Can there really be another blog post coming so soon after the previous ones? Have I been infected with some brain parasite that compels its victim to churn out travel content at a rate that some experts consider dangerous? The answers to those questions are yes, and maybe.
Yes, it’s time to publish a new list of what’s new on the site because even though it’s not been that long since I last did one of these I have found the time and inclination to post enough new write-ups about cruises and weekends away in England that it’s worth summarising it all on the site and for those people who subscribe to the updates. There will also be some news about something we booked yesterday that should be entertaining when it occurs in a couple of weeks, and for those who host their own WordPress sites I’ve got a little recommendation to impart too based on some issues that have been plaguing this site over the last week (but which now appear to be fixed).
Let’s start with the first two posts that have popped up relating to a weekend away we took last August. That was a few days and nights spent in Oxford, a place we’d visited only briefly once before but had passed by on numerous occasions over the years.
The first post covered the hotel we picked and the first morning’s walk into the city with a wander around University Parks and some time in the Natural History Museum.
From there we then visited Oxford’s most famous museum, the Ashmolean, and that post is mainly just photos with very little description. If you like Roman or Egyptian exhibits then it’s got some great ones.
Three more travel posts have been published from last year’s first cruise aboard Sky Princess. The first two of those complete the Danish portion of that cruise. In the first one we had a great time at Bangsbo Fort, part of Germany’s line of defences along its occupied Atlantic coast during World War II. Bunkers and guns and lovely clifftop views.
That fort visit was part of an excursion we took while docked in Skagen and we concluded our day in the northern Denmark town with an explore of it on our own and some great beers in a brewery. Skagen Church and Brewery.
And finally, the most recent cruise post on the site sees us visiting Oslo, Norway for the first time. As usual, we took an excursion, and in the first travelogue from the Norwegian capital we visit the absolutely incredible Vigeland Park to see and touch the sculptures there. It’s a must-visit place if you’re in Oslo, in our opinion.
Onto some travel news, now. Sort of.
P&O Cruises have some work to do to improve how they allow bookings for restaurants or events in general. It’s been a bugbear of ours for some time that it favours those who board early with a hefty “tough luck” to everyone else. As far as the cruise line is concerned, of course, all that matters is that the venues are booked because booked venues cost money and they’d like more of yours. They’re a business. We get it. We don’t like it. It’s grossly unfair.
That moan over, though, they do allow some bookings for the Limelight Club (on ships that have that venue) two weeks ahead of the cruise. As of yesterday we are two weeks from boarding Britannia for the first time and thus it was that I logged into the website yesterday and made sure to book a table. We were pretty much going to book no matter who was performing – the Limelight Club is an evening including a meal followed by a performance from a guest artist – because it had been one of the few things we’d actually enjoyed when we cruised on Iona (see: Iona Food and Entertainment). As it turns out, we’ll be seeing Chesney Hawkes perform and we’ve decided to book that for embarkation day because we’ve cruised out of Southampton enough times not to be bothered about missing the view of Ikea, whereas the possibility of missing some fjord cruising is something we don’t want to entertain.
Finally, a tiny piece of advice for any other bloggers out there using WordPress and who are hosting their own sites.
This last week has seen this site suddenly develop all manner of problems. Typically that came from trying to insert any images into a post or when publishing or even auto-saving. The symptoms were that not only would those things take a long time – in one case half an hour to save a post – but during that time the entire website became unresponsive to anyone on the web, timing out with gateway errors.
Now, the first thing you do when something weird happens in WordPress sites normally is disable some plugins to see if one of them is to blame. I did this but they weren’t the cause, and each test to see if the site was working invariably led to another period of downtime for the site.
My software development brain (I have one; it comes free with the software development job I have) suspected that the problem was most likely database queries pessimistically locking the tables but I wasn’t able to gain root access to my host to log slow queries to see if that was the cause. There also didn’t seem to be anything missing when comparing existing database indexes to those created by default in fresh WordPress installations. I was pondering options when I stumbled upon a plugin called Index WP MySQL For Speed. This plugin claims to alter existing indexes and add some new ones to optimise some typical queries used by other plugins and WordPress itself. And its claims were absolutely spot-on. Installing that plugin and letting it do its thing sorted everything out. I highly recommend using it if you have your own site.
That’ll do for this update.