categories are no longer accessible through $wpdb->link_categories, but are now in $wpdb->categories (with a link_count bigger than 0).
$ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.1.3
U wp-rss.php
U wp-login.php
U wp-comments-post.php
U wp-blog-header.php
U wp-rdf.php
(Read on …)
