On Tuesday 24th. January 2012 both vicchi.org and garygale.com went down. Then again, last night, both sites went down again.

The first of these outages was entirely intentional; like many other sites on the web from the huge to the tiny, I blacked out my web presence in protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act which was being voted on in the US Senate on that day. I did this for two reasons. Firstly the internet is a global network and the SOPA legislation, as worded, would have had a massive impact on the global internet and negligible impact on online piracy. Secondly, whilst I live in the UK and SOPA is a piece of US legislaton, past experience shows that the UK government have a rather good history of importing UK versions of poor US legislation. Here's a helpful infographic which speaks more about SOPA that I ever could.

WP Biographia's always had the ability to suppress the display of the plugin's Biography Box for all users; unfortunately that's been accomplished by simply not installing the plugin. But judging from requests on the WordPress forums as well as emails hitting my Inbox, suppressing the display of the Biography Box for some users ranks highest on the list of requested features.

So it's good to be able to say that as of v2.1.1 of the plugin, you can now do this and v2.1.1 is now live and able to be downloaded from GitHub as well as from within WordPress or via the WordPress plugin repository.

Although I fly a lot these days, I don't fly on internal routes in the US that much and so flying Virgin America, which has onboard wifi, is still something that brings out the childish geek in me. In homage to a certain Mr. Aaron Cope, once again I am in the sky as I write this and starting to think that maybe I will only write blog posts from airplanes from now on.

While sitting in a hotel room about a week or so back, I realised that while vicchi.org has been the home of my blog for years and the current incarnation may have 267 pieces of bloggage tucked away in the bowels of WordPress (that's 268 with this post), the theme has been pretty much static since sometime in 2007. The same goes for my other web presence over at garygale.com.

But back to this blog for a moment. Like a lot of people I started out with a stock WordPress install and theme. Then I went through the discovery of the WordPress theme repository, installing and uninstalling too many plugins, before finally becoming confident enough to start hacking the PHP and CSS of an existing theme into something vaguely approaching what I wanted. And thereby hangs the problem. My theme, which started out as Chandra Maharzan's rather wonderful Cleanr, suffered from the problem that each time the theme was updated I needed to go through the changes and manually apply them to my hacked version. Scalable and fun this is not.

It's taken a while but after 20 commits on GitHub, 1000 odd lines of PHP code, 40 odd WordPress forum posts and, what to me is a staggering, 1100 odd WordPress downloads, WP Biographia finally hits version 2.0. As I've written before, this is very much an ongoing learning process and putting version 2.0 out into the wild hasn't been entirely trouble free, as this thread on the WordPress forums amply shows.

But despite the initial teething problems, version 2.0 is out and the list of enhancements and fixes remains unchanged from the beta version, but the official version 2.0 release of this plugin is now both on GitHub and the WordPress plugin repository and while my Codeage page still remains the official home for this plugin, there's a nicer looking home on GitHub for WP Biographia courtesy of GitHub's pages feature.

You can argue that it's cheating or you can argue that there's a vague degree of ecological-friendliness but sometimes you just end up recycling and repurposing a conference talk deck for more than one conference. So it was with my keynote at GeoCommunity in Nottingham last month and my keynote at the Location Business Summit in San Jose. One deck, two audiences. As it turns out, taking this approach can yield unexpected benefits.

Firstly there's the UK audience at GeoCommunity, the Association For Geographic Information's annual get-together and all round geo shindig. GeoCommunity is probably the closest the UK has to California's Where 2.0, but with a very different audience and a very different accent. The AGI still draws the bulk of its membership from the GIS heartlands of the GI community, although in recent years the association has dramatically expanded its reach into the web, mobile and neogeography domains.

The Location Business Summit, on the other hand is firstly in San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley and secondly has a very pronounced American accent and draws the bulk of the audience from the Bay Area where web and mobile, both from a developer and from a business perspective, hold sway.

One deck, two audiences.

Another day, another flight, another addition to the ever growing and increasingly arcane number of steps that you need to go through in order to get through an airport and actually take off on a plane. I've written before on the world of airport security, be it having your bags X-Rayed or searched and on engaging flight-safe mode on your mobile phone/tablet/e-book reader/laptop.

Last week, flying from London Heathrow to Berlin's Tegel airport I found a new addition to the increasingly detached-from-reality world of airline security ... the electronic boarding pass. In principle, the electronic boarding pass is a great idea. First introduced in 1999 by Alaska Airways, checking into your flight online and putting a QR code on a graphic of your boarding pass cuts down queueing and waiting at the airport. Some airlines either send you the boarding pass as an SMS message, as an email attachment or as a time limited web URL. Some airlines provide an app on your phone; British Airways falls into this category and their app covers Windows Phone 7, iOS, Android and Blackberry.

On September 20th, with a new venue and a new tag line, the second W3G (un)conference kicked off the annual three day UK geo-fest that is formed of one day's worth of W3G followed in quick succession by two day's worth of AGI GeoCommunity.

After last year's inaugural geo-festivities in Stratford-upon-Avon, this year W3G grabbed firmly onto the shirt-tails of its big brother, in the shape of GeoCommunity, and relocated to the East Midlands Conference Centre on the grounds of Nottingham University, which is aptly located in, err, Nottingham.

In May of this year, Nokia announced the retirement of the Ovi brand and the observant map watchers amongst you may have noticed that pointing your browser of choice at maps.ovi.com now automagically redirects you to the new, shiny maps.nokia.com.

What you may not have noticed is that Nokia maps doesn't just work on your desktop or laptop web browser or on Nokia smartphones, as Electric Pig nicely pointed out, Nokia has invaded the iPhone too. Point your iPhone or iPad at the Nokia Maps for Mobile Web at m.maps.nokia.com and you'll see something like this ...