AstrotalkUK

You will have noticed that I’m not quiet on schedule right now. Indeed have not been so for a few weeks. As a one man band I expect that to happen from time to time. Last week however was special. For the very first time, I became a dad. Both my wife Regine and my daughter – Amrita Christine May-Singh are well and healthy.

I have some projects underway for Astrotalkuk and will resume a more regular pattern in the coming weeks and months. I will also continue with my rather unorthodox approach of retrospectively dating the episodes.

Just over a week ago, Wordpress 2.6 was released. I updated and everything was working fine. I have run in to a problem when I attempted to upload episode 23. It turns out that the plugin I use for this - called Podpress, is not compatible with Worpress 2.6. For existing episodes its fine but I cannot upload anything new.

An updated version of the plugin should be available early next week. Rather than regress to Wordpress version 2.51 I will wait a few days. So middle of next week if not before, it should be back to “normal”.

Something different.

If you are even only a tiny bit of a techie, you will be aware of the huge impact of Wordpress - the open source blogging platform, is having in the online community worldwide. Indeed, AstrotalkUK runs on Wordpress.

From time to time,  the Wordpress community gets together for a day or two to talk, mingle, learn and socialise with other wordpress bloggers, designers, developers or just about anyone who is interested in or connected to Wordpress. They call these events  “Wordcamp”.  They have taken place around the globe and on the weekend of July 19th and 20th, the UK contingent will have one of our own in Birmingham. I’ll be there. Its 35 quid for the two days of talks, presentations,  social events. Interested? More here.

The 24 hour downtime wasn’t planned. A  loss of some config files on Sunday evening at my webshost (IXwebhost) took much longer to recover than I had expected. Infact I am still waiting for them to contact me! I now know much more about cgi-bin folder, .htaccess file and hsphere than is healthy. Thanks to regular automated backups that no data was lost. Nice to be back.

Its been a busy week - Space conference and Buzz Aldrin’s visit - more  in coming episodes. Episode 9 should have gone out yesterday. I’m late. You may not be aware but Astrotalkuk uses Wordpress (WP). Version 2.5 was released this weekend. So over the next few days I hope to upload Episode 9, upgrade to WP 2.5 and fix the RSS link so Itunes (or other podcast reader) will pick up each episode automatically.