It is with sadness that I make the following announcement.

For those of you who regularly read this blog, you may remember that I moved into a house I purchased in April 2009. It was an exciting time for me and my family. Due to the ever increasing prices of houses in Sydney (Australia) I couldn’t even dream of buying a house in the area in which I lived, so it meant I had to move out of the metropolitan area. This is turn meant that I would have to commute to work each day – a two hour trip each way.

As I’ve mentioned several times over the months, the travelling isn’t all bad. I have turned that time into precious writing and reading time. So things are good in that regard. I’m not overly keen on getting up at 5am and getting home at 7pm though. But, I’ll survive because at the end of the day I’ll have my own home.

Anyway, buying a house is a wonderful thing. For me, it offers a form of security for when I retire (because by then the house should be paid off and I won’t be trying to find rent money on the miserly pension I’ll probably be on). But, paying a mortgage can be difficult, especially for a one income family. Now that the global crisis is reportedly over, the interest rates are going up, up, up and I’m finding I have to tighten the belt a bit.

For this reason, I have looked at my finances and have decided that as paying for domain names and web-hosting is a pure luxury, the pleasure of hosting my own website must come to an end. I tried to use affiliates to raise a bit of money toward this expense, but as everyone is thinking and doing the same thing, there’s little to no money to be made in that area (or maybe I’m just no good at it). Anyway, I can no longer afford this bill, as small as it might be, and I have no choice but to move the blog to a hosted service.

This is, in fact, the last post I will make at this location even though the website will remain in place for several months. All future postings will be made at the following url:

My New Desk

If you have been kind enough to link to this website, I would greatly appreciate it if you could update the link to point to the new site, at your earliest convenience.

I hope you will follow me over to my new desk where everything will continue on as usual.

The new WordPress allows the user to update plugins with a quick click of a button – no downloading the new file then uploading it to the server and then activating it. Life is becoming so much easier with each year that passes, in terms of technology.

Recently, I used this new system to update several plugins. I’ve done it before and never experienced any problems. However, this time, was different. This time, something went wrong and although I could login to WordPress and make my way to the dashboard, that was as far as I could go. I couldn’t post, I couldn’t go to the plugin page and deactivate the offending plugin (which I didn’t know which one it was anyway) and I couldn’t add links, pages, update the theme or anything. It’s been a real pain in the rear.

A couple of people suggested that I access the files via ftp and just deleted the plugin file. I was hesitant to do this as I thought it might wreck the inner workings of WordPress. But, a desperate person will chance anything so half an hour ago, that’s what I did – I deleted the plugin file.

I don’t know if there’s an adverse affects, but I’m writing this post which is something I couldn’t do this morning so maybe I’ll be up and running again now. Only time will tell. If you see anything unusual, please leave a comment and let me know.

During the past week I’ve been messing with the internal works of this website. Wordpress has been upgraded to the latest version (2.8), all the plugins have been upgraded and new plugins have been added – including Not Another Related Posts Plugin and Link Checker Plugin.

After seeing CommentLuv on Benjamin Solah’s Website, I thought I’d install it here too. If you leave a comment and enable the plugin, a link to the last post on your own blog will be included at the end of your comment. I think, however, that you have to register your blog with CommentLuv for this to work.

Last night, I spent an hour or so changing another aspect of the blog. I got rid of the html front page found at “Home” and used Wordpress to create a static front page. It was quite easy to do, despite my worry that I might crash the whole site permanently. The result was that I had exactly the same home page that I’ve always had, but it meant that I could edit it with ease (without having to wait until I had access to a text editor and ftp uploader). However…it also meant that I no longer had access to what I consider to be the main part of the website – the blog. This page, as you see it now, was no longer available. To reach the posts it would have been essential to have the categories listed in the sidebar and I believe I would have had to include another new plugin to show the latest posts as well. I didn’t like it. Not in the slightest. And…everything has been put back to how it was originally.

The two previous posts announcing some of the things I’ve mentioned in this post have been deleted. I think I’ve finished messing around with things now, except I’ve discovered (through the Link Checker Plugin) that I have a lot of images that are “broken”, as well as some external links that need checking. I’ll get on to that shortly.

The battery on my laptop is about to run out, so I have to be quick.

The new template is finished. The home page has also been replaced. I like it and I hope you do too. Now that it’s done, perhaps I’ll be inspired to write some proper posts. Oh, I just remembered…I do need to update the home page. The content is no longer current.

Anyway, must go. Time is running out…

Yes, I’m changing the template again. I’ve already upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress. That went well…and without a hiccup! I’m currently working on the template. There will be a new banner and a bit of a colour change, but basically I’ll be using this three column design.

I’ve run out of time now, so I’ll be back to finish it off on another day.