Danny-T.co.uk

New Theme

Didn’t really like the old theme, I felt it was a bit busy, the font was hard to read and it had gotten a little too common as freebie WordPress themes tend to do so when slackers like yours truly get their dirty mitts on them.

This theme is called RS17 from Theme Lab based on a CSS Template by RamblingSoul.

I’ve started making some minor adjustments which will try to keep doing to make it a bit more individual.

I’m Baaaaaaack!

I'm back

Jeez, that’s been a heck of a long time since I last posted… or that my site has even been visible!

Back around mid 2008 some scrawny, b*&$$d, a$$*&, s*($&£, c&(£& git hacked my wordpress site. At first I didn’t notice because all they’d done was inserted some inline css to style a few select words in my posts to look just like the rest of the text but had added in a load of links to who-knows where. Shortly after that I was duly notified by my business partner that upon looking at my site his laptop completed barfed and was seriously infected with a whole load of nastiness. Humorously I’d not noticed any of this as I’d only looked at my site recently on my mac (he has since become the original mac fanboi btw). Anyway, needless to say I immediately took the site down with the intentions of sorting it out and bringing it back. Which I’ve now done albeit an entire year after all this happened.

Anyway, quite a bit has happened since I last posted, I’ve presented at Flexcamp London, attended last years FOTB, started writing for InsideRIA and had a whole host of opinions and discoveries that you’ve all been spared for the past year (assuming there is anyone left out there!).

Well I’m not going to dwell on the past and try to regurgitate my thoughts and opinions of everything that has been missed, onwards an upwards. I hope to make blogging a fairly frequent activity again (even though twitter seems to have slowed alot of people down of late). I will be trying to keep on topic of RIAs specifically related to the Adobe and MS offerings. So that’s me back in the game.

And to the scum who hacked my site, “in the words of my generation UP YOURS!”

UP YOURS

Wordpress oddness – deleted pages

Seems something went wrong with the blog some time over the weekend. All my tutorials went walkabout. Fortunately I managed to restore them from backup but there still seems to be a few gremlins.

If you notice anything not quite right drop me a comment and I’ll get it sorted. Also if you know of why these pages might have disappeared i’d also be interested to know how. (looks like the entries in the wordpress db marked as post_type = ‘pages’ were somehow removed???).

Hopefully normal blogging can resume shortly after my recent bout of blog upset

UPDATE: turns out all my plugins had been disabled somehow as well, AKISMET going off would explain the spam-city I waded through and the total lack of hits showing on my analytics due to analyticator going offline. Annoying

Spamtastic

Okay, so yesterday my comment spam went absolutely mental. Literally one every couple of minutes for half a day. Total pain in the ass, so I’ve had to implement a captcha, unfortunately a necessary evil. I also chose to implement a slightly different to normal captca in the name of reCAPTCHA.

Basically it gives you two distorted words, the first is a word from some book digitization process that couldn’t beOCR’d the second being a word that is known. By getting the second correct, reCAPTCHA uses your interpretation of the first and contributes it back to the digitization (once verified a few times by others).

Little more work than normal but seemed like a good cause and makes a good use of those few extra seconds.

Silverlight Mailing List

Okay I’m well behind on posts at the moment. I have some posts on the remainder of the Expression Course almost ready, I’m hoping to write some stuff on the CS3 launch and also comments on the events at Mix07. Unfortunately I’m hella busy right now so falling mad behind.

Anyway, excuses aside I thought this was worth a quick mention: TalkSilverlight
A Yahoo mailing list for discussion about Silverlight, sign up and get involved regardless of your opinion about Silverlight/Microsoft some interesting conversations will ensue I’m sure.

More posts to follow soon, just let me get through this week…

Hello MXNA World

I’ve just been informed my site is now being aggregated by MXNA so thought I’d take a minute to welcome any new readers (or rather just wanted to see my name in lights and had nothing in particular to post at short notice).

My latest ramblings are on Apollo which I intend to keep up with and am currently due to be presenting at the LFPUG sometime soon (anyone in the London area you should come along). I also have a couple of tutorials I’m nearly finished with on open source Flex2 remoting with .Net using FlashDevelop, SharpDevelop and Fluorine (and how to easily switch to webOrb).

Anyway, I’ll post some decent content soon!

New wp theme for Danny-T.co.uk

I finally decided to get a new look to the blog, I’ve chosen Vistered Little by Nik Iliadis check out his site The Scary Little Monkey for some of the best looking works I’ve seen for any blog.

I’m hoping to create and add some custom Flash widgets in the future, but seeing as it’s taken best part of 6 months to download a different theme, I wont hold my breath

Hello world! pt2

I originally set up this site on my laptop whilst I was setting up a server to host it on. As a result of which all of the previous posts were all viewable to the massive audience of me, myself and I.

However I have now got everything setup and hosted as desired and am now posting out to the world wide web. I will be mainly posting my thoughts and findings from my business, the world of web development, specifically the Flash Platform and Open Source Flash along with general ramblings on any other technology I’m getting my teeth into.

Enjoy

The blogging software – WordPress

So I have a domain name, some webspace and the dev environment setup, only thing to do now is find a blogging engine to post my thoughts to. I decided to use WordPress as it’s pretty popular around the online communities i’m interested in.

Again, I was amazed at how simple this was to install. Download, unzip, create a database (using phpMyAdmin which came as part of the Xampp install), update a single config file with the database details et voila! Run the setup.php and within 2 minutes the blog was up and running.

The whole site took no longer than 20 minutes to bring together, the tools available nowadays are just so easy to use! Just the way it should be.

0 to danny-t.co.uk in 60 seconds (ish)

This is the first post of a few about the steps taken to create this site. Why? Well if ever I need to do it again, I’ll have a reference, also if anyone else is considering starting themselves a blog this might be a good starting point. Even as a fairly experienced web developer I was amazed as to how easy things were to set up.

1. Domain Name – registered the domain at 123-reg, a quick search shows available domain names, one quick credit card transaction later you have your online identity.
2. Webspace – signed up for some cheap hosting at [insert host here]. I then setup my domain name to point to the webspace (the details of which i’m not going to bore you with here, if you really want to know feel free to get in touch).

This far gets me the ability to have my own online presence and in fact if I were just after a blogging facility steps 1 and 2 can be avoided by using a free blog host blogger.com or wordpress.com.

The next step was to setup a development environment on my local computer…