Welcome to the new site! To paraphrase Eric Morecambe: there’s all the same content here, but not necessarily in the same order.

Actually, that’s not completely true. There are a few posts with photos that I’ve not (yet) managed to migrate over. Most of those I’ve hidden, but there may be a few posts with breakages. Bear with me.

But what motivated this change? Largely it’s a desire for something a bit simpler. I do have misgivings about how it’s all being managed recently but, honestly, Wordpress the software when self-hosted is still really nice. It’s just… a lot. It’s a full CMS and supports all kinds of interactive stuff, magic SEO and a bazillion plugins (one of which I maintain).

According to WordPress, this is my one thousandth post here. I’m not sure how (or whether) I should celebrate this occasion but thought it was worth noting.

ZX81.org.uk has been around in one form or another since 1999. It’s survived the dot com boom and bust, it made it through the financial crisis and austerity. It’s been my “home” for longer than any physical location. It’s outlasted six employers (excluding myself, when I was self-employed) and I’ve had it longer than I’ve known my wife or had children.

A couple of minor “admin” changes:

• If you want to get an email subscription, you can do so by using the “Subscribe to Blog via Email” option at the bottom of each page. Or, if you leave a comment, you can simply check the “Notify me of new posts by email” box. If you’re currently using the old system, please try to switch over to this new variant. Long story short: I can’t access the Feedburner service that I used to use
• For the same reason, I have switched the RSS feed. It should point to http://www.zx81.org.uk/feed — indeed it may already do so — but please check and update if you use it
• I’ve added “Share” links on many of the pages. Some sites are a bit too in-your-face, practically demanding that you share posts. I’ve tried to add the functionality without being too obnoxious. Having said that, please do share my posts!

So there I was, trying to be a good Internet citizen. I updated my web server to use the latest version of Linux and… Boom! It would display the first post and then just peter out.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time or patience right now to track down exactly what the problem is — presumably something to do with PHP — so here you go: a new theme. It’s one of the ones I considered before I switched last time. A bit more minimal, more monochrome than last time. I like the minimal, and the lack of colour makes the pictures pop a bit more so it’s not all bad.

I have just moved ZX81.org.uk to a new web server for reasons that are too dull to explain here. The good news is that it should be faster and, hopefully, more reliable than before. The bad news is that there are still a few things that I need to do before we’re 100% whole again.

The main gap is where you’d normally expect to see a picture you might see the word “photopress.” This is because a WordPress plugin that I used to use no longer works on my new server. I’ll gradually move everything over to… something that works. Unfortunately there is a deadline and there was no way that I was going to get everything ready in time.

If you’re seeing any pictures missing from ZX81.org.uk at the moment this is because of a glitch in the way that I synchronise my pictures from my computer to Flickr. In short a large number of images were removed and I’m having to go back, find out which pictures I’d used and update all the relevant blogs. Please let me know if you find one that I missed.

I normally try to be pretty positive here. Most reviews you’ll find here are of products that I’ve bought with my own money and that I’m broadly happy with.

That makes this post the exception.

You may remember that ZX81.org.uk went off-line for over twenty-four hours last month. Shortly afterwards I switched away from Adept Hosting, but it’s not only, as you might expect, because of the reliability.

I posted the following review at Review Centre:

I try to keep ZX81.org.uk free of direct promotion of my iPhone applications but I think the launch of a new one warrants an exception to the rule.

www.cut is a utility that shortens URLs so that they can be mailed, Twittered or FaceBooked without worrying about character counts or line breaks.

Find out more at the above link or head straight to the App Store to download a copy. It’s free so you have nothing to lose!

Welcome to ZX81.org.uk’s new host. It may look the same as the old one but will hopefully be more reliable!

If you missed the full story, here’s how I reported it on the old server:

If you came here a day or two ago you probably found that ZX81.org.uk was missing.

It turns out that this was not just an extended outage but a planned maintenance activity where they moved my account from one server to another.

You may have noticed that ZX81.org.uk has been offline for at least twenty-fours hours. I don’t know exactly how long, but I first noticed about this time yesterday.

At the moment I have no idea what happened. The company hosting the site have not been terribly forthcoming — no response to the support tickets I raised, no public announcement of the down time — which in a sense is even more disappointing that the downtime. No system is 100% reliable, but you should at least communicate with those most affected.