Yesterday PC Pro a story about how system administrator Lewis Peckover had discovered that O2 were transmitting customer’s mobile number when you visited a web page. Lewis even produced a web page where you could if your phone was doing this. However, by the afternoon O2 appeared to have back-peddled quickly and removed this functionality, as my phone was not displaying any information.

Why would O2 be doing this in the first place? Well, they’ve since given a few reasons but the most important, as far as I’m concerned, is so that their website can identify you. Unlike other networks who make it difficult for you to find your remaining balances, O2 give you a useful web link to visit – it reads your phone number from the web page header and then displays the information.

Sadly, now they’ve removed the phone number transmission, that site no longer works (see screenshot from my phone). Boo. Of course, I equally don’t want my phone number spread about the internet – would it have been too much to ask to have O2 encrypt it?

Expect to see much change on the site in the coming months, although initially it may be the opposite.

I am currently looking into a new design for the site but, unlike before, it won’t be one of my own – but rather designers who know better than I do I’m moving towards a more mobile friendly magazine format with posts associated with just a small selection of categories. I’ve recognised that the site is organised quite eclectically at the moment with customer service reviews nestling next to advise on WordPress plugins – a clear division will enable you to concentrate on the area of the site in which you’re interested.

To this end I’ve already started organising the categories into which the posts fall. I’ve also started reviewing some of the posts, combining where there is an historic thread.

However, none of this means I’m going to change direction in my post content – this will remain the same. It will just be easier to navigate and be presented in a better format.

If you have any ideas of your own on any of this, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.

A number of years ago now this site started off as my personal blog. Politics, news and general rants were the topics, with the occasional review of tech products that I’d bought. In time the latter started to take over and my new-found interest in writing WordPress plugins.

As a result the site has become more a commercial venture and personal posts now seem inappropriate to the point where I rarely add any. None-the-less I wanted to still put finger to keyboard occasionally so I decided to separate out my personal posts. I looked at 3 different ways to do this…

1. Get the site to exclude personal posts and list them in their own separate section. Sadly, excluding one category from certain parts of WordPress is not as simple as it seems and just caused me problems when I tried it.
2. Use the Multisite option in WordPress to set up a secondary site. Unfortunately, as I have an established site with set (and indexed) URLs, introducing a 2nd site would likely to cause problems.
3. Create another site. Thankfully I already had one. A few months ago I decided to create a separate sandboxed WordPress installation for testing my plugins. Hardly used except for the odd bit of testing I realised this would be the ideal candidate – I can still use it for testing as if this site goes down for a short while it’s not a big deal.

So, I’ve done it. The sandbox website has had a splendid new theme (although not of my design – I used a free “out of the box” one) and I’ve transferred over all my personal posts. Many of these are quite old so were in need of TLC – videos spilling out of page widths, missing images, etc. I also had to go through and add new categories to them all (and there’s over 100 posts!).

Click here to visit my new personal site – I’ve already christened it by way of a new post today.