Back From Galway

July 03, 2008

Last weekend (28th June) i went to Galway with all of my friends for a 21st party, it was great crack, we initially decided to stay just for the Saturday night and go home on the Sunday. We got up really early on Saturday morning at 6:30am and went to the train station at 7:30am, we had to get a train to Dublin then onto Galway from there.

The train ticket cost €68, for a return ticket. When we arrived in Dublin and made our way to the train there was a massive line, we had to sit on the train’s floor for 3 hours to Galway! That really annoyed everyone since it was really warm and packed. When we arrived at Galway it just got better from there. We were staying in the college student accommodation, these rooms are rented out for the 3 months that the college is closed. They were brilliant, they only cost €35 a night and you got free travel in a mini bus to and from the city center, and we got free breakfast the next morning!! all included in the small price of €35.

We went out that night and since it was our friends 21st we were all dressed as pirates (ARRGH!!) We had  a great time everyone seemed to like us and were taking picture’s of us and everything  after a great night of partying we all were looking forward to a good night’s sleep, however it would have to be cut short since check out time was 10am sharp!!

When we all got up we decided that we would stay an extra night so went down to book the extra day, they said it would cost €60 for the extra night since we were booking it with such short notice, but then they told us that if we went into town and booked it through there website it would be even cheaper! And indeed it was it was only €30 to stay on the Sunday night, €5 cheaper than the previous night this was because it was a Sunday.

When we had it all sorted out we went around the city center and looked in the shops and had lunch, then after lunch we were passing a group of people setting up a mat on the ground, they were going to be putting on a show so we decided to sit and watch it, it was brilliant they done loads of acrobatic performances. Here they are in the pictures below.

Mad limbo

Head standing

That was a brilliant show

Later that day we went and lay about in Eyre Square

us in eyre square

Later that night we just had some drinks in the apartment and had the crack!

Then the next day we were back up at 10am and checked out and went around the city again until we got our train home at 3pm

The place we stayed in was called Corrib Village

It was definitely a great trip to remember!

Me and ian with the pirate flag

Create your wordpress blog offline

June 22, 2008

How many times have you made changes to your website that might not work that could cause an inconvenience to anybody that is trying to view your website? Well if you are using wordpress you usually edit your website online, and as soon as you save it the changes will take effect on your live website, this can be a nightmare because it could mess up the appearance of your website and cause your visitors to become confused on where everything is.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply test these changes before putting them into action on the live web for everyone to see. Well now you can, i was looking around the internet a few days ago and found out a way of installing wordpress locally on your own computer, this means you can make as many changes as you want to your website and it will not effect your live website, therefore making the ease of visitors to your site more comfortable, then when you are ready you can simply upload your changes to your live website.

Ok so in order to setup wordpress locally on your computer this is what you have to do:

  1. First download the latest version of wordpress, here
  2. Then go here and download XAMPP Lite
  3. When the download is complete extract it to the root of your hard-drive e.g: C:\
  4. When the extraction is complete go to C:\xampplite and click on setup_xampp.bat
  5. Then click on xampp-control and start Apache and Mysql
  6. Then open up your browser and go to https://localhost/ then choose your preferred language on the left column
  7. Then click phpMyAdmin from the tools section in the left column
  8. type: wordpress into the create new database section then select utf8_unicode_ci then click create, that is the XAMPP setup complete now
  9. Unzip the wordpress folder you downloaded into the folder: C:\xampplite\htdocs
  10. Then browse to the folder wordpress in C:\xampplite\htdocs then you should see a file called wp-config-sample.php open it up in a text editor such as notepad or textpad then replace the default values with these:

    // ** MySQL settings ** //
    define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database
    define(‘DB_USER’, ‘root’); // Your MySQL username
    define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ”); // …and password (needs to be empty, just for local install)
    define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

  11. Then save the file as wp-config.php in the same folder as wp-config-sample.php
  12. Then open your browser and type in https://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php
    Then follow the instructions and that’s it enjoy!

Have a look at the video below, i made it to show you how to do the above in case you had trouble doing it, i added some music so it wont seem so long!

Original instructions source: Geeksaresexy

Web Hosting

June 17, 2008

This site soon will be here 3 months on the 12th of july that means that i am going to have to renew my hosting account, the reason i only paid for 3 months of hosting was so that i could test out the service that this provider is offering. I am currently using GoDaddy for my hosting but i think the server is a bit slow, i have been looking around for slightly faster servers at good prices and have found some on Lunarpages, Dreamhost and Webair

My next purchase of hosting will be for 2 years, i decided to go for 2 years because you get bigger discounts and more services for the longer you buy the hosting for. Once this new hosting is faster i will be happy, of course it has got to have support for php5 because this current theme requires it.

The prices on the 3 different Web hosting services are as follows:

Lunarpages:

  • 24 Months
  • php5
  • Also $775 of bonus products (Most likely wont use these, nice to have though!)
  • $6.95/Mo
  • Storage: 1,500 GB
  • Bandwidth: 15,000 GB/Mo
  • Subtotal $166.80
  • By using the promotion code “spring” i can save $48
  • Total: $118.80 (€76.55)

Dreamhost:

  • 24 Months
  • php5
  • Storage: 500 Gb
  • Bandwidth: 5 TB/Mo
  • For signing up for 2 years you get a 18% discount!
  • $8.95/Mo
  • Total: $214.80 (€138.40)

Webair:

  • 24 Months
  • php5
  • Storage 1,000 GB
  • Bandwidth: 5 TB/Mo
  • For signing up for 2 years  you get a 26% discount!
  • $8.05/Mo
  • Total: $193.20 (€124.49)

So those are the 3 hosting providers that i have been looking at and i have to say the service looks great. The only thing i find hard to believe is the amount of storage & bandwidth you get, i suppose i have roughly that amount with my current supplier. Im still not sure which one i am going to go with, i have to take into account that with Lunarpages i would be using a discount coupon but when you go to renew the price will go up and you cannot use a coupon more than once.

I think that i will most likely either go for Dreamhost or Webair, yeah they cost a little more but they have fantastic service response time and with the quotes i got for them they will be the same price everytime i go to renew, no nasty higher prices.

I was considering going for some local hosting here in Ireland, but to be honest who in there right mind would pay for the high prices, and also they give you very little storage space, a few hundred MB of storage for a ridiclous price. Its cheaper to just buy away from home.