12/01: New Year Photos
Martin, Steve and Ally came up to celebrate the start of 2009 with us. Unfortunately, Jenny had to work, but the rest of us went to find geocaches located on Lewis and Harris, which kept us out of trouble for a couple of days, even though we had to put up with Ally's pink, flowery wellies!
Unfortunately, there are no firework pictures this year - although there was a pretty good display in Stornoway, we couldn't be bothered to trek in (and back again) to see it. We did catch it from the house, but I was never sure how long it would go on for, so didn't bother grabbing the camera. I must try harder next year.
Anyway, the photo albums are here, and as ever, the best of the pics are on my flickr account in this set. (For Steve, Ally and Martin, the pics at the end are from a walk we did at Hushinish the day after you headed home.)
Great news - octopush is being played in the Western Isles! There is a junior session running at the Harris Sports Centre (Ionad Spòrs Eilean na Hearadh) in Tarbert on Friday evenings. Cameron Morrison, from the sports centre, set this up last year, and has done a fantastic job getting it up and running. The sessions were taking a break over the Christmas Holidays, and I'm not sure when they restart, but I'm sure if you call the sports centre on 01859 502944 they'll be able to tell you.
When I get my act together, I'm going to see if we can't build on Cameron's work and get something up and running here on Lewis as well - both for juniors and for adults. If anyone is interested in playing (or just finding out more), post a comment on this entry and I'll get in touch.
PS Almost forgot to mention, I've also met some of the people from the dive club in Stornoway, and they've been known to play occasionally too!
Once again, my site's been playing up. All the links within the site were giving HTTP 404 errors. This has happened before, because I use the FancyURLs option within Nucleus, which makes the URLs of each article more search engine friendly, but less web server friendly. Last time this broke was when the .htaccess file had been replaced by persons unknown who had compromised the site. However, looking into it, the .htaccess file was there and contained the right content. This files contains instructions for the webserver to URLs like "/item/223", and pass them to the the Nucleus PHP scripts to handle. Unfortunately, it looks like my hosting provider made some changes to their implementation of PHP and Apache, and the standard instructions for making FancyURLs work are no longer compatible. The old .htaccess file had directives along the lines of:
<FilesMatch "^item$">
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>
After much digging around and experimenting, I have a solution. Instead of using the Apache ForceType directive, the Apache SetHandler directive works instead. So now the above should be changed to:
<FilesMatch "^item$">
SetHandler php-script
</FilesMatch>
I'm not going to pretend I understand all the intricacies of this, but the notice I got from my hosting provider about the PHP changes gave some clues. They've switched from the PHP Apache module to a CGI-based installation of PHP. There was a hint that to make PHP work, you need to use the AddHandler directive, so a bit more digging around suggested that switching from ForceType to SetHandler would probably have the same effect under the new installation, and hey presto, it worked! Fingers crossed, everything is back to normal - sorry for any disruption in service.
So, if you're having problems with FancyURLs not working in Nucleus CMS, then try the above - obviously you'll need to make the change for each entry in the .htaccess file (and for each .htaccess file if you're running blogs in multiple directories). Good luck!
