Past Thinking

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  Tehmina Goskar 10:36 am on 5 August, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Blogging, Conservation (3)   

  New International Heritage and Conservation News blog 

  It seems like an age ago that I blogged about the use of the web, particularly blogging, to communicate better issues related to heritage conservation, particularly as it is a field in the broader heritage sector which is perhaps most shrouded in mystery. Communication has tended to be aimed purely at the professional with public understanding of conservation lower than it might be.

  ICOMOS-UK’s new website, based around a blog, is now live. After a marathon month of literally pulling up the hand-break on this web project and changing direction, a completely new and different approach was taken to help the organisation make the most of the web and its audience: quickly and all on a shoe-string [note: what on earth are 'shoe-strings' in this sense?] Without going into too much detail about the background to this, the original plan for a redeveloped website, overseen and directed by me, especially the creation of new content, but technically put together by a company who had promised to sponsor the project, fell through.
  (More …)

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  Benjamin Chesterton, Photographs of Brunel’s Structures at Past Thinking, and Tom Goskar are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Benjamin Chesterton 1:00 pm on 5 September, 2008 Permalink

    Hi,

    enyoy this website with lots of solid thinking about heritage and communication which is really important but often gets lost along the way.

    This might interest you … its a audio slideshow that celebrates the heritage of Brunel. The photographer, David White, rebuilt the camera that was famously used to photograph Brunel in 1857 and then travelled around Britain photographing Brunels work … nuts but the photographs are really amazing .. its this kind of stuff that I think gives people a window into heritage. http://www.duckrabbit.info/brunel … more of our stuff can be seen at http://www.duckrabbit.info THANKS

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    Tom Goskar 1:24 pm on 5 September, 2008 Permalink

    Hi Benjamin,

    I’m glad that you’ve enjoyed some of our posts!

    Thanks for the link to David White’s photos – they really are amazing. I might mention it on here – fascinating stuff…

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    Benjamin Chesterton 12:06 pm on 6 September, 2008 Permalink

    Tom, thanks for your post and kind works.

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  Tom Goskar 11:47 am on 15 February, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

  Website Hosting 

  Over the last few years, I’ve been swapping hosting companies, looking for the perfect one. I’ve always used UK based hosts, since I felt it was best if I ever needed to phone them for support. I’ve always used Windows hosting, because I’ve used various bits of ASP in my online projects.

  Over the last year or so, though, I’ve been getting comfortable with PHP an MySQL databases, and since getting in to blogging using the venerable WordPress, it’s opened my eyes to the world of open source web applications. Whilst this blog is hosted by the admirable LiquidSix (which has wonderful support, and very reliable), I’m edging towards Linux based hosting to give me the flexibility I’m after (I want permalinks for starters). Quite a few WordPress plugins won’t work on Windows, which is a shame.

  If you want Windows hosting – go with LiquidSix, I can’t recommend them enough (and some of my domains will continue to be hosted by them). But if you want a Linux host, I’ve been recommended Dreamhost, who are based in the USA, and have an admirable record for email support. I’m looking at one of their shared hosting accounts.

  Although they advertise a basic package for $7.95 per month, that’s if you buy 2 years of hosting in advance – on an annual basis, it’s $9.95 per month with a $49.95 setup fee. In a very geeky way, my eyes popped out of my head when I saw what they offer in their ‘basic’ package (as of 15th Feb):

  • Web based control panel
  • 20Gb disk storage (increases weekly by 160Mb!)
  • 1Tb Bandwidth (increasing weekly by 8Gb)
  • Host unlimited domains
  • Custom DNS
  • One-click WordPress install (apparently!)
  • One-click install for loads of open source web goodies
  • ImageMagick for on-the-fly image processing
  • Absolutely everything…

  All rather tempting if you ask me!

