Eardisley Circular Walk

Posted on October 3, 2011 by RedEyedMonster

A pleasant afternoon with Eardisley Ramblers Group (Herefordshire) on their first outing.

Yesterday we had a very enjoyable afternoon joining Eardisley Ramblers Group on their first outing. The aim of the group, led by David Bennett is primarily to establish an inner circular walk around Eardisley, not the walk we went on today, and to highlight the poor state of repair to stiles, signage and the footpaths in general.

Twenty-three walkers met in The Tram car park of various ages and abilities. The walk had been designed so that people could easily drop off along the way during and after the first few miles if they desired. It turned out to be a lovely day with good exercise and very good company. For more information on the group and future walks take a look at the Eardisley Community Access Point page on facebook and like it!

Directions
Follow the detailed map for precise directions, however: leave the Tram Inn, head up Woodseaves Road past Canon Ford Avenue and take the first stile on your left. Follow the signs through two fields to join a narrow footpath running behind the Old Mill and The Barns where you exit by Eardisley Church. Go through the Millstream Gardens estate and the field at the back onto the old tram line which joins the Almeley Road. Straight across the road following the signs into a large field. Walking up the right side of the field at about two thirds through cross to the left, over a stile, and follow the line of trees in this field to the top. At the top turn right down a steep bank and across a rickety bridge into Hollywell Dingle. Take the high road (top path) through Hollywell Dingle and follow it right to the end. Over another stile, through a field and onto a lane leading to the A4111. Shortly before reaching the main road there is a footpath to the left follow this across the field and exit via a gate onto the A4111. Turn left for 50 yards or so and then right into Bower Lane. After a short distance (one field width) take the footpath into a field that you cross diagonally. From this point the signage is pretty sparse but basically it’s all down hill from here. Keep an eye out for the few kissing gates and follow your nose!

View larger map

Detailed OS Map

Hergest Common/Grove Farm Walk

Posted on October 1, 2011 by RedEyedMonster

A short but hilly walk exploring the permissive access to Grove Farm from Hergest Common, Herefordshire

The last time I walked on Hergest Common I notices that a new footpath had been opened up. So, on possibly the hottest ever recorded October day, I set off with Bandit to explore.

The great thing about Hergest Common is that, although popular, there are so many footpaths and routes that once off the standard ‘hike to the top’ walk it is rare to encounter more than a few people for your entire visit. Today though, in the unnaturally hot weather with, literally, buzzards wheeling in the sky it had a slightly eerie feel. It was almost like being in a scene from The Day the Earth Caught Fire.

For precise instructions see the detailed OS map. However, walking up from Ridgebourne Road onto Hergest Common, look for a kissing gate after a short distance on your left. About two thirds of the way through the first field there is another kissing gate, again on your left, where you start to descend to Grove Farm. Once through the farm carry on down the farm track. There is a footpath running through some woodland about halfway down the track which I imagine is the official route but it was seriously overgrown and I was only wearing sandals, so I carried on down the track to Upper Hergest. Turn right following the road all the way up to Hergest Common farm. Then right again to take you back down through the common and back onto Ridgebourne Road.

This is a short walk, about three and a half miles but with a couple of quite steeps climbs. I took it easy, ambling along, taking photos, and completed it in a little over an hour and a quarter. Enjoy.

View larger map

Detailed OS Map
Related Post: Hergest Ridge

BizTalk Server 2010 Documenter

Posted on September 14, 2011 by RedEyedMonster

A free tool that greatly simplifies documenting BizTalk installations and their associated applications.

About

User Guide

Download

I don’t like to generalise but most developers I have met are not keen on writing documentation and having recently finished a piece of integration work using BizTalk 2010 I was delighted to find an automatic documenter on the open source CodePlex site. Unfortunately it did not work properly on the environment I was using so I downloaded the code and gave it some tweaks and enhancements. Having tested it, successfully documented projects at work, I have uploaded the now BizTalk Server 2010 Documenter to the same site and hope that some of you may find it of use.

LivingSocial is dead long live GoodReads

Posted on August 9, 2011 by RedEyedMonster

I have used LivingSocial since joining Facebook to keep track of books I am reading, have read and to pass this information onto my friends. The service didn’t offer any other functionality really, a standard suggested books feature but that was about all. However when recently I accessed the site to update my latest read I was surprised to be confronted with this message.

Fortunately they supplied a handy link to export all existing data to the GoodReads site, which now having signed up seems to be a far superior and greater used service. I’m often on the lookout for new ideas for books to read and this appears to be a valuable resource. It can also link in with Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and Kindle accounts, allows you to compare your bookshelf against your friends and supplies a number of widgets for inclusion in your site. So I’m afraid I will not be mourning the passing of LivingSocial. Long live GoodReads!

Red Eyed Monsters read books

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Smith of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles of Ham

Nigel Bachmann’s favorite books »

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Restoring WordPress

Posted on July 13, 2011 by RedEyedMonster

Moving across from legacy SupaNames account to 123reg and issues with permalinks

Supanames was taken over by 123-reg a few years ago. This wasn’t something that affected me initially and I continued to use my Supanames account as always. However when recently trying to install the latest version of WordPress I found that the version of MySQL was not compatible with the latest upgrade. I contacted 123-reg who informed me that there was no plan to upgrade old Supanames hosting and so with great reluctance I began to make preparations to move over to the more up to date 123-reg hosting.

The first thing to do was to backup the database. This is remarkably simple to do using the Supanames MyPanel interface.

Go to MyPanel and then in the Left-hand menu choose MySQL DATABASES, MySQL Backup Submenu.
Click on the link on the next page in MyPanel to Backup your Database.

If successful, you will receive a message confirming the backup has been completed. The backup is zipped and stored on the root directory of your web space. Having done this I then downloaded my entire site via FTP (I use Filezilla) including the zipped database backup.

I am fortunate that I don’t have hundreds of email boxes consider, all mine are hooked into gmail accounts and I have records of the alternate addresses. So I contacted the account holders to inform them that their mail would be down for maintenance. Once this was done I gave 123-reg the go-ahead to close down my old Supanames hosting and fire up the new one. This was ready to go in a couple of hours and the first thing I did was re-establish the mail boxes and send instructions to the users on how to reconnect.

Next I FTP’d the entire site back up to the root directory so that it had exactly the same structure as it did before.

The final step is to restore the database and modify the configuration so pages and database can talk to one another. Restoring a database with 123-reg is not quite as simple as Supanames but it is no great technical feat either. First you need to create a database. In your 123-reg control panel go to Web Hosting -> Manage

Manage Web Hosting

Then select Manage Database -> Add database

Take a note of the username, password and server, you will need these for the config file. Return to the Add database screen and log on to your new database. Select the Import tab:

Select the previously downloaded backup via Choose File and then hit the Go button (you should be able to leave all other settings at default). Hey presto your database is restored. Now for the configuration.

You need to edit your wp-config.php file typically found in the root directory of your web space. Enter the database name, user and password against DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD respectively (you can get the database name from the Add Database screen). On the old Supanames hosting the host name (DB_HOST) was set to ‘localhost’ this now needs to be set to the server name. Once done save wp-config.php back to your web space.

After doing this I was pleased to see my front page (this blogg) functioning correctly, however when I selected any of the links I was given a 404 Not Found error. A quick Google and my suspicions were confirmed, it was something to do with the permalink structure I was using. I found a number of solutions and didn’t like any of them much so before trying any of them I went into my WordPress Admin and selected Settings -> Permalinks. I did not change any of the settings, merely selected the Save Changes button. This completely fixed my problem, so I urge you to try this before one of the more complex and possibly dangerous solutions on the net.