Mixed message

Tuesday, March 14, 2006 ~ Comments Off

Aretha caresses my ear as the headlines leap off the page and stab my eye.

News of a Home Office campaign to warn men that “having sex without consent could lead to a prison sentence” is launched today. I didn’t think that was something new, but it turns out it’s more to do with raising awareness and re-educating minds. A good thing I’m sure you’ll agree.

However, it does make me wonder. Will future liasons be marked with the presentation of a pre-printed card.

Bloggies 2006 results and many congratulations to, as Anna graciously puts it,”Girl, Tokyo Girl and Zoe (“ZoeGirl”?), you are all fabulous, and now even more officially so”.

I’m trying to claim some credit as they are all on my blogroll but I’ll concede that that was probably NOT a swaying decision when the votes were being counted. Those results aside it seems that Post Secret and Boing Boing took every other award. Sad really and seems to prove, as many have suggested, that the competition is becoming a little bit exclusive. Sorry, yer names not down, you ain’t gettin’ in.

And a quick word for the despairing losers. Velocity. (sorry, couldn’t resist, and no it’s not my joke)

IF CATEGORY=4, DISPLAY 1 MOST RECENT AND IF CATEGORY=2 OR CATEGORY=3, DISPLAY 1, MOST RECENT
AND
IF CATEGORY=4 USES [THIS CSS]
IF CATEGORY=2 USES [THIS CSS]
IF CATEGORY=3 USES [THIS CSS]

Kept me up until 1 a.m. that did, and it STILL doesn’t bloody work!

Back to Aretha singing the classics, yours for only £6.97. It’s worth every penny and much much more. So much class on such a tiny silver disc. Hard to believe sometimes.

And, with my soul being serenaded and the strings of my heart being plucked, I’ll leave; to dally here any longer would ruin everything.

My ears are being caressed and it’s sure to be a good day.

WP Plugin Idea

Wednesday, February 1, 2006 ~ Comments Off

May already exist. CBATG (well I did but only found one ‘unpublished’ plugin).

A plugin that will control the publishing of posts, only releasing one every X days.

For example, I could write five posts in one night, hit publish and forget about them. The plugin would publish the first one immediately, then set the date on the second one to X days from the first, the date of the third one to X days from the second and so on.

It would need to check the dates of previously published posts to get the gap between the first post and the most recently published one… in fact that’s all it would need to do. Check the db for the last published post, and change the date on the next post to X days from that. As WordPress will pre-publish to future dates that’s all it should need to do… Hmmm that doesn’t sound too hard actually. For someone else, obviously.

Upgraded

Friday, August 19, 2005 ~ Comments Off

What I did (for Lyle and anyone else).

Usual caveats apply, if you’ve done a lot of hacking then YOU need to know what YOU’VE changed. This is all taken from the WordPress Upgrade documentation. Worked for me.

The Preparation
1. Backup your database and the files on your site.
2. Download the WordPress ZIP file for 1.5.2.
3. De-activate all plugins on your site (will make your site look funny until the files are upgraded). I’d suggest taking a note of them as well, just in case you need to upgrade them too (I didn’t have to).

Note: It is NOT necessary to run install.php or upgrade.php as no changes are made to the database. As with all WordPress upgrades, the contents of your /wp-content/ folder should remain intact and unchanged.

The Upgrade
1. Delete /wp-admin/ folder.
2. Delete /wp-includes/ folder
3. Delete all the wordpress files in the root directory where the root index.php file is found. DO NOT DELETE wp-config.php. Note: My WordPress install is in a separate folder, I deleted all the files in my “WordPress” folder, leaving the remaining folders intact.
4. Download and extract the new version.
5. Upload the appropriate folders – /wp-admin/ and /wp-includes/ – and the files they contain.
6. Upload all the files in the WordPress root directory to your WordPress folder.
7. Re-activate your plugins.

Done. Hopefully. Was a breeze this time round, the docs could still do with a little “dis-ambiguating” and I guess it’s about time I used my membership of the doc team to good effect!

RADAR

Wednesday, March 30, 2005 ~ Comments Off

Jonathan King. Guilty or not he needs to learn the meaning of the word dignity, although I doubt he’d recognise it if you filled a large bucket with it and twatted him upside the head. Twice.

