If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that two friends and I will be walking the Alfred Wainwright inspired Coast to Coast Walk in June - 192 miles. It was to be a party of four, but Neil dropped out for personal reasons so it’s just Clive Catton, Richard Poole and me.

Where I’d like your help is to suggest any local charities (local to Lincoln, that is) I might raise funds for. Obviously, I’ll need to approach them and find a charity willing to work with me on this. Secondly, I’ll be looking for sponsors and if you feel you could help in this way as well it’d be very much appreciated. You can contact me at richard [at] rkwinternet [dot] com.

Moving on, I needed a break after what’s been a very busy week so nipping over to the Peak District with Clive today made a very welcome break. And we’ve been lucky with the weather too! After all, rain had been predicted for mid-afternoon and it didn’t materialise.

We’d originally intended setting off from Edale to walk to the summit of Kinder Scout, but we missed the turning and ended up miles further on in the Snake Pass.

Undeterred, Clive got out his PDA complete with satellite enabled memory maps and promptly set a route from where the Pennine Way crosses the Snake Pass.

The ambient temperature was 8C when we set off and had a fierce, bitter following wind. At first I was disappointed at the flagstone path we were following; this was all too easy. But it soon became apparent this was a necessity because of the peat bogs surrounding us.

We made good progress keeping up a steady 3mph ‘til we reached the Kinder Scout escarpment after which we slowed to 1.5mph. I was very glad of my layers of clothing by now as the wind was persistent as ever.

Still, the sunshine made up for the cold and the scenery was further recompense. Once we reached the plateau we could see the famous Jodrell Bank, Manchester University’s Astrophysics Centre.

As we passed along the path towards the summit I caught sight of a waterfall where falling streams of water were being blown back up the waterfall as though they would never reach the ground. This was too good not to photograph so we stopped for lunch and attempted to catch the spectacle.

We stopped for half-an-hour and decided that rather than continue on to the summit we’d return the way we came.

The clouds seemed to be stacking up behind us, but the rain held off and we made it back to the car. 9 miles in 4 hours including our lunch break. We managed an average of 2.5mph, which is a speed we’re aiming to maintain, on average, on the Coast to Coast Walk.

Remember, if you can suggest any local charities, I’d love to raise some funds for a local good cause - thanks.

Some background information first.

My regard for WordPress has been growing steadily over the last two years since I started using it as my blogging software of choice. And I’ve integrated it for quite a few clients, some of whom have also used it’s content management system to maintain and add web pages to their sites.

Back in 2006 I needed to make quite a few changes to the system to get it working in such a manner as to be easy to use for website owners, and to perform to it’s full potential with regard to search engine optimisation.

During this two year period WordPress have been making improvements to the core system, which has meant my intervention has been required less and less - and that’s a good thing.

So last week when it was announced WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 1 was to be made available imminently I was very excited and installed it as soon as it ‘hit the streets’. RC1 seemed very stable and gave me an insight into the likely extent of the changes, which are many and varied. The admin section has had a major overhaul and will take a bit of getting used to.

The good news is that if you’re new to WordPress you won’t have to re-learn where everything is. If you’re already using an earlier version all I can say is it’ll be definitely worthwhile upgrading for all the added improvements you’ll have access to. And don’t worry I’ll be here to help.

Moving on, WordPress 2.5 was released yesterday and within 3 hours I had the basic system installed on my own website. In truth, I hadn’t intended installing version 2.5. The reason for this was because when I started making preparations for upgrading WordPress in the morning it still hadn’t been released! But when I was ready to download the WordPress install file the stable version was 2.5 and not 2.3.3. I was so surprised because no-one knew when the final stable 2.5 version was going to be ready - it was just an amazing coincidence.

I finished the installation at 03:30 this morning, it was a complicated one, trust me!

Now I have a site totally operated by the latest version of WordPress for both the web pages and the blog.

Was it worth it? You betcha!

I’ll make another post in the next few days detailing the beneficial changes of this new release.