I’ve been using Gmail for a few years and I finally got around to tidying up my email archive. This was becoming an issue as I keep a local backup of my Gmail account using IMAP Backup.

I wanted to delete messages with large attachments resulting from emailing work in progress. While you can find attachments using search modifiers has:attachment and filename:zip, you can’t search or sort on attachment size.

The solution: the IMAPsize freeware Windows IMAP utility found via this blog post from Amit Agarwal. IMAPsize’s speciality is searching your Gmail account for folders (Gmail labels) and messages based on attachment size.

I quickly found and deleted my large attachments using IMAPsize. Backup problem solved. Recommended.

WordPress 3.0 has just been released so I’ve updated all my blogs to the latest version. The automatic update worked well, as usual, although it would be nice to have a link to a “What’s New” page before running the automatic upgrade.

One of my hosting accounts limits PHP memory, so for these blogs I need to deactive all plugins before running the automatic update. My other hosting service has enough PHP RAM to not have to do this, which is nice.

All my blogs have now been running WordPress 3.0 in production for a few days and so far I’ve not met any problems with the core product.

One minor issue has been with the CSS minification in the W3 Total Cache plugin. I’m using the latest development version of W3TC but it has an issue with CSS so I’ve disabled minification until I’ve time to look into this further.

The new multisite feature in WordPress 3.0 seems a good option for combining a number of separate WordPress installations to cut maintenance effort. I’ve had a first look at some tutorials and it looks possible. However, not all my plugins are yet multisite aware.

The Thesis theme I use on all my blogs is not multisite aware so I’d need to make some edits to the Thesis code to work in a multisite network.

So, I’ll leave my existing installations alone and give my core plugins and theme some time to catch up with WordPress core. Once they are multisite aware I’ll merge all my retired blogs into a single WordPress installation.

You’ve no doubt heard of the widely used web framework Ruby on Rails, but what about COBOL developers? If you’ve worked with mainframe COBOL in a previous life you might appreciate the COBOL ON COGS web framework:

Click for the online demo of the COBOL ON COGS web framework. Watch carefully as the screens change and recall the long-delay screen phosphors on early IBM 3270 terminals!

I’ve consolidated contact information from all my active (and retired) WordPress blogs to this site. John Godley’s Redirection plugin makes it easy to add 301 redirects to the new canonical definitions. It also catches 404 errors, with an easy way to add redirects for incorrect URLs, common typos etc. All in all, a very useful plugin for restructuring your WordPress blog.

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This is the first post on the Andrew-Biss.com blog.