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  Tom, David St. Hubbins, and Howard Durdle are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Howard Durdle 7:33 pm on 16 February, 2006 Permalink

    They do look like the ultimate in geek playgrounds. :) That said, I’m more than happy with Gradwell (www.gradwell.com). A UK firm whose uptime and support has been second to none. Phone them up and you’re as likely to get Peter Gradwell himself as anyone else. I’ve only ever had two problems with them in the years I’ve been hosted by them, and they’ve both been resolved within about 45 minutes! They don’t have all the bells and whistles that your DreamHost has, but for good solid UK based PHP and MySQL based hosting, with spam and virus filtered mail you can’t go wrong.

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    Tom 12:51 pm on 17 February, 2006 Permalink

    Gradwell do look expensive, but then this site isn’t exactly mission critical ;-)

    I’ve just signed up a little earlier than I thought, since I found a code to give me $90 off. I just bought one year’s hosting and a domain name for about £18, which ain’t bad…

    It’s not much to lay out to have a play with, so I’ll see how they go before I move other WordPress sites to them.

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    David St. Hubbins 12:31 am on 21 February, 2006 Permalink

    What? and run the risk that a stray nuke or Al-Qaeda glider will deny us access to your blog?
    I’d be taking a look at these people for secured hosting if I were you. http://www.thebunker.net/

    You owe it to your fans.

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    Tom 3:18 pm on 21 February, 2006 Permalink

    Crumbs. Well, I know the world would grind to a halt if Past Thinking were to disappear, so perhaps I ought to take a look ;-)

    Those guys take uptime *seriously*!

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  Tom Goskar 8:58 pm on 3 January, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

  WordPress 2.0 

  I have just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0. If you notice any hiccoughs with the site – please let me know!

  [Update] After some plugin weirdness (Spam Karma 2) all seems to be working again.

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  Tom Goskar 3:11 pm on 18 May, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

  WordPress RSS Woes 

  For those of you who are new to the world of Blogging, it is a form of personal web publishing, allowing people to easily post information and comment about whatever they please. This blog is powered by a web application called WordPress, a fantastic system (although not for someone who is not familiar with the dark arts of website hosting) for running a small website.

  Recently, an upgrade was issued to WordPress, bringing the version up to 1.5.1, promising lots of bug fixes and performance enhancements. I took the plunge, and a day later, I realised my RSS feed had ceased to be, throwing up an HTTP 304 error. Damn. A quick visit to the helpful folks on the WordPress support forums showed a number of people had the same problem and a fix had been issued. Basically, you need to download the patch, which is a file named “wp-blog-header.php”, and replace your old copy with it (after having backed it up or renamed it, of course!). I duly did this, and hey presto! A working RSS feed again.

  Or is it? A quick check of this feed on Feed Validator, shows the error

  line 69, column 3: content:encoded should not contain onclick tag (2 occurrences) [help]

  ]]>

  line 69, column 3: content:encoded should not contain relative URL references (4 occurrences) [help]

  ]]>

  Stumped! I’ll get on to the support forums and see if anyone can help out. In the meantime, apologies if you’re having a spot of bother with the feeds. SharpReader on Windows, and NetNewsWire on OSX don’t seem to have a problem with it, but some RSS parsers do (e.g. Carp and Magpie). If I do find a fix, I’ll post it here.

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  Rowan, Stuart, and Tom are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Tom 1:40 pm on 24 May, 2005 Permalink

    I’ve just updated WordPress to 1.5.1.1 and still no joy – time to hit the forums :-(

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    Stuart 7:58 am on 10 July, 2005 Permalink

    Hi Tom,

    I saw your post and have investigated it for you.

    Your first problem (onclick) is no longer present in the RSS feed, but the relative URL problem is still there.

    This can be easily fixed by changing your img tags to use the full URL of the image. This is currently only a problem in your post on “A quick review of RapidMetaBlog…”

    Note that the Feed Validator is not saying that the feed is invalid, just that it may cause problems for some users. It is a good idea to remove any javascript code (ie. onclick) or URLs that are not complete.

    Cheers,
    Stuart.

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    Rowan 11:11 pm on 12 July, 2005 Permalink

    I’ve noticed some bloggers using Feedburner; the website doesn’t say so explicitly, but it appears to be free. Since I’d like to create a syndicated account for your weblog on Livejournal, would you mind if I set up a feed for you?