House Move News

After waiting 5 months for our vendors to find somewhere to move to we decided we just couldn’t keep waiting. We’d been keeping an eye on houses in the village we wanted to move to but nothing that met what we wanted came on the market.

Last weekend we figured it was time to look in other areas and headed out to the town just down the road from where we were looking. We looked at a couple of places and one of them was really interesting. Seemed it had be repossessed by the bank who were now trying to get their cash back and wanted to exchange ASAP. This put us in a favourable position as we have no chain, a mortgage offer already and a solicitor waiting to get to work.

The house itself is bigger than the one we currently have an offer on. Needs a bit of work (double glazing, carpets, and new kitchen) to finish off the job the previous owners were doing before they ran out of cash, but as it’s a lot cheaper we’ll have money spare to do it. It’s not the area we dreamed off, but it’s not bad either. Our offer got accepted today and fingers crossed we could be exchanging in 3 weeks or so.

Dear Thieving Bastard

Thank you for stealing my bike you little shit. In order to keep training for the Charity Bike Ride ride I’m doing next year i just had to spend 600quid on new bike, accessories and insurance.

I hope the wheels buckel and you fall under a bus you twat.

All the worst,

Alex

Great Weekend, Bad Monday

Last weekend at the Big Chill was fantastic. We got there Thursday evening and got the tents up in a fairly good location.

The tent I’d bought in a hurry two days earlier turned out to be absolutely massive. Next time I take it anywhere I’ll take an inflatable double mattress too. The festival was as good as I remembered from previous years and the music was fantastic, I listened to a load of bands I’d never heard of before and now feature in my Spotify favourites.

I managed to get up in time on the Sunday to get naked and painted for Spencer Tunick. It was certainly an interesting experience and look forward to getting my free copy in the post. Incase you need proof then here’s a picture of me after the event.

You can find more pics on these news stories at The Metro and TNT Magazine.

On Monday we made our way back to london and when i got back i thought it would a nice way to finish off the long weekend would be a good thai massage from the place down the road. I cycled down there as I’m trying to cycle everywhere as part of my training for next year’s Vietnam to Cambodia bike ride. I chained the bike up nearby and went to get my massage, and hour later I leave to find my bike gone. Some thieving bastard had nicked it in broad daylight from a busy main road right opposite a bus stop. Reported it to the police but not expecting to ever see it again. That sucked.

So, five awesome days and one shitty afternoon.

Getting Naked for Charity

Not sure if you’ve heard of Spencer Tunick, he’s the guy that does art installations involving thousands of naked people.

Well he’s doing his next installation at the Big Chill this weekend and as I’ll be there I figured why not try and raise some sponsorship money for my charity bike ride.

So if enough people sponsor me before Sunday I will take part. And if you don’t sponsor me I’ll send you the photo!

You can sponsor my 440km bike ride here. It’s for MAG (Mines Advisory Group) and will help clear unexploded devices from many countries around the world.

Time for some Big Chillin’

I’m heading off to the Big Chill festival today for a weekend of relaxing in a field listening to great music.

Looking forward to Massive Attack, Bonobo, Morceeba, Plan B, and a bunch of others.

More bugs fixed, more testing

Thanks to Sergey for sending me his database for me to test with.

Noticed a few issues:

• The required database table wasn’t being created
• Category subdomain options weren’t being saved
• Permalink ‘/%postname/’ doesn’t work, it causes subdomain page to display all posts

I’ve fixed the first two issues.

The plugin directory now has to be in the wp-content/plugins directory, before a symlink from wordpress-subdomains would work, not now. Now when you update the plugin and deactivate/reactivate it any upgrades and table changes should be done properly.

The issue with the options not being saved was down to me doing something in a poor way that got broken when WordPress changed. I’m now doing it the correct way.

The final one is a mystery and it’s too late for me to investigate tonight. I seem to remember spending a lot of time last year trying to get all combinations of permalinks to work but it seems /%postname/ stopped working at some point. I will investigate further tomorrow.

I’ve commited all the fixes to the development trunk so if you wish to try it out download here. Remember to deactivate and reactivate the plugin after you upgrade. This may fix a number of issues straight away.

