Since returning from India last Friday I have felt absolutely terrible. At first I thought it was just Jet Lag, and then a chest infection (Man Flu). Now I”m not sure what is going on but I have done nothing but sleep, and I”m talking sleeping 18 hours a day. I generally feel like I have flu and a cough, but every now and again I feel fine and then a couple of hours later I just can”t function and need to sleep. I saw the Doctor on Wednesday and she referred me to Basingstoke District Hospital for a chest X-Ray and blood tests which I had done yesterday but otherwise just told me to rest and wait for the results. I am really hoping it”s Indian Man flu at worst, and not some of the alternative on the table.

During my good moments however I have been looking at ways to improve my web site and blog. If you have been following the “Playing with Technology” posts I have made you will have learnt that I am trying to get to the point where I am not reliant on a single machine, and can work regardless of where I am.

Well I am slowly making progress and one of the tasks that was really annoying me was that I was tied to my MacBook Pro and RapidWeaver to update my website. Now I love the ease of RapidWeaver but it means that I have to carry it with me. This is not ideal as it weights quite a bit and should anything happen to it, I am well and truly stuck. So after looking around I found WordPress, a great free blogging solution that was remarkably quick and simple to install.

I have been playing with WordPress and it seems to work well so I have decided to go with it for now. I am still keeping the RapidWeaver site which you can find here, until I have migrated everything over. Be sure to let me know how you find the new site, and any problems you experience, as I am still learning the software and there”s quite a lot to learn.

One of the biggest items to migrate is my Photo Library. Now this is one of the area”s I still haven”t figured out how manage completely, but I am getting there in a round about way. At home I use iPhoto from Apple. I have my main photo library on my Mac Mini and within RapidWeaver I simply created a new Photo page and selected the pictures from iPhoto. Now that I am looking to stop using RapidWeaver I needed a way to do this with WordPress. I found a plugin for WordPress called FlickrExport (£12) that allows you to upload your iPhoto pictures to Yahoo”s Flickr service. Now I have been playing with Flickr for a while and it”s Pro Service is pretty good value at $25 a year. Flickr is basically an online photo gallery, like Google”s Picasa. The plugin then allows you to display the photo”s you have in your Flickr albums on your WordPress site.

I am in the process of uploading my photo”s to Flickr, and as there are quite a few this is going to take a while, but you should start to see them appear shortly. One part I haven”t quite figured out yet is when I am on the road I can upload my photo”s to Flickr but I now need to figure out how I bring the photo”s from Flickr back into iPhoto.