FeedBurner is no more¹. Long live raw, in the flesh, naked feeds.

In other words, if you previously subscribed via FeedBurner, please re-subscribe. I promise to make it worth your while

1. to be perfectly honest, it was being just a touch flaky since Google took over. Not only that but it kept complaining that my feeds were too big. [↩]

That’s my YSlow rating for the BMTG website.

It’s taken me a year but I’ve done it. The only thing missing - that elusive 9% - is a CDN. But I’m not going to have that so I now have the highest rating I can achieve.

Once this site is at its new host, I’ll start looking at the same thing (restrictions on the .htaccess file, amongst other things, prevents me at the moment).

To put this in perspective, Amazon.co.uk and Apple.com both have a score of 63%, Microsoft.com a score of 94% and PC Pro a score of 52%. Google, not surprisingly, scores 99%. What is surprising, though, is that Yahoo - the people who originated this scoring system - gets 82%.

It’s been released! And I’ve upgraded!

It wasn’t hassle free, but that’s mainly due to my host, as the Automatic Upgrade plugin I used kept timing out.

After the upgrade, launching the site gave me… a blank screen. I did the correct thing of deactivating all my plugins and the site came back on again, so it was a process of elimination after that.

The fault was with PHP Speedy - I’ve emailed the author.

I also took the opportunity to deactivate some plugins that I don’t intend to “take with me” when I move hosts in the New Year. This includes the Automatic Upgrade plugin as WordPress 2.7 introduces this feature natively.

WP 2.7 mainly revolves around a complete re-write and design of the admin option. And very good it looks too - but I’ve not had a chance to have a “proper” play.

One thing I must remember to do though… when the Twitter and Akismet plugins are switched off the site doesn’t display properly. I need to look at that for future.

Well, you could tell I needed to get some development work tonight on the Copy+ site because the host, Streamline.net, allowed the SQL server to fall over in a crumpling heap. Therefore bringing down both this site and that one (they share SQL servers) for a good couple of hours during the busy tea-time period.

Thanks.

As if the slow site responses weren’t enough.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again… I’m moving. In the New Year. To Memset.

I am happy to announce the first of my, of what I hope will be many, online tools.

I’ve used various tools over the years for compressing CSS, but many miss a trick here or there. Or will simply be so over-eager that they break the nicely validated code. In the end I would manually compress it using a search & replace tool.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to get a script to do it all for you so step forward my new CSS Compressor.

Simply upload the file and decide whether you want to remove comments or not (this can sometimes cause some browser compatibility “tweaks” to stop working, hence the option) and that’s it. The output is displayed and you just need to cut and paste it.

Enjoy!