Updated to real BLHeli and it’s AWESOME

When I bought these Emax Nano v2 20A ESCs I thought I was getting a bargain.  In hindsight they have been the root of many hours of uncertainty and confusion.  Once the “stock” BLHeli was replaced with the real BLHeli though it all came together. Continue reading Updated to real BLHeli and it’s AWESOME

Lessons from Flying my DIY Quadcopter Badly

The hardest thing about building my own quadcopter from random parts has been the process I’m about to describe.  Using (flying) it.  You see, if like me you’ve never flown anything before you’re going to be starting at the bottom of a steep learning curve. Continue reading Lessons from Flying my DIY Quadcopter Badly

Building a Dirt Cheap 2-Axis Gimbal for Drones

I needed a small, cheap and simple servo operated 2-axis gimbal for my Quadcopter/Drone build.  Barely large enough to mount a GoPro but suitable for many FPV cameras this solution is achievable for around AUD10.00 Continue reading Building a Dirt Cheap 2-Axis Gimbal for Drones

Setting up this Blog – aka How Awesome is WordPress?

When I set out in my mind to create a bit of a travel back in early 2012 for Kitty and I to use while travelling through Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong I quickly threw one together using the “Build me a WordPress Blog” type function within my GoDaddy account.

The result was functional and quite neat.  However the automated offering meant that it didn’t update as cleanly, nor did plug-ins work exactly as expected.  Probably because of the version/update lagging.

So upon our return (and despite the lack of use) I jumped onto http://download.wordpress.com and grabbed the latest release and ran the install over the existing one, suddenly we had a cleaner interface, and every plug-in we wanted just worked.  We still hardly used it though 🙂

So when it came time to make this Blog dream a reality I reached for the same tool.

Well lets put this into a timeline:

  1. 3pm – Decide today I’m “Going to do it”
  2. 3:15pm – Buy Domain using GoDaddy (already have an account so that’s just a few clicks)
  3. 3:30pm – It probably didn’t take 15 minutes but there’s always a minute or three between clicking the “Shutup and take my money” button and having the domains available to bind to the hosting control.  Anyway I did it.  Now I can hear you screaming “You host with Go Daddy? What are you?  Stupid?” – Yeah it’s cheap and somewhat cheerful, but it works for me.  I have more hardcore Hosting through http://stormhosts.com which has been excellent for a number years.
  4. 3:45pm – The Domains are bound to the file system, the permissions set so the config script can do its thing.  The MySQL Database created.
  5. 4pm – I’ve hit the Install page and bam the famous 5-minute process works.
  6. 6pm – I’ve tweaked the design, set up my preferred initial plug-ins, written a page and a couple of posts.  I’ve also fed the fleet of cats and tinkered with settings on our other WordPress site.

Yeah it’s safe to say that 3 hours go-to-whoa for anything in IT is not too shabby, especially when it’s multi-tasked around other things.  The result, while not bespoke is neat and clean, much better than my stagnant design skills could achieve and best of all everything is just a one-click config away.

So yes, I rate WordPress, and I rate it highly.