Canon Digital Ixus 70

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve just got home to find that Amazon has delivered my new toy – a Canon Digital Ixus 70. Whilst I still take the majority of my photos on my Nikon D70, carrying a body and a couple of lenses (as well as the paraphernalia that going anywhere with two small children involves) is sometimes a bit of a bind – it would be nice to have a good camera that I can slip in a pocket and take anywhere. Perhaps a mobile phone camera would fit the bill, but most of them have pretty poor lenses (necessarily so in a device that size) and when Vodafone
wanted over £300 for me to upgrade to the Nokia N95, I decided that I’d be better off buying a separate camera.

I’ve always liked Canon’s Ixus range of compact cameras – even when they used film – and the Digital Ixus 70 looks great to me. Basically it’s a 7.1MP camera with a nice large screen (and a viewfinder for when the sun makes using the screen impractical) for just over £120. I’ll probably struggle a bit at first with camera shake (as I’m used to holding a nice weighty body and lens) but I have a couple of overseas trips coming up and it will save me a lot of space in my suitcase.

One thing that’s good to see is that Windows Vista recognised and supported the camera without any intervention from me. Less helpful was the fact that Canon only includes a 32MB SD card in the box so I’ve ordered a 2GB Sandisk Extreme III which will provide fast (133x or 20MB/sec) read and write times. That’s coming from play.com 100x30Play.com and is unlikely to be with me before I fly out to Prague on Sunday so, until that arrives, I picked up a cheap SD card from Tesco (1GB for just under a tenner) which can then be used as a spare.

Backing up and restoring a WordPress database

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last year, Alex and I redeveloped the website for a campaign group close to the town where I live. Even though the design was pretty plain (neither of us are designers), from a web development standpoint the site was pretty good – written in semantically correct XHTML and CSS, using PHP for server-side scripting. Alex even wrote a neat navigation bar system and all in all it was a pretty good site.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time for updating the site content and handing it over to a non-technical person to produce new content was never going to be straightforward. I needed something with a user-friendly content management system and so I rewrote the site to use WordPress with pages for the static content and blog posts for the front page news.

Moving all of the content to WordPress didn’t take too long – I still need to sort out a few dead links and develop a decent template, but one of the beauty of WordPress is the ability to customise a site on-the-fly so I can keep on working on those after making the site live – the important thing for me was to let other people create new content without needing any code.

Even so, when the time came to launch the new site, I did need to move my WordPress database from the /dev subdirectory to the root (it is possible to install WordPress in a subdirectory and still let it be accessed from the site root; however I chose not to take that path).

Although WordPress includes an export/import function that would let me export all of the posts via an XML file, then import them to a new WordPress installation, it doesn’t handle all of the database changes (new users, configuration, etc.) and it seems that the best way is to back up the database and then restore it to a new location. Whilst the WordPress Codex provides various methods for backing up a database, the clearest instructions are actually found in a link at the bottom of the Codex article to the Clearpoint Systems blog post on how to backup and restore a WordPress database (using phpMyAdmin). Then, because the database tables will refer to the old location, it is necessary to update the siteurl and home entries in the wp_options table.

It took just a few seconds to backup the database, restore it to a new WordPress installation, and make the changes necessary to make the site accessible again. Finally, all that was required then was to upload any edited theme files and plugins to the appropriate locations in the WordPress folder structure.