So I’ve decided to experiment with Google Adsense, and so far I’m very impressed! After a week for Google to approve my application (why?), the welcome email arrived. I installed the Adsense Manager plugin for Wordpress, made a slight tweak to my theme, and as if by magic… adverts!
One good thing this forced me to do is clone the default theme. Now I can start tweaking it a bit more severely, expect breakage!
The Debian package for Wordpress in Etch is version 2.0. Lenny (the current testing distribution) has version 2.2, which has quite a few improvements. Here’s how I installed this testing package without upsetting the rest of my stable system.
Wordpress is a php package, so it’s architecture independant and has hardly any dependencies. In fact the only dependency that can’t be satisfied from stable is libphp-phpmailer: wordpress 2.2 needs a newer version of this library than shipped with etch. It’s possible to manually download those two packages from the testing distribution and install them manually, but there’s a better way.
Add the testing distribution to your /etc/apt/sources.list so it looks like this (the first two should already be in there):
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ testing main
Then use apt-pinning to disable the testing distribution for all packages except the ones you want. Edit the /etc/apt/preferences file (you may have to create it if it doesn’t already exist) so it looks like this:
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 700Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: -1Package: wordpress
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 800Package: libphp-phpmailer
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 800
The magic part of this is the preference of “-1″ for the testing distribution, which removes its packages from the available list. If you put a positive preference such as 500 (which is lower than the stable preference of 700), stable will still “win” for most packages but you’ll see some that aren’t in stable. The preference of 800 is assigned to the two packages we *do* want, and this makes them preferred over stable.
Now install wordpress 2.2:
apt-get update
apt-get install wordpress
If you already have wordpress 2.0 installed, “apt-get update; apt-get upgrade” will upgrade your 2.0 copy instead.
This technique can be used to cherry pick other packages from testing into a stable base system, but only if they don’t have significant dependencies (such as a newer c library version). In this case, backports.org is your friend.
I had a fun weekend up in Nottingham. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been up, and as usual everything is different!
The University of Nottingham students union has been completely refurbished, and is now two separate bars. The old lower ground floor has turned into a bar called “Mooch” and the old Ark is now a separate club called “The Venue”. Both look fantastic (probably because the paint is still wet), but why such a small bar in The Venue?!
I also went car shopping with my brother John, as he’s looking for a replacement after his recent Hungarian lorry driver incident. We wandered round one of the nearby car supermarkets, they’re really quite useful if you don’t know exactly what you’re after as you can have a poke around lots of different makes and models.
I’m going to start adding some technical posts, I have a few solutions to problems that I couldn’t find the answer to on Goodle, so I’d like to share them with the web. Hopefully someone will find them useful.
Yes, I’ve finally decided to start blogging, and only several years after the rest of the world!
In a similar way to Ben King, I plan to blog about both personal happenings and work.
For now it’s the standard Wordpress look, I’ll see about customising it when I get a few spare hours. Hopefully I’ll find enough time to keep it updated too!