For those reading this post through an aggregator (or via Facebook), it’s still basically a two-column blue affair. You can visit me at www.ianburnett.com to see for yourself.

Comments always welcome.

Possibly the shortest blog post for the amount of work required.

Since this blog was created (way back in October 2007) it has always lived at blog.ianburnett.com. The main idea was that I would have a more serious website of www.ianburnett.com, with my blog being slightly less so. I would also have gallery.ianburnett.com to showcase my photography highlights, plus a couple of private websites for photos of Lucy and a wedding I went to back in 2007.

These days, however, it’s a struggle keeping on top of security for every individual site. Before a brief spring-clean this morning, I had the following:

• A Joomla 1.0 site (loads of security holes)
• A Joomla 1.5.1 site (quite a few security holes)
• A Joomla 1.5.2 site (some security holes)
• A WordPress 2.6 site (quite a few security holes)
• My main WordPress 2.8 site (no known security holes)
• Three Gallery 2.3 sites (no security holes, but quite a bit of admin)

That’s a lot of admin to look after. Neither do I need a heavyweight main website plus my blog, so they’re merging. This blog will eventually reside at www.ianburnett.com, with an automatic redirect covering any old links you may have. I will be dropping the mostly unknown gallery.ianburnett.com, in favour of a link to my Flickr site (which is now a pro account due to being a BT Internet customer). Let someone else look after the security!

Hopefully, nothing will break during this – bear with me while this change takes place. I’ll post again when things are updated and finalised.

Furthest back is the cautionary tale of trying to have a shower while in a hotel, although I should be thankful at least that I had lights while doing so. I’ve added some thoughts on whether resolution actually matters in a digital camera, and then been thankful for the most basic of data entry devices. More recently, we’ve been shopping for shoes, but only after my inept display of romance.

Well on my original website, I made a start on posting some stuff but quickly got bored. The main problem was the use of Joomla 1.0: there was no easy way of posting to the website without going there, logging on, writing the post in a nasty WYSIWYG editor based on a web page. Things just took Far Too Long for my short span of attention. Then I discovered WordPress and w.bloggar (moving on later to Windows Live Writer). Things were good again.

Unfortunately, there was now some stuff on my original website (www.ianburnett.com), and some stuff in my blog. As mentioned the other day, I’ve started rebuilding my website using the new Joomla 1.5 system so what better time would there be to clear out the crud and put it into my blog, which is really more for personal rants and stupidity. That means I can leave my “proper” website for the purpose it was intended.

Everything that’s been moved across from my original website has been put into the category “Migrated”, and the original creation date has been preserved. So that’s why there’s entries before October 4th. You can see them all here or by clicking on the “Migrated” category in the navigation panel to the left.

This should hopefully be reasonably easy to do, given there wasn’t a great deal on there in the first place. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Things are starting to settle though – we’ve had a good day out today doing various bits of shopping and Lucy seemed oblivious to the fact that we’ve been in the car, in and out of shops and then driving back home. Quite content there in her car seat and pram.

Way back when, I wrote that I would summarise the choices made about the various transport systems we’ve chosen, and that will be the subject of a post in the very near future (near being a relative term for a new parent, not the “normal world” mind you).

I’ve been meaning to sort out my web hosting account for a while because I’ve got a load of sub-domains (some temporary, some permanent), which were starting to become difficult to manage. Today I spent some time rearranging the account space to make things much easier to organise.

It’s only a case of moving some folders around, updating the DNS records, and pointing the internal links to the right location, but the trick is knowing what internal links to change and what the reference should be changed to.

Everything should work as normal on my web site, apart from I’ve un-embedded my gallery from my main website. What used to be referenced as www.ianburnett.com/gallery has now been migrated over to gallery.ianburnett.com. There’s a permanent redirect in place, which should let people fix their broken links.

Now today has seen an update from the Windows Update service, which improves on it even further. It can now make it look exactly like a new post has been added. Whereas yesterday it replaced the last post for the preview, it now works out what the blog page will look like and constructs it without overwriting any previous posts. To gain this magical functionality if you’ve already installed it, go to Weblog -> Edit Weblog Settings… -> Editing tab and click the "Update Style" button. Say yes to the test post.

I am now very, very impressed.

One of the optional extras it offered on installation was the use of Windows Live Writer which is a tool for publishing to your blog, much in the same way as I do at the minute with w.bloggar. What the Windows Live writer app offers me is the ability to do WYSIWYG editing, even down to downloading the style sheet used for my blog and rendering in exactly the same way.

It’s also very smart in the preview window – for example previewing this entry re-uses the last entry I wrote (entitled “No Baby”), but swaps the text around as if this entry were already published (click for full-sized snapshot). Note that in the preview, the “No Baby” post is missing and the text of this entry replaces it.

Now that’s quite smart.