It's officially British Summer Time now. Clocks went forward last night in the UK, and I think it's the same for all countries that have their clocks change time. So we've got lighter evenings, well it's 8pm here and it's a nice low light outside.

So what's been happening this week? Well, Monday was a bank holiday here (Easter Monday) so we were still down at my parents, watching the snow come down but not settle. Dave ventured out in the afternoon for a walk and to take some photos, although about an hour later he called as it was pelting down with rain and his camera isn't really waterproof! On Tuesday we traveled home in the afternoon after I'd finished work. Not too much traffic around thankfully, and the house wasn't snowed under when we got home!

The rest of the week was spent working. I had a bit of fun on Friday as I'd been asked to install a tab style system on a client's site, something I'd never done before. Luckily Michael had just written up about using a particular script to do this, so I had a bit of a play with that and have managed to get the tabs set up nice and neatly. Just need a little loading animation there now.

Yesterday was a pretty naff day weatherwise as it rained all day, but it gave me a chance to upgrade my Food and Drink blog, give it a new theme and start working on the additional pages I intend to add. Typically, after finishing off yesterday, WordPress 2.5 was released, but then again I wouldn't have upgraded that site just yet, not until I know it's not going to cause my sites problems.

Today was a gorgeous day. A perfect start to British summer time. I woke to sun streaming in through the window, waking like that puts you in such a good mood. We'd already decided to go out cycling today, so after a quick breakfast we took a ride out for the morning (okay I'll be honest, we cycled about 15 minutes down the road to a bicycle shop, spent 20 minutes in there buying a socket to get Dave's bike pedal off so he can fix his chain guard, and then spent 20-25 minutes cycling/walking back, most of which was uphill!). I then set to work on finally repotting the strawberries, which I dug up out the garden from our old house. Hopefully some may still produce fruit this year, but we'll have to wait and see. I also got the greenhouse set up too. I'm starting to get a little motivation back for gardening During the week I'll have to pick up some seed compost, then I can start with the chilli pepper and salad seeds.

The weather is meant to be good this week so hopefully we'll take a couple of afternoons off and do a little more cycling to get our fitness back up, as let's face it, working from home, working at a computer, barely moving, our exercise is virtually nothing!

After a few release candidates over the past week or so, WordPress 2.5 is now officially released.

So what's new in this release? I had a play with the release candidate 1 when it came out and the first major difference I saw was the admin area, fresh new design and the menu all over the place. Once I upgraded my Admin Dropdown Menus which thankfully brought the menu items back into line, it wasn't as bad. Am I happier with it? Not from the RC1 (I've not installed the new version yet, guess I should before moaning!). The admin look is okay although I prefer the classic design over the fresh one (you can switch between the two), however on the posting page everything's been moved around and not for the better. The comments page looks better though, displaying gravatars.

They've incorporated a few plugins into 2.5, such as Gravatars, and looking on their latest post there's also a gallery in there (I didn't see that in RC1!). That'll be interesting to see how good and flexible it is, very handy for CMS's and blogs alike. It seems like most of the plugins should continue to work fine as there hasn't been any major, if any, database changes. I know my plugins appear to work okay, although I'll double check them on the final release.

I'll be having more of a play locally on the new release, just to make sure everything looks okay, works fine, give it a day or two incase any major problem crops up in the WordPress camp etc. Then it'll be time to deploy it to every blog and CMS based site running it!

For those that celebrate anything in particular during this period, or for those who simply have a long weekend off work, hope you're enjoying it. We're currently down at my parents and experiencing strong winds and snow flurries!

This week I finally got back to work after the lingering illness that we've both suffered and many more are suffering from it seems. My head had cleared by Monday although I've still not been 100%, spending Tuesday afternoon with a stinking headache. At least I've managed by contract job (5 hours a day) so that's some money coming back in, and there's nothing much else coming in right now, just waiting on replies from everyone.

On Thursday afternoon we headed down to my parents. Luckily we avoided most of the expected heavy traffic of people trying to get away for the long weekend (Friday and Monday are day offs for most people in the UK). On Friday my Mum and I went up to a local indoor shopping centre to have a wander around the shops, pick a few things up and have a good look about. It was my first real day out of the house (besides the supermarket) since before I got ill, and it was a bit tiring too, but good all the same. Unfortunately though, as always, neither of us were impressed with the current fashions and I couldn't find t'shirts or a jumper that I liked.

I spent Saturday indoors, avoiding the snow, hail and wind. I finally finished off one of my sites that makes a bit of income for me on the side. It's looking a lot better now so with a little added content on occasion hopefully I can start to get a few more sales through it. I also got another day of photos from Rome processed and uploaded to Flickr. That's 3 days done, a few more to go!

Today's been another day of snow and wind, pretty cold too. I've been playing around with WordPress fixes and plugins for a couple of people, along with reformatting and sorting out my Mum's laptop. No rest for the wicked eh Well there's not much on TV so besides sitting and doing puzzles I may as well do something constructive!

This week has also seen me move to Firefox 3 beta pretty much full time. Sure, I've lost a couple of handy extensions but overall it's soooo much better! I've also had a play with the new version of WordPress (2.5) which is out as a release candidate 1. First impressions? Well it's okay, some things have improved, others have been made worse. But I'll reserve full judgement for the stable release

Running a site requires maintenance from time to time, perhaps an upgrade to the file structure too. Even if you've not altered the file structure from the original set up, a simple mistake such as an incorrect link in your content, can cause a 404 Not Found error. Unless you've set up a custom 404 error page that offers a correct navigation to your main site (which I would recommend too, if you've got the option), then you could lose each visitor, a potentially paying customer, when that get that dreaded 404 page and leave your site for good. Also, when a file structure is updated the old files will still be known to the search engine spiders and they'll continue to search for these files.
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I've written up an easy to use, secure, accessible and XHTML Strict compliant contact form, originally for someone to use on their site, but figured I'd post it up here as a bit of a PHP tutorial for anyone who wants to understand what's going on, or for others to just download, follow the instructions and use. I'll explain its usage today and then dissect the form for any PHP learners later in the week.

First off, download the contact form, unzip it and open it in your favourite coding editor. The best version of this form requires PHP 4.4+ however I've altered the line that depends on this version so that you can use it down to version 4.0 however foreign characters will not be checked in the name. Both are contained in the download file.

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