A few more days went by, and by now the corruptions had spread to the Desktop icons. Something was definitely going wrong, so of course I did a Google search on things like ‘Mac Desktop Corruption‘ or ‘G5 Desktop Corrupted‘ and found the usual suggestions – reset the PRAM, change screen resolution, empty caches etc. In fact, changing display resolution in System preferences (from 1920×1200 to 1600×1200 and back again) worked a treat, every time, so I thought maybe whatever latest software update I’d performed might have made something go screwy and I’d see if it righted itself eventually. I had a workaround right??

Er, no.

About a week and a half ago the corruptions got worse, and this time changing screen resolutions didn’t fix the problem. Back to some more serious Googling. Eventually I found a forum post titled Help! Weird Screen! being attacked by barcode hash marks! And a couple of screen grabs that showed identical corruptions to what I was experiencing…

Apple Mac G5 Desktop corruption from www.typophile.com forums

If you read through that thread you’ll see that it turns out to be a symptom of a dying graphics card.

So here’s my own advice…

If you’re reading this and your Mac has got a few little corruptions like those in the picture above, then I’d advise you order a new graphics card sooner rather than later, because before long your Desktop will look like this (my grab below)

Apple Mac G5 PowerPC Desktop corrupted

And in no time at all it will get much, much worse – so bad in fact that eventually you will find it almost impossible to do anything on your machine – in particular install new drivers for your replacement card when it arrives! And no amount of clearing PRAM, changing resolution, reseating your existing card or taking the card out completely and cleaning all the gunk off it (I tried all of those..!) will make any difference.

So anyway – respect and thanks to dezcom at Typophile.com for posting images showing his own graphics card failure. Hopefully anyone else experiencing the same thing might stumble across this page as well. By the way, I’ve just fitted my new graphics card. Just in time too – I pretty much had to guess what I was clicking at during the installation. Anyway, I’m typing this now from a lovely pristine squeaky clean good-as-new Desktop.

Anyway, I decided to give it a shot today, in between getting the baby to the creche, doing some shopping, doing some proper work, and overseeing a bit of minor building work at home. I built a quick webpage, set up a subdomain on this site, blogged about it briefly on my other blog and even uploaded a shoddy video to YouTube. And when I eventually got back online this evening, I was ever so slightly disappointed to find that not only was my site NOT on the first page of Google, it wasn’t actually anywhere on Google at all. (Yes, I clicked all the way to the end).

Reckon I may have to rethink my strategy. Or maybe hope that there’s a prize for the WORST bit of search engine optimisation in Ireland.

Update:
After a brief spell at around the 30 spot, the new ‘improved’ WordPress powered site has disappeared completely. Either dark forces are at work, or I was a bit over-enthusiastic with the cross-linking (especially beween my own sites, all hosted by the same ISP. I’m not surprised I’m now in Google’s bad books!). I’m removing links now, but I’m thinking ‘horse, stable door’…

Update (2):
Roll back the carpets grandma, it’s party time.
My geansai gorm site has rocketed back up to page 2. It’s now the 16th result out of 71,000 odd. And that will do me just fine.

Final update:
It’s all over. Congratulations to the winners (www.mybluejumper.com I think it was). And happy days to everyone who took part.

geansaigorm.mikeafford.com managed to reach 15th position (out of 112,000 results). Highest 11th, Lowest nowhere.

I’ve tried to hoover up most of my own mess, so with any luck this is the last remaining splurge of blue jumper related madness, on this site at least.

For starters, the BBC Election Night programme in 2006 didn’t use REAL holograms. But then neither did the recent CNN election special.

For the secrets behind the CNN programme you should visit the VizRT website where it explains the process of using 35 HD cameras and a bunch of Viz boxes to place a real person into a real studio with a fuzzy border around them.

BBC Hologram from 2006

On my own site you can read some of the background behind the 2006 BBC Election Holograms – whereby we placed a real person in an entirely virtual studio (which matched the look and feel of the real studio next-door) and introduced a number of graphic ‘projections’ which were, of course, just animated textures designed to look a bit like Princess Leia from Star Wars.

