Web/Tech - Semantically driven

The circle of blogs

August 12, 2011 by Jen

Friday, 5 August 2011, Day 255/365.

I’ve changed templates on my blog. I’ve yet to pay for a theme and free themes quite often don’t get updated so there were some aspects to the old one that annoyed me.

Anyhoo, pop on through, have a look and leave me a comment. I like to reply to my commenters and have done so via email but that doesn’t carry on the thread of conversation on the blog so I’ll give a go to the replying on the blog instead – especially now that this theme allows threaded comments.

You can also subscribe to the blog via RSS or email (see the button on the right of the blog).

I still want to muck around with the footer but that’s not urgent.

Oh, and check out the new Project 365 page. I’m not completely happy with that but I’ve got a question on there that I’m hoping someone can help out with.

iPad – I tried to play

August 31, 2010 by Jen

photo: Yutaka Tsutano

I started my new job nearly four weeks ago and one of the perks was that I get to play with the office iPad. Like a kid with a new toy I took it home at the end of last week after a short tutorial from my colleague.

The experience left me a bit disillusioned though. Let me explain.

I could logout of my colleague’s Facebook and Twitterific accounts and login as myself. Facebook played nicely but Twitterific still had my colleague’s tweets on there until mine started taking over. I did find a way to clear the cache – not that any of mine, or hers, are sensitive and we follow each other anyway.

But when it came time to update the applications I couldn’t because it wouldn’t let me logout of her iTunes account and login as myself.

iPad, as I discovered the hard way, is not multi-user.

After that I couldn’t be bothered adding any other apps because I didn’t want to spend half my Sunday night finding out how to log out of them.

I’m still to get my iPhone – long story – but I imagine they’re quite similar which I don’t see as a problem. But an iPhone is less likely to be shared. Sure, your kids might play some games on it but it’s fairly unlikely they’ll be using the same applications like Facebook, email, and so on, as you are.

iPad, on the other hand, I think is more likely to be shared. Come on Apple, multi-user would be nice.

I’m not alone in sharing this thought according to MacWorld and macenstein

Pink

October 2, 2009 by Jen

Finally I can breathe. That extra work I was doing has now been finished. Well the website’s been published but there’s still a bit of tidying up to do.

This week’s been one of those hellish weeks. JJ excelled himself at being naughty at vacation care on Monday and I was lucky he was able to stay there for the rest of the week. I don’t know what I would have done if he couldn’t go there and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in the future during holidays. I’m at a real loss there, so much so I can’t even write more about it.

I had another deadline to meet during the week – details of which I won’t go into but it added extra stress onto what was already a stressful week.

I’m supposed to be doing some ukuele stuff this weekend but I had to bow out of it because I haven’t had the time to practise.

So now I’ve got a bit of extra time I’ve sat here this morning changing my blog theme to pink for the pink October breast cancer. There’s more about it at Pink for October. A couple of people I know have been diagnosed with breast cancer this year. Thankfully I think both are good for the moment but fingers crossed on that one.

And lastly, if you haven’t already, please pop over and enter my competition to win a Stargate DVD.

Intensity

August 30, 2009 by Jen

photo credit: Simon Pow

I’ve been doing some extra work – paid – so I have to do it. There’s a deadline and there’s SO much work to do. It’s a very content rich website that’s getting a completely new look. If I don’t say so myself, I’ve done a damn fine coding job (with a bit of help from a colleague with Javascript). I did a lot of it over the last weekend and by Monday I was proudly showing it off to some colleagues (it’s work related) because I was really proud of myself.

My CSS skills have grown exponentially over the last couple of years and I’m quite confident in what I do now. Practise makes perfect and all that, and I’ve been using the most excellent Firefox extension called Firebug. It lets you debug on the fly so you can really easily experiment with webpage development. If you’re building websites – especially ones that are built with CSS for layout and look, then you should be using it. I love it.

So I am really chuffed with my interpretation of the designer’s brief, and the ‘client’ is really happy so far and said ‘you’ve done an excellent job mate’, and he never calls me mate. Although the designer wants to come and sit with me and go through the website so I’m sure I’m going to have to explain some things about accessibility and CSS, so it could be an interesting meeting. I know from a previous meeting that he doesn’t have any or much experience with HTML etc.