On what scale do you judge musical popularity? Critical acclaim, album sales or a varied level of both? What was the last GREAT album you heard? (I’m going to start reviewing CDs here as well as the occasional movie)

TO DO: Finish draft post on “women in blogging” currently titled Chasming the Tipping Velvet (geddit).

TO DO: Finish HaloScan Wiki, getting close.

M74 extension, a good or a bad thing?

When I offered to be the book keeper for my wife’s new venture, she said: “You don’t have the figure for heads”. We spent the next ten minutes giggling like children.

WORDPRESS: Miniblog plugin?

Introspection

Thursday, March 17, 2005 ~ Comments Off

1. Fedup with Blogger timing out on me. I need to switch the MiniBlog to WordPress. But how? Suggestions welcomed.

2. The more eagle eyed will have spotted a heading in the sidebar “Listening”. I’m still trying to get the plugin to work but eventually it will pull a list from audiscrobbler of the last 10 tracks I’ve listened to by me.

3. The even more eagle eyed will have noticed that the archive pages have a new “heatmap”. The brighter and larger the text the more posts there are. Looks a bit messy at the moment but I like the idea.

4. I’m aching to revert back to a cleaner, white based design. Thankfully I have more important things to do. Which reminds me, I should be doing them now! (File under: avoidance technique)

Get a grip

Thursday, March 3, 2005 ~ Comments Off

I’m finally getting to grips with WordPress, it’s that “click” moment I always (eventually) get with most things.

The final puzzle has been solved, in no small thanks to Stuart of foolfillment fame who left a link to a WordPress plugin in a recent comment. The plugin allows you to have a different number of posts displayed here on the ‘home’ page, on the search page, and in the various levels of archive page.

If you do want to use it, just edit it with a text editor, setting the limits as you desire, then upload it to the WordPress plugin directory, activate it et voilà! Go on, try it out. Search for something, or head into the archives. The search will return 25 posts, the archives will show 50 posts for each month and ALL the posts if you choose a year (might be advisable NOT to do that). The main page (that you are reading) is currently set to show the last 10 posts, but that can be changed if it’s causing the page to load slowly.

I’m still bemused as to why this isn’t standard functionality mind you.

Edging

Friday, February 25, 2005 ~ Comments Off

Slowly getting around to fixing some minor things here.

The search is now a bit better (still can’t get it to return a different number of posts than are currently set to display on the main page – frankly this is ridiculuous but the forum, Wiki and Google are still failing me on this), and I’ve finally updated the Site Archives to, hopefully, be a bit more user friendly.

I’m still working my way through ALL posts without titles as it’s screwing up the archives a little (it’s a whole permalink naming mess to be honest), and I’m also categorising as I go. A slow process but one area the new version of WordPress has definitely improved. Now, when you select a month to edit, it will remember and return you to the same set of posts – in 1.2 when editing an old post it always returned you to the most recent.

Anyway, this is all probably boring as hell to everyone except me. If I DO find a way to get the search to return full results and if I get the blogroll to display who has updated, I’ll post something here.

Sky+ has a bug. The failed recordings bug seems to be quite common place and hit me hard the other night. I was recording Desperate Housewives, and was going to start watching it before it had finished (so as to skip through the adverts). However Sky+ wouldn’t start playing the recording, something I’ve not had a problem with, so I left it to record the episode. Later that night the entire box had frozen up. Wouldn’t respond from the remote or the fascia, so I powered the box down. Next morning I powered up and it seemed to be working fine.

When I got home last night I decided to watch the episode and was greeted with several FAILED messages next to previously recorded programmes and films. Rather than pay premium rate I head to the the forums and discovered that this was a common issue and was occasionally fixable by re-building the Sky+ planner. I tried that, didn’t work. It looks like I’m faced with re-formatting the entire thing, losing all the recordings I had. I’ll be phoning Sky Customer Services over the weekend and see what they have to say for themselves. Not happy!

This evening I will be partaking of some alcoholic refreshments. I’ve not been out to the pub for ages and I’m beginning to look forward to it. I just hope I can stay awake, as I spent yet another night watching the clock click past 2 a.m.

Still, I can have a lie in on Saturday as we don’t have much planned. I do have some web design stuff to do for someone, more on that tomorrow, and a few bits and bobs of general maintenance over at Scottish Blogs.