Fierce Disco Remixed was released this morning - the second Fierce Disco compilation available as a digital download on .

Over the last five years, Fierce Angels have been releasing a great collection of Fierce Disco compilations, all compiled by the main man Mark Doyle and packaged up into a stunning set of collectible triple-CD packs.

This year, however, Fierce Angels have ventured into the world of digital download, first releasing Fierce Disco 3 back in March and now following it up with Fierce Disco Remixed.

Fierce Disco Remixed is available for download from for just £7.99 which includes 45 unmixed DJ-friendly tracks plus the 3 mixes as individual tracks at the end.

Not one to overlook the more popular CD market, Fierce Angels will be pressing just 100,000 CD copies of Fierce Disco Remixed so if you’re after a limited edition CD, make sure you pick up your copy quickly. Amazon are selling Fierce Disco Remixed for £9.98 (not including delivery), Play for £10.99 with free delivery and HMV for £9.99 with free UK delivery.

Fierce Disco Remixed is, in summary, a “best of” compilation from the last 5 years of releases. If I’m brutally honest, I’m not normally a fan of Best Of’s as I tend to lean on Fierce Angels for inspiration, delivering new and upcoming music that I haven’t heard elsewhere. That said, Fierce Disco Remixed is probably the only compilation I’ve heard in a long time that will get constantly played.

Mark Doyle has selected what could arguably be the ultimate collection of funky house. He’s mixed up some of his all-time favourites such as Praise Cats “Shined On Me” with some of my all-time favourites like the Bassmonkey’s “The Answer“. All the regulars are in there too such as Bonnie Bailey, Peyton, Buzzjunkies, Freemasons, Eric Kupper and Wideboys.

Each CD has a slightly different play on the disco house genre, all mixed by Mr Doyle himself for that added personal touch. I’m glad Mark has been a bit more creative with some of the transitions in this compilation too, making the most of the musical hooks of these disco house classics. It makes a pleasant change to Hed Kandi’s factory settings they tend to stick to.

Have a glance over the track listing to get an idea of the fine tunes featured…

Disc 1

1. Discrete ft Belle - Free (Club Mix)
2. Crystal Waters - Never Enough (Harlem Hustlers Love Club Edit)
3. Club 4 Life - Don’t Matter (12″ Club Mix)
4. Soulshaker vs Ce Ce Peniston - Shame Shame Shame (Club Mix)
5. The Wideboys ft Clare Evers - Bomb The Secret (Intention) (Full Club)
6. Fac15 ft Cathi O - Haven’t You Heard (EK’s Believe In The Magic Mix)
7. Whelan & Di Scala ft Nikki Belle - Teardrops (Hott 22 Mix)
8. Buzzjunkies ft Elesha - If You Love Me (Moto Blanco Club Mix)
9. Frankie Knuckles - Disco Shimmy (Eric Kupper Mix)
10. Eighteen ft Stephanie Mills - (You’re Putting) Rush On Me (Moto Blanco Mix)
11. Audio Fraud ft Peyton - Ride Like The Wind (Moto Blanco Club Mix)
12. Cahill ft Nikki Belle - Trippin On You (Extended Mix)
13. Marco Demark - Tiny Dancer (Moto Blanco Mix
14. Freemasons ft Amanda Wilson - Watchin (Club Mix)
15. Wi-Fi ft Melanie M - Be Without You (LMC Extended Mix)

Disc 2

1. Michael Grey - The Weekend (Main Mix)
2. Wi Fi ft Siobhan - Last Night (Club Mix)
3. Peyton - Falling (Eric Kupper Mix)
4. Bonnie Bailey - Kingdom Of Pretty (Bassmonkeys Club Mix)
5. Gusto - Disco’s Revenge (Freemasons Vocal Club Mix)
6. Grooveland - Tell Me Original (Vocal Mix)
7. Bassmonkeys ft Naomi Marsh - The Answer (Club Mix)
8. Dirty Old Anne - Turn Me On (Vocal Mix)
9. Riffs N’ Rays ft Kelly Llorrenna - Let The Music Play(Riffs N Rays Mix)
10. Elek-Tro Junkies - Don’t Hold Back On Me (Club Mix)
11. Freemasons ft Siedah Garrett - Rain Down Love (Walken Mix)
12. Whelan & Di Scala feat Nikki Belle Erskine - Sunset To Sunrise (Extended Mix)
13. Ultrabeat - Sure Feels Good Soulseekerz Mix
14. Stunt - I’ll Be There (Wideboys Mix)
15. Bassmonkeys ft Naomi Marsh - Here’s Where the Story Ends (Club Mix)

