If you can read this, it means the host move was successful and you're looking at the new neilturner.me.uk . Admittedly it looks almost exactly like the 'old' neilturner.me.uk but I'll get to work on a new design at some point.
January 2010 Archives
Britain has had one of its biggest snowfalls for a number of years over the past few days, and Bradford in particular has had more snow recently than I can remember from the 7+ years I've lived here. Yesterday I took my camera with me on my way to work and grabbed a few shots.
I have just ordered a new hosting package with a different hosting company. The package offers faster and more up-to-date servers for around £5 extra per month.
The switch will take place shortly, and will allow me to upgrade to the new Movable Type 5.01 which has just been released. MT5 requires MySQL 5.0 (released several years ago) yet my current host is still offering MySQL 4.1, as well as a very old version of Apache. There's also no support for persistent environments such as FastCGI which are key for getting the best performance out of Movable Type.
I'm aiming to have the migration to the new host complete by the 14th, which will be the 8th anniversary of the first post to this blog.
Happy new year everyone!
I spent the new year with Christine in Blackpool and on Sunday went to Blackpool Zoo. It's open 364 days a year (seeing as the animals there need caring for all year round) and is nice and quiet outside of the busy summer tourist season. The weather on Sunday was bright and sunny (if bitterly cold) so it made an ideal day to go, and to give credit to the zoo staff the educational talks during feeding times were still going ahead despite there being probably no more than 50 people in the park all day.
Naturally I took my camera and 40 out of the 100 photos I took are on Flickr. The above picture of the ring-tailed lemurs is probably my favourite, but I was also impressed with this picture of a red panda (or firefox) and this pair of magellanic penguins.
Having done the Sea Life Centre before Christmas (which has a £5 discount per adult out of tourist season), the next big Blackpool attraction on my list is the Blackpool Tower. I'm sure I'll get chance to do that soon.
