A few pics from our Shannon boating holiday.

We hired a boat from Pleasure Cruisers and they were a fantastic company that went above and beyond with their customer service and were just really friendly people. We went all up and down the shannon visiting Leitrim town, Lough key, doing the boda borg which was tons of fun and made me sweat!

Some pics from my first attempt at juicing, an orange and pineapple mix. It tasted extremely fresh as you would think and was gulped down swiftly.

An Post delivered a nice package this morning from Amazon.

I bought it because I have been watching a few documentaries about eating raw food and the huge health benefits it gives you. Apparently humans are herbivores and we shouldn’t really be eating meat Anywho, I can’t see myself giving up a steak fillet or even a big mac just yet! So I’m trying to balance out a bit and I’m sure my body could do with more fresh fruit and veg, even if it is in liquid form.

The Antony Worrall Thompson Juicer  says it is professional on the box and it seems it, so I’m glad I bought it over others that were half the price. I have made an orange juice and other concoction so far and it tastes quite good and so so fresh!

The Good

• Heavy – It is of heavy weight, apparently a sign of reliability.
• Well made – The finish and the attention to detail is amazing, from the chrome handle to the pulp collector.
• Tasty – Makes good Juice! of coarse if it can’t hold it’s own weight making a juice, there’s no point. Although I have only made two juices as of getting the hardware, they we’re very nice.
• Safety – The machine won’t turn on if the handle is not in the up position.
• Wide opening - Alot of room to put whole oranges in and apples etc..
• Froth filter – In the Juice Jug, there is a froth “filter” that removes this if you don’t like the froth.

The Bad

• Pricey – I purchased it for about €120, Argos do them for €155, but there are other brands that are as low as €40.
• Bulky - It’s quite big and would take some room up on your counter.
• Cleanup – There are a good few parts that have to be cleaned up afterwards, most of them are dishwasher safe though.

Overall, quite happy with it and would recommend it, I am aiming to make two juices a day with mine.

Spotted the mother of the little eggs a few days back and took a snap, I’m about 4 feet away with my zoom in all the way and she didn’t even care.

The amount of times I have come across stories about Apple screwing over iphone developers is quite disgusting and makes me thankful for being a 100% windows guy and not a Steve Jobs fanboy! Their latest change to their iphone developer license program is so unbelievable you would think it was April the 1st again, but it’s true.

“Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the documented APIs (e.g., applications that link to documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

So, you must write your code in a language that Apple wants C, C++, Objective-C, or JavaScript.

Here is a nice bit of backlash from Bill: http://pluggio.com/blog/?p=244

So we were cleaning up the back garden last week and ripped up the old “decking” which was in terrible shape. I also wanted to get rid of our wall bushes that only bloomed for about a week every year, so the other 51 weeks we have this (bushes to the right):

So I grabbed the shears and started cutting away, until I seen this:

So, that puts our plans on hold for a little bit

Just tried this tasty burger from Low-fat Meals in Minutes.

Louisiana Blue Cheese and Chicken Sandwich, absolutely gorgeous and only takes a few minutes!

So I just finished installing and converting this site to WPMU, mainly to test it out and delve deeper into wordpress.

The migration from the old site to the new, went remarkably smooth and the site was only down for about 5 minutes which I class as a big success (Also, I’m sure my method is not the most elegant). Because of the fact that WordPress and WMPU share 99% of the same codebase, the conversion was painless.

I am going to briefly explain how I did it.

Step 1 – Backup

Backup, Backup, Backup!

Using ftp, everything was backed up, as in the complete installation and all sub directories of the existing wordpress installation. Then I dumped the entire mysql database for keithdonegan.com. Now if we bodge it up, it doesn’t really matter, we have the most important thing, our data.

Step 2 – Download

Download WPMU and overwrite all existing wordpress files and folders. Now delete the .htaccess and wp-config.php files. Pop over into the browser and refresh your site. You should now see an install screen. (Note: my site is for personal use and gets only a few visitors, so If your site is big and gets alot of traffic, put up a blank index.php file to protect yourself against malicious users.) Fill in your database details as per your original wordrpess installation and log in. You should now have a working install of WMPU.

Step 3 – Migrate

So, we now have a spanky new WPMU install, pretty cool huh? Our next step is to migrate all of our old content into WMPU. While having a peek through PHPmyadmin, I see some new tables created by WMPU: wp_1_ etc. Keep a note of the these.

Now I select  the main tables which are below and export only these tables. Also, select the ‘Add DROP TABLE’ checkbox.

• wp_comments
• wp_commentmeta
• wp_links
• wp_postmeta
• wp_posts
• wp_terms
• wp_term_relationships
• wp_term_taxonomy

With the sql file, I open this in a text editor and begin to replace the old table names with the new ones.

For example. When fixing the wp_posts table for use with WPMU, I simply do a find and replace like so:

Find wp_posts Replace wp_1_posts and do this for all of the 8 tables above.

Step 4 – Patch

WordPress MU adds a ‘/blog’ to your posts and removes the www from the url by default. If you have some content indexed in Google and don’t want to lose any traffic, there are 2 optional steps left.

Download and activate this plugin.

And add this to your .htaccess file to convert www traffic to the new non www url.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^keithdonegan\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://keithdonegan.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Now, you are done and have a WordPress Mu installation, congrats!

Conclusion

As mentioned at the start of this post, this is most likely not the most elegant solution but It worked absolutely fine for me and should work for you too. Also, in regards to the media files, you can replace these permalinks in mysql and point them to the new files/ folder, but as this is a small site, I’m fine with my images pointing to my old wp_content folder.