The BBC production was put together on a bit of a shoestring budget (luckily enough for the licence payers), but we were fortunate enough to pick up a Broadcast Designers’ Association (BDA) award for the ‘Ascent of Tory Man’ graphic sequence.

The reasoning behind the use of ‘holograms’ in 2006 was three-fold. The production was already going to be using the Brainstorm VR system. We were also looking for something that complemented the night-time feel of the programme – ideally ‘lighting up’ the graphics in some way. Lastly, I was keen to make an obvious visual distinction between the virtual ’studio’ elements and the virtual ‘content’ elements (i.e. the analysis and the results) – so the flickering ‘projected’ quality of the images was extended to include the histograms, line graphs etc, while the surrounding VR studio was designed to look as much like the real discussion studio next door where David Dimbleby was hosting the main programme.

Election Hologram

Anyway. I’m not suggesting that what we did in 2006 and what CNN did last week were the same thing. For one thing, we were only inserting flat graphic elements as opposed to real live people. The image of Tony Blair here appeared as though it was being projected somehow into the studio space, but obviously if the camera panned round the back we wouldn’t see the back of his head. Still, I think we did a pretty good job of faking a holographic ‘feel’.

I expect that CNN could quite easily have embedded the ‘holographic’ people seamlessly with the real studio, rather than fuzzing them up a bit (actually it ended up just looking like very poor keying – probably intentionally). But unfortunately if they’d made it look more professional then no-one watching would have noticed anything strange or clever at all, and might have been tempted to think – what on earth was the point of all that????

Actually, come to think of it, what was the point of all this??

The changes to the basic proportions of the page were made by increasing the #page and #footer divs from 760 to 900pixels and adjusting the right sidebar content to be 250px wide (to match my own ‘content_sub’ div) and expanding the rest of the content to fill the gap.

Next I changed the basic colour scheme – or as much as I could using color values in the style sheet (text etc). I searched all the template files to see exactly where the background images appeared and then added my own versions (at the new widths) including a body background, a footer image that closes off the main grey box backround, and a new ‘topper’ image that does the same at the top (this needed a new div – added to the header.php file).

I changed the header box to be left aligned and smaller and removed the top margin from <h1> tag (blog title).

Lastly, I put a new DIV into the header php code – this is where I place all my own header content.  I also moved the background image from the body (to stop it scrolling when the browser is resized) into my own header code.

The last few tweaks were mainly little cosmetic changes – a bit of margin/padding adjustment and a new background colour and border around the comment boxes. And that was pretty much it.

I made a few notes as I was tinkering with the CSS and PHP files – I will post at some point with a breakdown of what I did. But probably not today – it is the weekend after all.

I will also write a post soon on the excellent training day I had at the splendid Leitrim Enterprise Board presented by the equally excellent Johnny Beirne

But I think I’m needed right now for shopping duties…

I’m intending to blog about the changes I’m making as I go along. There are two possible outcomes here :

1. This may serve as a useful resource for anyone else attempting to customise their own blog.

or

2. This will be a catalogue of disasters, showing how to mess things up royally.

Obviously, I hope it’s not going to be (2) – but if by any chance you happen to be reading this and can spot disaster looming – please feel free to comment and point me back in the right direction!

As it stands, having spent about 2 minutes looking at the Design > Theme Editor tab I’m thinking this is the way to go. I’ll make a complete copy of the themes/default directory on my hard drive just in case I mess anything up. If I do, I should be able to selectively replace either the messed up style sheet, image, or (god forbid) php file.

By the way, I’ve recently been working on optimising my main website. Currently I’ve only replaced a couple of pages, but I have managed to create a pretty well-formed HTML template, and a style sheet that seems to render it identically on most browsers (according to the excellent Browsershots.org). So I’m hoping that with a bit of sly CSS cut’n'pasting, I should be able to impose my style on the default WordPress template – which also uses a basic two-column layout like my main site. Anyway, here goes. I think maybe the first thing to do is to change pixel dimensions only, and leave fonts, colors and images until later.

I’ve a good few years’ experience hand-coding HTML and CSS. I’ve got a pukka copy of the Adobe CS3 suite. I’ve got the O’Reilly book ‘Learning PHP & MySQL’ (I knew it might come in handy one day). I’ve got ‘The Convincer’ by Nick Lowe on repeat.