Disc 3

1. Soul Searcher - Feeling Love (Soulsearcher Club Mix)
2. Milk N Sugar - Stay Around (Club Mix)
3. Steven Anders vs Andrea T Mendoza - Can’t Fake It (Tibet Vocal Mix)
4. Inaya Day - Nasty Girl (Riffs N Ray’s Extended Mix)
5. Marly - You’ll Never Know (Morjac Extended Mix)
6. Gadjo - So Many Times (Extended Mix)
7. K-Klass ft Bobbi - Let Me Show You (2008 Re-Master)
8. Herd & Fitz - I Just Can’t Get Enough (Full Club Mix)
9. Blaze ft Barbara Tucker - Precious Love (DF Future 3000 Mix)
10. FR ft Jenny - Love Is The Music (Original Mix)
11. Praisecats - Shined On Me (Bini & Martini Mix)
12. Freeloaders - So Much Love To Give (Basscore Remix)
13. Therese - Put Em High (LMC Extended Mix)
14. Evoke - Arms Of Lloren (Steinway Mix)
15. Rhythm Fatale ft Redd Angel - Man In The Mirror (Extended Mix)

If you’re a fan of disco house (and those who enjoy my Funky House Finesse podcast are quite likely to be), I suggest you get yourself a copy of Fierce Disco Remixed right away. Whether you get in early for a CD or go for the digital download, you will not be disappointed!

WordPress is quite a popular open source CMS that is often praised for its ease of use and simple installation. Like most open source applications, WordPress tends to have upgrades every few months to improve security, stability and the underlying framework.

In recent versions of WordPress, this process has been extremely easy with an automatic upgrade system (something that has also been integrated into the plugin framework too) but on older versions, the process wasn’t particularly straight forward.

Thankfully, I found a rather useful set of commands that you can run on your server via SSH to make this process extremely simple.

Disclaimer: I recommend you always take a backup of the database and working folder before running these commands in case something goes wrong. 99% of the time, I’ve not had any problems with this process but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

# Get the latest WordPress version available.
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

# Uncompress it.
tar xfz latest.tar.gz

# Delete the old wp-includes and wp-admin directories.
rm -rf ./wp-includes/
rm -rf ./wp-admin/

# Go to the new Wordpress directory:
cd wordpress/

# Copy the downloaded files to your existing WP install, overwriting any old files.
cp -rpf -f * ../

# Remove the uncompressed and downloaded files.
cd ..
rm -rf ./wordpress/
rm -f latest.tar.gz

# Visit your blog and upgrade the database (if needed).

Make sure you visit your WordPress installation in the browser straight away to run any upgrade scripts that are required. You should only see one screen and that process is complete.

Over the last few years, I’ve been using IMDB to keep a record of the movies I’ve watched by giving them a rating out of ten using the simple star rating widget at the top of each movie page.

By rating each movie, I have managed to create quite an extensive history of the movies I’ve seen which is publicly available on my personal vote history page.

The problem I’ve had though is accessing that data elsewhere for use on other websites, such as this blog, Twitter or Facebook profile.

Until now, I’ve been using a service called Dapper which can scrape any accessible webpage for data and output that data as a range of different source such as RSS, Atom, JSON or XML.

The RSS output has actually worked quite well but the Dapper service was quite tempramental at keeping up-to-date, sometimes taking a few weeks to update. It wasn’t ideal for a reliable source.

Well, I discovered this morning that IMDB actually offer a dedicated RSS feed directly from their website of this exact data.

If you have been publishing your vote history to a public page, you can see your feed by appending your unique reference to the end of the URL http://feed://rss.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=[your id].

For example, my vote history would be accessible at http://rss.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=5051158.

Unfortunately, the date saved doesn’t seem to be output as the timestamp for each RSS item but I’m sure a few pokes at the IMDB development team could sort that out.

No doubt there are other personalised RSS feeds available from IMDB such as your movie reviews and favourites. If I find any, I’ll add them to this post.

Maybe now, I can tap into the data and start building some useful widgets out of it.

Update: it seems there is already a Facebook app which taps in to your vote history called My Movies.

The Apple OSX bevelled effect isn’t exactly original now but, nonetheless, there are times when the style suits your design needs, especially when wireframing OSX/iPhone applications.

I’ve found a neat little method of creating the bevel effect in Fireworks which you can reuse quite easily:

1. Select the object you want to apply the effect to. (Note it works best on darker objects).
2. Apply a drop shadow filter to the object (Filters > Shadow and Glow > Drop Shadow).
3. Set the Distance to 1, Opacity to 20%, Softness to 0, Angle to 270 and the Color as #FFFFFF.

That’s it! See the following example of how it looks.

For added convenience, why not set this as a favourite style?

1. Select the object you’ve just applied the filter to (it should be the only filter applied).
2. Click the + button next to Filters.
3. Select Options > Save As Style….
4. Name the style, something like “OSX Bevel“.
5. Now you can apply the bevelled effect to any object you select in Fireworks by clicking the + button and choosing “OSX Bevel“.

Hopefully some of the designers out there will find this little tip useful.

If you can think of a quicker or more convenient way of applying this effect in Fireworks or have an alternative approach for all the Photoshop users out there, leave a comment below.