The RSS page for your blog/podcast/whatever at FeedBurner updates periodically, and you sometimes have to be a little patient for blog entries or new podcasts to appear. If you can't wait, you can force FeedBurner to update their version of your RSS page.

To do this:

1. Go to https://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/login and log in to your FeedBurner account.
2. Click Troubleshootize.
3. At the very bottom of the page, click Resync Now.

Thanks to fellow tech author Graham Campbell for telling me about the following list of true-life examples of badly hyphenated words:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.usage.english/msg/f615e0a4acfa21f1

My favourites are:

arse-
nal

fun-
draiser

lighty-
ears

rear-
ranged

pronoun-
cement

Graham at work directed me to this Popular Mechanics video about what Microsoft are doing with "surface computing". This is really cool stuff. I want one of these! 

Copyright (c) Popular Mechanics 2007

After about three weeks down, this website is now available again! The reason for the downtime was that I have switched my ISP from Telewest (now part of Virgin Media) to Sky. The cause for the switch was, initially, that my broadband service from Telewest had been getting worse and worse since about Christmas. I nominally had a 2MB connection, but I was only getting a fraction of that, and working from home had become quite difficult at times, and very frustrating. My dissatisfaction with Telewest turned into real anger after they'd been taken over by Virgin, who announced that they would be dropping Sky One from their cable TV package - meaning we wouldn't see Lost any more.

So I paid my way out of 6 months of remaining contract with Virgin and signed up for a Sky TV, telephone and broadband package. Then the problems started. First we had to get our telephone switched back from Telewest to BT. This should have been a straightforward switch over at the exchange, but the day came for the switch and we lost our telephone connection. It turned out that Telewest had disconnected the BT line, rather than leaving it in place, so we had to get a BT engineer out to fix it. This 2-minute job resulted in a bill for over  £200. Fortunately we managed to persuade BT not to charge us this, but we did have the inconvenience of no phone line for a few days.

Then we had a load of hassle getting our Sky TV installed. The engineer, due to turn up between 10 and 1, eventually appeared at 4.15 and on the stroke of 5 announced he had an urgent call from home and had to leave, job unfinished. He also broke the news that, as far as he was concerned we were only getting Sky TV, he knew nothing about broadband. After numerous phone calls to Sky call centres we found out that our area (in Edinburgh, a capital city - not some little village in the Highlands) no longer qualified for the TV/telephone/broadband package, so we'd have to pay an extra  £20/month for broadband.

After much hassle and many phone calls we eventually got a satisfactory agreement over the TV, telephone and broadband, but we then had to wait a further 10 days to get the broadband switched on. That day arrived, but unfortunately we still didn't have a modem. Another phone call to the call centre and we found out that, according to Sky, the modem had been delivered and we'd signed for it. They agreed to send us out another one, which arrived a few days later.

That wasn't quite the end of the story though, because what arrived was a nice, white Netgear wireless router. But I'd been expecting a straightforward modem, and a router didn't fit into my existing network architecture because the router prevented my Smoothwall firewall from getting an externally visible IP address. However, we now had an outward internet link.

It's not until your unconnected for a while that you realise how important the internet is.

Well, I haven't sorted out the IE7 problem yet, but I have found a fix for the load speed problem. It's a plug-in called wp-cache. You can get it here:

http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2

Installing this plug-in has taken my time-to-load from 25+ seconds to just 3”“4 seconds, which compares very nicely with the performance I was getting from Plone. It does this by caching pages on the server so that preprepared HTML pages are served up to your browser, rather than dynamically generating pages on request, using PHP. You can check that you're looking at a cached page by viewing the source of the page. If it's a cached page, the last line of the source will be:

!-- Cached page served by WP-Cache --

Two installation methods are documented. I chose the manual method, just because that's the one everyone seems to talk about, so I reckonned I'd stick with tried-and-tested. Installation is a little more difficult than installing most WordPress plug-ins. But if you're used to ploytering around on a UNIX command line on your Web server you'll find it easy enough.

There are 2 little problems with this plug-in that you must watch out for. Both of these cause your site to serve up completely blank pages after you install the wp-cache plug-in.

1. If you're server uses PHP 5 you need to edit /wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php, locate ob_end_clean(); in this file and replace it with ob_end_flush();That is, you need to change "clean" to "flush".
2. Don't use the documented command for creating the symbolic link. I copied and pasted it onto the command line and it created a duff symlink. The correct command, from the wp-content directory is:ln -s plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php advanced-cache.php

Once you've sorted this out and added the define statement to your wp-config.php, you can go to the Options section of the WordPress admin and you'll see a WP-Cache tab. Go in there and click the button to enable the cache. Having done that everything should work fine and your pages will fly.

Incidentally, I just did a php -v and realised I'm still on PHP 4.3, so I guess I should go and change back that ob_end_clean(); function, but it seems to work fine as it is, so maybe I won't bother.