It has been a long time coming but I have finally got around to upgrading my blog software and I chose to switch from BlogCFC to Mangoblog, which thankfully was a pretty painless expereince. My main reason for wanting to upgrade was to stop comment spam, which I have been getting a lot of as my version of BlogCFC has no way to stop this.

The last time I looked at doing this there was no easy solution, I of course looked at updating to the latest BlogCFC, but this turned out to be the most complicated solution of all, as I would have needed to apply a lot of old incremental updates first and do a lot of manual work, so I dismissed this option. So I looked at Mangoblog which I have used on cfmldeveloper and really liked, but there was no easy upgrade route there either.

So I then decided if I was going to have to do this much work then I may as well move to Wordpress which I have really come to regard as the mother of all blogging software and then some. I had made a good start on this several months ago, I had Wordpress installed, chose a theme, got all the config done, all I needed to do was write some scripts to import all my blog posts and comments. However when I next looked at my Wordpress site several months later the permalinks had broken and I could not get them working again, so I got pissed off and decided to give Mangoblog another look.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the current version had an import tool for blogCFC 5.x, I had my doubts it would work but thought I would give it a go.

Well I am happy to report that the import tool did work, flawlessly, which was good considering I did have a very old version of BlogCFC (5.5), it imported all my posts, all the comments and categories. However it is not perfect as it did not import blog subscribers or comment subscriptions and did nothing at all with images in posts, so all the img url's remained the same.
This is not such a big deal as I don't really care about comments on old posts and a simple post on my old blog advising readers of the new URL will get them to update. The image issue is also easy to resolve, you can either:-

a) copy the folder that contained your images over form your old blog to the new blog.
b) do some url rewriting to redirect the image requests to the old url.

As my old blog is actually just a sub-directory inside michaels.me.uk and I will be keeping it running for a while until Google indexes the new one, I chose option b, and here is the rewrite rule in case your interested (I use Isapi_Rewrite on IIS btw).

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^images/(.+) russ/images/$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^enclosures/(.+) russ/enclosures/$1 [QSA]

And here is the rule on my old blog to redirect the RSS feed

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^rss.cfm http://www.michaels.me.uk/feeds/rss.cfm [QSA]

If you have any custom CSS for formatting CODE blocks and the like then you will also need to copy this across as well.

As I mentioned I have used BlogCFC before and here are just 2 of the cool Wordpress type features I really like about MangoBlog .

• Extensible with plugins
• Themes , it is also very easy to skin or modify existing themes.

I just can't seem to get away from this weird and wonderful tech issues that don't seem to affect anyone else or at least not enough for them to show up on google, I must be some sort of magnet for these things.

The latest bizarre episode was my Broadband connection at my office, which started to become rather unreliable, constantly dropping, becoming slow and then eventually died altogether and has been down for the last month. The router would connect for a few seconds and then disconnect again, so not enough time to do anything.

I replaced the router several times, all cables, ADSL filter, AC/DC adaptor, unplugged all other equipment from the router and phone line, nothing worked.

Finally my ISP sent out a BT engineer to do a line check, he fixed every possible problem he found on my line and at the exchange, so I now have a perfect line with an even better download speed than I had before.

The engineer even connected up his own BT Broadband router and connected to BT without an issue. So it appeared the problem was with my ISP, but they didn't have a clue what it could be so I decided to transfer to a new provider, after much careful consideration I chose Zen based on their good reputation and number of positive reviews for their business broadband.

My new ADSL was connected today, so I came in to the office with anticipation, only to be deflated again when I realised the problem was still there.

So I got on to the phone to Zen and literally within 10 minutes the problem was solved.

The first thing the guy asked me was if I had any other electrical devices near my router or the wires and if I did could I turn them off, which I thought seemed a bit odd but I did it anyway, and by heck my router came to life, the ADSL light went green and I had Internet access.

So it turned out to be by Snom 360 VOIP phone, some how it had developed a fault and was emitting waves at a frequency that was interfering with my ADSL, yes even when it was not plugged in in to the router.

