It’s been a long time in the planning but it’s finally upon us! Shweta and I are off for a month around Eastern Europe, taking our own car over 6,000 miles, visiting in excess of 12 countries and reaching as far East as the Black Sea coast of Romania and Bulgaria.

As you would expect there is a little technology backing us up along the way and so if you click on the tyre tracks on the right or follow this tracker link, you’ll be taken to a dedicated trip page where you can follow our progress and share in some of the travel excitement.

We hope you enjoy our updates and we look forward to meeting up with friends upon our return to tell our travel stories!

I upgraded the Akismet anti-spam plugin on my site earlier only to be greeted with a message stating “your akismet key is invalid”. Turns out that despite having my personal key since early 2006, I had to re-request the key on the Akismet site. I noticed when I did this that I was encouraged to pay a subscription fee of my choosing.

While I do completely understand the need to monetise services like this, I really didn’t like the underhand way in which I was forced onto that page. Plugin upgrades shouldn’t render a previously issued key invalid and certainly shouldn’t force you onto a site where payment is solicited to proceed (even if you can side-step this). As a plugin author, if I published a plugin into the WordPress repository that did this kind of thing I’d likely have my entry deactivated for violation of terms of service – smacks of double standards to me