cricket.rickeyre.com

In case you are wondering about the lack of activity on this page, it is because I integrated my cricket blog with my other writings from the commencement of October 2006.

The place you need to be is: www.rickeyre.com/blog/cricket

The new address for my cricket blog RSS feed is:

http://www.rickeyre.com/blog/cricketrss

Please note that the atom feed is no longer available.

A special cheerio to those of you who are visiting this website via Patrick Kidd’s cricket blog at The Times, “Line and Length“. Patrick picked up on my item on Anthony Albanese’s cricketing analogy to fighting global warming. (And no, I don’t go trawling Hansard every night for quotes, I happened to see Albo on the tele giving the speech in question.)

But on to the real purpose of this post. I am centralising my personal blogging into one location now, which I have given the cryptic URL of www.rickeyre.com/blog . The reason for this is that much of my writing on cricket these days crosses over into other subjects (as, for example, with my post on Albanese’s climate change speech). My other blog, now.rickeyre.com, is also being superseded in this change.

Fear not, however, as cricket items will continue to appear here, cross-posted from the central blog.

Another domain name I bought a while back and never got around to using.

I’ve put worldcup-champions.com up for auction on eBay. The auction closes in three days time, on Thursday about twelve hours after the Portugal-France semi-final. The domain name is currently registered until 24 February 2007.

If anyone is interested, the auction is on eBay here.

As you may have seen, this site was down last Thursday for about 18 hours.

I need to reduce the load on the MySQL server, and as a consequence, I have had to switch off the cron jobs that ran the RSS aggregators every half-hour (which generate the news and blog feeds which are the heart of this site these days).

Currently I am running the aggregator scripts manually twice a day until I develop a less sql-intensive process.

Thanks for your patience.

I’ve put a couple of domain names up for auction on eBay. thinkcricket.com, which I was using a couple of years ago but have long since discontinued, is one. The other is worldcupchat.net. I won’t be that deeply involved in the coming FIFA World Cup for it to be of any use to me now. Other people might find it handy.

Links to these items are in the eBay panel at the bottom of this page (please note that there can be a 30-60 minute delay in the bid information you see here). Alternately, you can look for seller reyre59 on eBay. I’ll be selling some books, magazines and PAL VHS videos on eBay over the coming months - you’ll be able to follow all of my current items on these pages.

“…the most useful source of inspiration comes from established blogs such as Rick Eyre’s”
- Alistair McLellan, “How to be a Cricket Blogger”, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2006

My copy of the 143rd Wisden arrived by Australia Post courier this morning, having pre-ordered it from Amazon.co.uk when it was on 55% discount. First port of call was the “Cricket on the Internet” feature.

This year, Alistair McLellan did a piece on blogs relating to cricket. I did a phone interview with Alistair last year during one of the Ashes Tests when he was researching his article, and I know that he contacted a few other regular cricket bloggers, including some of you reading this.

The article appears on pages 1569 and 1570 of the hardcover edition. I won’t dissect the piece now, but at the end he does give the URLs of eight blogs which he recommends as showing “signs of both permanence and quality”. One of these has gone off-line since the time of writing!

The 2006 Wisden is a mere 1600 pages in length and I’ll review it over the next few days, probably in instalments. (My one previous review of Wisden, of the 2003 Tim de Lisle edition, can be found here.)

Almost a fortnight of the most unbelievable comedy of errors is over, as I have left my previous hosting service for hopefully greener pastures.

Some catching up on blogging to do. Goodness me, the English domestic season starts in a few minutes!

(Update: I’ve managed to recover a couple of blog entries posted between the most recent backup and the final crash. Google’s cache is good for something after all!)

This website is back in action after approximately 40 hours off the air. Initially described to me by my host’s tech support as a GRUB issue, it finally involved a complete reloading of the operating system followed by a complete reload of the configurations and data on every hosted account on mulroney (yep, my provider has named all their servers after Canadian prime ministers).

The only data loss that I can see is a small blog item I wrote on Monday (ie, after Sunday’s backup which was used for the restoration) congratulating Fairfield on their Sydney first grade final annihilation of Manly-Warringah. Any opportunity to slag off at a team from Manly getting beaten should not be missed

I promised when The Net Sessions began that I would try to keep to a minimum of one podcast a month. I didn’t do a podcast in February. Sorry.

Busy, and frankly, a bit uninspired. Some of it has already been recorded, including a response to some of the feedback I have received. So maybe I’ll get around to post-production next week.

I’m rather surprised, actually, that I’ve had more than 800 accesses to the podcasts in February, despite the fact that I haven’t put out a new one since the beginning of January. (The podcast accesses for January totalled 1731, by far the busiest month to date).

Of course, if you haven’t listened to any of the podcasts of The Net Sessions yet, please do so at www.thenetsessions.net

If anyone’s interested in providing sponsorship for a weekly or fortnightly podcast on cricket, including interviews and features and aimed at an international audience - ie, what I’d like The Net Sessions to be - please drop me a message via the feedback page. It’s amazing what can be achieved when you have the resources to achieve them.