Simon Harrison’s Blog

In April of this year, I set about learning the alternative keyboard layout, Colemak. As the job I had at the time required very little typing, I thought this the perfect opportunity to give it a go.

Many people thought I was odd to do this. It was something that no one I spoke to had ever considered doing. I thought they were odd to happily use a layout that was so much hard work. That really is the main reason for my switching to Colemak. I’m lazy. I have always hated work for the sake of it. And Qwerty does make you work. On average, your fingers have to move twice as much compared with Colemak. Your fingers spend only about 30-35% of the time on the home row using Qwerty. With Colemak, it’s about 70-75% of the time. Take a look at the following image.

war and peace - Qwerty, Colemak, Dvorak

So there you go. If you have been considering trying Colemak but weren’t sure if it’s worth the trouble, believe me it is. And when your co-workers or friends poke fun at what an odd geek you are, just point out that it’s better to be a geek than a sheep.

Anyone who has searched Google for ‘make money online’ or similar phrases, knows there are plenty of people only too happy to take your money to tell you their incredible secret.  Are any of them genuine? How can you know which ones are scams and which ones aren’t?

Let’s have a look right now. Here are the results of ‘make money online’ using Google UK.

Thirty four odd million results. Wow. Obviously a lot of people are writing about this. First off, ignore all of the sponsored links. They are paying Google to appear in our search result. They don’t want to help us. They just want our money. Sorry guys, we are wanting to make money not spend it.

On to the ‘natural’ results. The first one is from timesonline.co.uk. They have an article suggesting ten ways to make money online. There are some ideas here that may need further investigation. Ten ideas that have cost us nothing.

Next is a crappy affiliate site. paid2review.co.uk. A complete mess with some well know scams recommended. No thanks.

The next result is an article at experienced-people.co.uk. Here we have 101 ways of making money. It’s a few pages of information to read through, but again it may well be valuable and has cost us nothing.

I could go on for the rest of my life, but hopefully you get the picture. At this early stage we are only wanting ideas. Of course we aren’t going to pay for them. Use your common sense. Build a list of possibilities for further research. Whatever you do, don’t pay anyone money or leave your email address.

I have a lot of CD’s. As well as audio CD’s, I have multitudes of burned CD’s and DVD’s. They all have to live somewhere, so what have I found to be the best solution for keeping them safe?

Well, I’ve tried nearly all of them. Plastic sleeves, paper sleeves, replacement cases, bound wallets, spindles and CD racks.

Plastic wallets I’ve found to be unreliable and fiddly to open and close.

Paper sleeves are even worse than plastic sleeves. Don’t bother.

I’d advise you to steer clear of the ‘one touch opening’ kind of boxes. These are the ones that you press a button on the front and the drawer slides out. They come with sleeves fixed inside usually. These are generally really badly made and won’t last long.

Another option is a CD storage rack. You can have these mounted on your wall so that they aren’t claiming any floor space. These also have the benefit that you can keep all your discs in their original cases.

My preference is for bound CD wallets. These will let you store between twelve and one hundred and fifty plus discs in one convienent place. Make sure to check that the sleeves they are using are good quality prosleeves (or similar).

I also have a couple of CD storage boxes. These are nothing fancy, just boxes designed to store CD’s. If you use loose double-sided wallets, this is a cheap and effective solution.

Here is another quick tutorial. If you followed the last one you now have to access your blog from (in my case):

http://www.simonharrison.net/blog

As I don’t really want anything but a blog right now, this is not ideal. I want simonharrison.net to lead straight to my blog. Here is the quick and easy way:

1. From your WordPress admin page click on ‘Settings’. It’s on the right along with ‘Plugins’ and ‘Users’

2. On the ‘Blog Address (URL)’ field, change that to the root of your site. http://www.simonharrison.net in my case.

3. Click on ‘Save Changes’

4. Fire up your FTP client. Connect to your site. Navigate to the ‘www’ directory and then to ‘blog’. Find the ‘index.php’ file and download it on to your local machine for editing.

5. Open the file in your editor. Change it by adding the /blog (highlighted in red):

/** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */ require(’./blog/wp-blog-header.php’); ?>

1. Save the edited file in the root of your ‘www’ directory.

2. Go to your site in your browser and you should now see your blog at your homepage.

Feel free to comment.

I spent a couple of hours messing around doing this yesterday, so here’s how to do it the fast way.

1. Set up a package and account on your HostNine account.

2. Log in to the site you set up e.g. mysite.com/cpanel

3. Scroll down to ‘Databases’.

4. Click on MySQL database wizard.

5. In the new database field name the database for your blog. Wordpress or blog should be fine.

6. Create a username and password for yourself (the administrator).

7. Click on ‘All Privileges’. Cpanel will inform you that database was created. Make sure to save your user name and password in a text document on your computer.

8. Download and unzip wordpress if you haven’t already.

9. Using an ftp client (I use Filezilla) connect to your site root. This will be shown as remote site: /. Click in to the ‘www’ directory. You should see a directory named ‘cgi-bin’ and a .htaccess file. Nothing else should be there if this is a new account.

10. Upload the unzipped wordpress directory by locating it on your local drive and dragging it across to the ‘www’ directory as explained above. You want to only upload the root directory that is called ‘wordpress’. That will probably take a minute or two.

11. When uploading has finished, rename the ‘wordpress’ directory to ‘blog’ on your remote site.

12. Shut down FileZilla for a moment. Go into your local wordpress directory. Find the file, ‘wp-config.php’. Open that in a text editor. Here are the first few lines:

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'mylogin_wordpress');    // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'mylogin_myname');     // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');    // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

On line three you need to change the DB_NAME to your account name plus the database name you set up in steps 4-7. That had me stumped for a while. It is not just the database name. The same goes for DB_USER. Fill out the database password that you saved from step 7. The rest of the file is self explanatory.

Now we are going to install wordpress. Let’s say your site is named ‘mysite.com’. Type this into your brower address bar:

http://www.mysite.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php

If you have done as above, then WordPress should have set up all needed tables and given you your admin password.

Learn how to use WordPress.

Any problems or thoughts, feel free to comment.