But now it’s at the stage where all that content’s got to come from a single column layout into a two column layout and it’s time consuming. I spent three hours on it today and thought to myself earlier I’m going to have to sit down and work out how long each one takes me and times that by the amount of pages I’ve got to do. I’m getting some nice extra pocket money and am thinking of how to reward us, and it has to be us because JJ feels some effects of my doing my work. Although it’s been a bit tricky this weekend because he’s been banned from all electrical games for the weekend. He did inform me that taking things away like this isn’t helping his behaviour at all. Other consequence ideas anyone?

Along with this extra draw on my time other things have been happening too but that’s for another post.

Makeover

August 6, 2009 by Jen

I’ve been wanting to change my theme for some time now. It takes a LONG time (for me anyhow) to find a theme that I like to start with and am confident enough to change. I’ve installed quite a few themes, had a bit of a play and just given up. Using the theme test drive plug-in is an absolute godsend.

I even mucked around with a theme framework but gave up on that because it was too hard. After all the playing around I did, I still wasn’t convinced that it was a long-term good thing to do for me. I probably just don’t understand how they work or there isn’t enough documentation to support them – the free ones anyway. And that’s quite understandable because I know from experience that documentation takes time and effort. (Upon looking at the above website I note that they’ve now got documentation for creating a child theme which wasn’t there earlier. Still, I didn’t want to create a child theme, but use someone elses.)

I did contemplate paying for a premium theme but I didn’t even find one of those I liked enough to shell money out for and the more expensive (to me anyway) themes like Thesis just isn’t warranted for a hobby blog like this.

Anyway, I finally settled on this Blogwerx theme. I’d found it a couple of months ago, played around with it and moved on, but after unsuccessfully mucking around with theme frameworks I went back to it. I’ve changed it a bit and I still have the three column layout with the content on the left and sidebars on the right. I like this layout because if something stuffs up with loading in the sidebars at least the content is available due to the order of the page loading.

I even used the widgets this time, and made a new widget area for my Reviews and Giveaways section because I can’t show BlogHer ads there due to their ads policy. I was very proud of myself.

Now that I’ve implemented this new theme hopefully I’ll be more motivated to get back into the content side of things. If my blog was seven years old (and not five) I could blame the seven-year-itch for wanting something new and exciting to happen and inspiration to hit me in creating some exciting content. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.

I’d like to know what your favourite WordPress themes are, or even if you care about them. In the meantime I’ll stick with this for a while.

Blog disappeared

April 13, 2009 by Jen

Thanks to one of my gorgeous readers – Jeanie – I found out that my blog had all but disappeared. Any page I tried to view gave me a 404 page error. Everything else was there, just no content. She emailed me first thing this morning and I didn’t read it until I got back from my mini Easter break this afternoon.

I immediately panicked and wondered when the last time I did a backup was – too long ago I’m sure. Once my little panic was over I thought I’d better fix it.

Knowing that WordPress runs from databases I logged into my blog’s Cpanel and went to view the post database to see what was there. A message informed me that I had a “WordPress MySQL database error: Table is marked as crashed and should be repaired.”

After doing a quick search I came across this very helpful post, and within a minute had repaired my database and was back in business. So if this ever happens to you, it’s probably a database error. I’m thankful that it wasn’t someone hacking in which has happened to me before too.

Naturally I’ve now done a backup. I was imagining having to manually redo my last few week’s worth of posts since my last backup but it’s all sorted.

Adding power to Twitter

February 15, 2009 by Jen

I’ve been using Twitter for more than a few months now and up until recently I’d never done anything to really enhance my use of it.

I recently found out about a Firefox add-on called ‘Power Twitter‘ and I really like it.

One of the things that used to annoy me about Twitter was that the links to images and webpages were always in a tiny.url form, or in a form that was so early web days (a ‘naked URL, not a link behind words) and didn’t mean anything.

Power Twitter adds this functionality. (Click on any image below to view larger one).

It also shows images, rather than links to images which I just love because I’d rather see it all in the one application rather than have to open another application. To tell the truth, I usually didn’t click on image links and it took me ages to learn about this thing called Twitpic. Apparently it will show Flickr, Twitpic and Youtube links inline within Twitter.

There is also an inbuilt Twitter search function. It doesn’t show trending topics like search.twitter.com does but you can search for anything you want. It’s very handy.

Another handy little feature (you can see why they called it Power Twitter) is hover over people’s avatars and it shows their latest status updates.

The only drawback – and it’s only a very small drawback – is that it takes that little bit longer to load. Twitter loads as normal, then Power Twitter kicks in. It doesn’t bother me at all.

All in all I like having Power Twitter in my Twitter life.

What makes your Twitter life easier?

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