pigpogm on August 8th, 2008

When we moved everything over to WordPress (from Drupal), we lost some data.

All posts lost their ‘author’ setting - for old posts, the site has no idea if they were written by me or Sam. Tags and categories - they did come over, but in such a mess that they had to be deleted. There [...]

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pigpogm on August 7th, 2008

…and we’re running WordPress.

It’s been an unpleasant time.  We’ve had to get the RAM upgraded in our server, but we don’t really know what else has gone on.  In the process of the troubleshooting, we migrated the site from Drupal to WordPress, and I think we’ll be sticking with WordPress now.  Drupal was great, but [...]

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Update3: The problem never stayed away, and got worse. I tried upgrading to Drupal 6.x, but our hosting has such an old version of MySQL that we can’t run Drupal 6.x. I then tried a fresh installation of Drupal 5.x, fetching the current version of every module we need, and enabling things gradually. So far, things are pointing at the search module again, but I only stopped the problems by deleting the search module and emptying all the search tables. Disabling the module didn’t stop lots of locked processes updating the search_index table. We’ll see how things go from here, then.

Update2: Running without the Image module didn’t fix it - it happened again. We now have the Image module enabled again, and a few other modules disabled. PathAuto is included in this lot, as I’ve heard it can have performance issues with a lot of paths (we have over 1,000). If things stay stable this way, I’ll probably try updating PathAuto to the latest version and enabling it again.

Update: This turned out not to be the case at all. The next batch of images I uploaded were ok, but the next after that caused the same locking problems without the search module running. I’m just going to abandon the image module for now, and maybe have another go when we upgrade to Drupal 6.x.


A GoogleFood post - there’s probably nothing of interest here, unless Google has brought you to this page when you’re trying to work out why Drupal keeps making your server crash, run very slowly, etc, after you’ve added a batch of images.

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pigpogm on April 6th, 2008

Another week, another new look for PigPog.

This time, it’s a completely new theme I’ve built, so there’s even more chance that I’ve broken something. It’s all a bit basic, but it feels a bit more like it’s actually ours. I’ve put all the navigation stuff in a couple of reasonably narrow bars on the right, so the content is the first thing on a page.

It’s readable, and shouldn’t be too overloaded with ads, which were two of the problems with last week’s effort. Anyway, as ever, let me know what you think - even if you don’t like it. When it’s a theme built from scratch, it should be a bit easier to change.

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pigpogm on March 30th, 2008

Ever since upgrading to Drupal 5.x, we’ve just stuck with the default theme, with just a colour tweak to make it ours. I finally decided to take a bit of time to look at other themes, and found one I quite liked - it’s called Channel Nine (no relation that I’m aware of to the Microsoft thing). I’ve made a few very small changes to the theme, mainly to change the colours.

The idea of a theme without the standard ‘masthead’ top section was quite appealing, and this one seems to cope nicely with different screen widths, too.

As usual, I’ve tried to check things, but I might have broken something - please comment here if you spot something I’ve missed.

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pigpogm on December 24th, 2007

The plan we had recently for making PigPog all about Visual Arts wasn’t really working out very well. We’ve not been updating much still, and most of what we have done has been personal stuff, not much more than catblogging. Rather than fight the inevitable, I’d made a few more adjustments to try to bring what PigPog claims to be more in line with what it is.

  • We’ve got rid of all the old set categories, and now only have ‘tags’ that we stick to things ‘on-the-fly’. It doesn’t make much real difference, but at least there aren’t a bunch of unused categories listed at the top of the form when we add new entries, taunting us, and saying “These are the things you’re supposed to be writing about”.
  • I’ve tweaked the Tag Cloud interface, which should now make a reasonably easy and fun way to find stuff on PigPog. It’s all still a bit time-based, but it’s nice and automatic.
  • We’ve dropped the ‘Visual Arts’ tagline. It now just says “Michael and Sam”, which is about as far as we want to narrow things down.

Stuff that we may do different or change in the future:

  • We’ll probably try to do more short blog posts, putting more into PigPog than Twitter.
  • A new logo would be nice, but I’m not sure what. The current landscape photo was just the first thing that came to mind that matched the colour scheme, and I didn’t intend it to last.

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pigpogm on September 16th, 2007

Just a quick update, because I’d like to sleep soon, but we’ve now got all the categories in place as we want them. All the old content is now in the wrong categories, but most of it doesn’t matter anyway. The main section headings are at the top right of each page now - Do, See, Us. The old Photography content has been moved into those pages for now, but still needs a fair bit of work to tidy it all up.

The really big difference for us, though, is that we’re not trying to be a comprehensive guide to anything now. We’re just covering what really interests us. It probably means that PigPog will become a bit more personal home page than it has been recently, but maybe that won’t be such a bad thing. If we’re only writing about stuff we actually care about, we’re likely to write more, and better. It will probably mean more photos, too, since that’s more our area now.

Continue reading about PigPog Visual Arts - Update

pigpogm on September 9th, 2007

Well, that was certainly a day of big changes for PigPog. I hate doing upgrades to the site, because all it takes is something very small to go wrong, and there’s a lot at risk. It all went reasonably smoothly, considering how much was happening.

  • I upgraded Drupal to version 5.x.
  • I switched PigPog to use the new default theme, and customised the colour scheme. I always feel a bit bad about not making a real custom scheme, but this way is so easy, and I’d probably never manage to make anything that matches the default theme’s simple but pretty design.
  • I’ve moved the content we don’t want to concentrate on any more to a new section, so it’s not using space in the top bar any more.
  • I’ve installed a new Flickr module for Drupal, which makes it a little easier to add Flickr photos to posts, and lets us do a few things with blocks too.
  • I’ve tried to give GuitarPr0n its own theme back, but only with limited success.

We need to make a new logo still, and there’s a bit of work to do to make the feeds work as they should, but I’m pretty happy with progress.

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pigpogm on September 9th, 2007

Summary: Expect PigPog to change around a bit over the next little while - some things will move, and it may start to look a bit different. It’ll probably take a week or so to settle down, but we’re doing a bit of ‘rebranding’. PigPog is becoming PigPog Visual Arts, and tightening its focus to concentrate on less things, but hopefully to cover them better. We’ll be trying to make it a bit more about us, too (Michael and Sam), and putting more of our stuff out there rather than just talking about it.

If you’re interested in why we’re doing this, and what’s likely to change, keep reading…


If you’re at all regular around here, you’ll probably have noticed that PigPog hasn’t been updated very much in recent times. There’s no shortage of things available for us to cover - anything creative is our area. We have reached the conclusion that this is probably our biggest problem.

The Problem

By focusing on such a wide area, we’ve given ourselves some difficulties:

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pigpogm on October 25th, 2006

Regular readers will probably have noticed that many of our pen reviews mention and link to Cult Pens. At first, we just happened to buy some pens there, and linked to them because we liked the pens and the shop. Soon, they started giving us a little discount on our purchases in return for the linking, then they started sending us a few freebies to try out (always disclosed in the review). Well, the relationship is about to change a bit more.

Things aren’t fully settled yet - there’s an office move that’s trying to happen alongside it all - but all being well, as of the end of December, we’ll be working at Cult Pens.

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