It seems like such a simple thing, but I doubt I would ever thought of doing this myself as the possibility of my phone being the cause even when disconnected would not have even occurred to me, and obviously did not occur to my previous ISP either, so so I have to give Zen top marks for their tech support and this is why you pay more for a quality service.

I have had to replace 3 (yes 3) ADSL routers in the last  few months, and the causes have all been quite bizarre to say the least, certainly worth documenting I thought seeing as I could find no solutions on Google myself only people with similar problems and so answer to their dilemma. So read on and prepare to enter "The router twilight zone"

Read more...

Earlier this year I attended Scotch on the rocks, it was my first ever time driving in London which was a nightmare experience I can tell you. I'm sure people who live in London think it's fine to drive but I don't think I will ever willingly drive into London again, especially during rush hour when it is almost impossible to get on to busy roundabouts, I spent most of my time trying to avoid lunatic drivers and trying not to get lost.

Anyway as a result of this trip I entered a congestion zone, now I knew this meant I would have to pay a congestion charge, but this is all I knew and I assumed I had been caught on camera and would get a bill in the post.

To my great surprise a few weeks later I got a £120 fine in the post for not paying my congestion charge. As I had not received my congestion charge I responded and stated this fact, only to be told I am supposed to pay it in advance or stop at any shop that has the congestion charge logo and that it is my responsibility to know this.

OK fair enough this is probably common knowledge to anyone who lives or works in London or travels into London regularly, but surely anyone like myself who does not live in London, work in London or have any reason what so ever to drive in London, also has no reason to know how the congestion charges work either. Just as someone who works in a hairdresser has no reason to know CSS, HTML or Flash or even that they should know them. Or is it just me ?

I have of course appealed the fine based on facts above but my appeal fell on deaf ears. Transport for London have made it quite quite clear with their responses that they have zero flexibility, zero tolerance and  absolutely no understanding or sympathy for anyone whatsoever.

After doing a bit of Google research it seems I am not alone and folks like me are in fact their intended prey, poor hapless individuals visiting London who don't know how the congestion charges work and it is from us where they make most of their money, intentionally.

Seems like just another government money making scam to me, rather like wheel clamping.

So for Christ sake, if you plan to travel into London, make sure you know if you will going into a congestion zone and pay your fees in advance or risk a £120 fine.

My ADSL router stopped working today (or so I thought) and I wasted an entire day trying to get 2 different routers working only to discover the problem was actually the power adaptor.

The bizarre thing was that the routers actually seemed to be working, they had power and the lights were on, so the power adaptor is the last thing I considered as I would expect the router to not even turn on if the adaptor was screwed. I am  sure that this must have happened to a lot of people who have must have simply assumed the router was screwed and gone out and bought a new one when they didn't need to, so hopefully this may save a few people some money if they read this.

Symptoms

Netgear DG834G v4.
I lost all connection to the router, I could not ping it or access the interface, it was not assigning IP addresses and was effectively useless. When trying to do a factoring reset by holding in the reset button the power light would flash green and red and would not reset.

Netgear DG834 v2.

Everything was working on this one, DCHP was assigning IP's, I could access the interface, I could reset and do everything, however it would not connect to the internet. The Internet light would go green for a few seconds and the router status would show it as connected for those few seconds, then the light would flash orange and the status would show disconnected.

I had some vague recollection of an adaptor issue in the past causing something similar to the latter, but sadly I have no other adaptors in the office with the same voltage output, so my only option was indeed to go out and buy a new router. So I bought a top of the range Netgear dual band 8.11b/g/n QOS router for £99 from pc world. which allows you to give priority to certain services/ports or mach addresses, which is great if you use VOIP as we do which generally requires you to not be doing any other up/downloading at the same time, but using this it will give priority to my VOIP phone.

I Got it back to the office, and then used the new adaptor (same voltage) to test the other 2 routers, and they both worked perfectly.

I am rather kicking myself now as when I originally went home to find my spare router I threw out 3 old sky broadband routers at the same time as they are useless, but I bet they probably had suitable adaptors as I believe they are made by Netgear and I also remembered I have a whole box of old adaptors in the garage that I have been refusing to throw away in case I need them one day LOL.