What could possibly go wrong?

To fix this, I had to go to Settings and Permalinks to choose a new format for the post URL – there are a few ready-made formats to click and choose from – I decided to use the form

www.mikeafford.com/blog/$year/$month/$title_of_post

For this to work, I needed to add a .htaccess file to the main blog directory – rather strange that it wasn’t included in the installation. Anyway, with that in place, the new permalinks appeared immediately.

failed to write to disk

So obviously something strange was happening at my servers end – I initially thought it might be read/write permissions, but after a brief search on the WordPress forums, and another quick email to my hosting support, it turned out that I needed to set up a couple of customised php settings on my site. This might not be the case with every hosting provider, but I needed to go to my site control panel and click PHP settings and set the upload_tmp_dir to be /tmp . And also in my case I to actually create the /tmp directory itself (I guess up until now I didn’t really see the need to have one…)

But I wasn’t quite there yet. When I tried again, I got a brand new error

Unable to create directory
…………./blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10. Is the parent directory writable by the server?

Now that smelt even more like file permissions than the last time – and sure enough that’s what it was.

Another quick scout around WordPress.org and I saw that they do say “A default WordPress installation comes with permissions settings for its files and folders (i.e. directories) that can be regarded as very secure.” I should say so. Particularly having a content folder into which you can’t actually place your content.

But they do give comprehensive instructions on how to change various permissions to get things working more smoothly. See Changing File Permissions for more information on this.

It’s also worth looking at htaccess for subdirectories which explains how to put back some of the security on folders that you’ve allowed more write access to – for example, restricting uploads of only image files (JPG, GIF, PNG) to that /tmp directory.

OK, with that all sorted, I’m fast approaching the time for customisation. Although the default template is sweet enough, I want to get my sticky paws on the HTML and CSS..

Step 1: I found this page on WordPress.org which details the procedure for installing WordPress on your own site (this assumes that you have your own domain, and FTP access to upload all of the WordPress files to your own site). Now, being a graphic designer, and itching to get on with the task of customising the page to make it look all arty and such, it’s fair to say that I only read the instructions briefly, so this might all end in disaster, but here goes…

Step 2: I downloaded WordPress 2.6.2 to my local machine (I’m using one of my Macs – a Dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5 – OSX v10.4.10) and unzipped the file.

Step 3: Using the control panel on my website supplied by my hosting company, I added a mySQL database – as this was the first database I’d added, all I had to do was select ‘default’ and there it was. Surprisingly easy so far. From reading the WordPress documentation I wondered if I needed to have a database called ‘wordpress’, but it seemed not so – I checked this by emailing my hosting support who replied within minutes (hats off to Mark at Supanames). The name of the database doesn’t matter, provided you enter it correctly in the wordpress config file (see Step 4 below).

Step 4: Now this bit I’m guessing wouldn’t be for the faint-hearted, but if you’re happy editing files that have lots of $’s and /’s and other gobbledegook in them then it’s quite straightforward. In the unzipped WordPress files you’ll find one called wp-config-sample.php – you need to edit this to include the name of your mySQL database, and your username and password. Also you need to set 3 secret keys – but instructions on what to do are included in the file itself. Once you’ve finished this, save the file as wp-config.php in the same folder where you found the original (wp-config-sample.php) file.

Step 5: I created a directory on my site called ‘blog’ in the top directory – so my blog should hopefully appear at www.mikeafford.com/blog . Then I FTP-ed the entire contents of the wordpress folder on my local machine into the ‘blog’ folder on the remote server. Another way of doing this would have been to rename the ‘wordpress’ folder to ‘blog’ and uploaded the folder itself to the top directory on your server (assuming you don’t already have one called ‘blog’ there already. Naturally enough.)

Success!

Step 6: In my browser I typed in the URL of my blog (mikeafford.com/blog) and there was the WordPress set-up page all ready for me to enter a title for the blog and my email address. With that completed, moments later the bog-standard blog appeared…

At this point my wife walked in and I proudly showed her my new blog. “That looks really good” she said.

I wonder if she’ll say the same after I’ve fiddled with the design…

Right now I’m having a few issues with uploading images, which may well be the subject of my next post.