Almost there… Stay on target…

Didn’t get latest release out the door this weekend as planned, but I now have it to a point where I think it’s ready but just needs some testing. This version is the one that’s currently running this site under WP 3.0.

I can’t test for every type of wordpress setup, so I’m hoping that some of you might be able to give me a hand. If you wish to help test you can download the latest version here. If you wish to report a bug it’s better to contact me here, or just email me if you already have my address.

Overall there has been quite a lot of code change in this since the last release. Most of it was just rewriting code to behave better. One major change is you no longer have to configure the Pages with custom variables but with proper input elements which should make it a lot nicer.

One thing this version wont fix is multisite. Once this one is out the door I will start working on that.

MAG Charity Bike Ride – Vietnam to Cambodia 2011

Next year in January I will be cycling the 440km from Saigon in Vietnam to Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

The ride takes a total of 5 days and will be raising money for MAG, the Mines Advisory Group. MAG is a charity that spends it’s time clearing unexploded mines, bombs and other explosives from current and former war zones. They have projects in many countries around the world and I’ve seen their work first hand in Laos when I was there a few years back. Whilst their work directly saves the lives of people who may accidentally trigger these dormant explosives, it also helps to hand back land to local communities so that it is safe enough for them to use again. They also educate the local populations about the dangers of these devices and provide employment for many people in these countries. You can read more about them here.

I have photos from my visit to Phonsavan, they help to give an impression of the scale of the problem. The explosives surrounded by sand bags in the scrap yard are yet to be made safe and could still kill.

More details about the bike challange are available here.

If you wish to sponsor me you can do so at my Just Giving page. If you’re a UK tax payer don’t forget to tick the gift aid box and the government will increase your donation by over 25%.

House buying woes

Back in March we finally found a house to buy in an area that we really like. Because of the current market there isn’t really a lot on but after a few months searching we found somewhere that was ideal. It had enough space, needed no immediate improvement, nice garden, good area and backed onto a park. The expansion potential is also very good.

We made an offer, had it accepted, got a mortgage and a solictor and waited for things to happen. Within a week the vendors had lost the property they had an offer on. This did not bode well but we figured it wouldn’t take them too long to find a new property. Three and a half months later we got back from holiday to find a letter from our solicitor, the chain was complete and things would start moving. Hurray!

I phoned the Estate Agents to get confirmation, yes they were buying an empty house with no chain, excellent. I then phoned the solicitor to ask what we needed to do and was told to just wait for the draft papers to come through. Three weeks later we’d not recieved anything, phone the solicitor again to ask what was up and she said she hadn’t heard from the vendor’s solicitor but would get in touch with them.

I figured I may as well phone the estate agents, our usual contact was on holiday so I spoke to another agent who said the vendors were still looking. “What? We were told they had an offer on a house”, this seemed to be news to this guy who said he’d contact the vendors and find out. Five minutes later he called back with the news that vendors no longer had an offer on the house as it required to much work to update so they’re looking again.

Well thanks a bunch for letting us know! It’s a shame you have no choice over estate agents when it comes to buying a house because with service like that I’d drop them and go elsewhere.

We’re now back where we were 4 months ago with an offer on a house who’s vendors have nowhere to go. It wouldn’t be so bad if the market was good enough for us to pull out and get another house but we keep looking and there is just nothing that matches what we’re looking for. When we first had the offer accepted we thought we might be in by now, at this rate it would be nice to be in by Christmas.

Testing on WP 3.0 and other issues

I finally found some time to load up my development environment and try out WP 3.0

I found that the development version of the plugin seems to work with WP 3.0. As this site is using the same version I decided to upgrade to WP 3.0 and see what happened. Well it all still works which is a good sign, so this weekend I’m going to go over the last few bugs I have in that version and release it.

If you’re having issues with the plugin where it seems to work, but shows all the posts when on a category subdomain rather than just that category’s posts then please can you contact me. I’m not sure, but I think the issue may be theme related, so wouldn’t mind getting a copy of your theme to test with.