Blog Refresh #3

November 19th, 2011 No Comments »

I feel it is time for a change. I’ve had the same design on my blog for a few years now and I’m bored with it. It’s also not that clearly laid out, and very difficult to maintain being as I originally pulled apart the ‘blue mist’ theme for my own ends and never really managed to fully understand the CSS styles behind it. So what you are viewing now (if you are on my site and not the RSS feed) is the brand new relaunched “Oliver’s Blog”. With the departure of energy drink reviews to www.fizzywakeup.com and my inane family-based ramblings banished to Facebook and Twitter, this blog can concentrate on technology and gadgets. With that in mind, I’ve cleaned the whole look up and we now have black-on-white text to make it much easier to read. I’ve also made use of WordPress’s custom menus to make navigating the site a whole lot easier. In fact, I’ve completely started from scratch really. Using nothing but the WordPress theme development guidelines, I created a brand new theme using Notepad++ in the same way I created the theme for Fizzy Wake-Up. By starting from scratch, you gain the advantage of knowing every single inch of your web site inside out. No unused bits of markup will end up lying around because everything has been put there for a purpose.

The downside of this approach is of course having to think of a new design. I decided to do a little research in order to get the creative juices flowing. I’m not going to pretend that this is the most elegant or stylish of designs, but I have tried to make it fit for purpose, easy to read, easy to navigate, and at least a little bit attractive. Most sites around the web are making use of a centered fixed-width column varying between 850 and 950 pixels wide… so I did the same. Instead of gluing to the top of the page, I hovered slightly lower, keeping all content within this central column. For those of you on Windows XP using Internet Explorer 8 – you should either install Mozilla Firefox or get a new PC. For those of you still using Internet Explorer 8 on other versions of Windows, you really do need to consider installing Internet Explorer 9 for security and aesthetics purposes. Basically, make sure you have an up-to-date web browser because this new theme makes use of CSS3 throughout. If your browser doesn’t support CSS3 then you won’t see any of the curvy edges or drop-shadows which this theme relies heavily upon.

Of course social networking sites Facebook and Twitter are integral to the new design with both icons featuring in the title-bar of every post – you can easily share / like / tweet about a post from their conveniently placed locations. The post archives (going back to May 2007 when this all began) have been compacted in to a specially written drop-down menu up at the top instead of a single massive ten-mile long list in the widget bar at the side. It’s this menu item, and the one to its right for Latest Posts which are despite appearances not actually part of the WordPress custom menu. Sadly WordPress doesn’t support the dynamics of this kind of menu just yet, so the PHP in my theme simply performs a lookup for the required data and loops around it, creating a layout in the exact same style as that created by the WordPress menu. With a bit of semi-clever positioning you’d never know it isn’t part of the same menu (I hope!).

The new theme also allows me to highlight my development activities more easily, with dedicated menus for the different development types (web and mobile), and the mobile apps specifically featured on the widget bar. Speaking of the widget bar, you’ll see a new advert size (300×250 pixels) which is a much more standard size than before allowing Google to place graphical, video and standard text-based adverts on to my site, hopefully increasing my revenue too with any luck. In the process of creating the theme I also discovered a couple of issues with my fundraising thermometer plug-in (known as the Olimometer) and have therefore also released a bug-fix release of that too. It now supports header and footer HTML tags in the widget presentation, and applying your own custom CSS styles to the widget should now be possible (although not documented very well – until I get around to that you’ll need to look at the source yourself and create a new class in your CSS accordingly).

As always, your feedback is gratefully received and I hope you enjoy the new look…


Facebook Integration

May 9th, 2011 No Comments »

Apologies to those readers on the RSS feed who’ve been getting spammed with test messages this evening, I’ve been trying to fine-tune the Facebook integration of my blog. I think I’ve finally achieved it by using a WordPress plugin called Wordbooker. It’s a pretty neat little plugin and compared to the many other ones I’ve tried it sets itself up and just works! It not only posts my blog entries directly to my wall, but also synchronises Facebook comments on the wall with the WordPress comments of that post, and vice versa. Another nice feature they’ve included is the Facebook ‘Like’ feature which you’ll now see at the bottom of every post on my site. Go on, if you like it, Like it. Obviously this will only work if you have a Facebook account which most people seem to have now.

The Blog is Back

January 22nd, 2011 No Comments »

Yes, almost five months after my last post I’ve decided to reactivate the blog. Obviously a lot has been going on over past few months and over the course of the next few posts I’ll be filling you in on everything geek and otherwise.

Let’s start with Twitter… I finally signed up and have assumed the role of mainly a follower, but I’m sure if my own follower base were to increase I’m sure I could be tempted to post my own tweets. My week / year has already peaked though, because I had a tweet reply from my gadget hero @JasonBradbury, star of Channel Five’s The Gadget Show. Whilst I’m on the subject of The Gadget Show, I shall be visiting their live event in April at the NEC thanks to Helena and Diarra! If you want to follow me on Twitter, my name is @OliverShingler

Blog Spam

April 20th, 2009 No Comments »

This is something I haven’t seen for a few years… spam for blogs. Normal spam comes in the form of unwanted email, blog spam manifests as random comments on a blog advertising all sorts of things. This morning, I had the following comment placed on one of my blog posts: “viagra If you have to do it, you might as well do it right”. Lovely. The text included a link to some random web site and was posted by a computer behind the former iron curtain. I remember when I first set up my blog I ended up with hundreds of these types of comments and had to put in a special spam filter to catch them, but then all of a sudden they disappeared. Well, if you decide to write a comment on any of my blog posts from now on you’ll notice that you have to decypher a cryptic looking image containing some warped random letters and numbers. This is called a ‘captcha’ and is intended to be illegible to computers – hopefully my loyal readership won’t be too put off by this, my other choice was to give you a maths question to answer whenever you post a comment but I thought this might alienate :)

Quest for a free host

November 25th, 2008 2 Comments »

In a bid to keep electricity costs down and with the advent of decently priced raid NAS devices, I am in the process of decommissioning my trusty home server. This meant moving all hosted web sites off and on to hosting elsewhere. For this blog and the tae kwon-do club it was a straightforward transfer to trusty old Supanames (who are pretty good value at £32.88 for two years hosting including a free .co.uk domain… the price hasn’t changed ever and I’ve been using them since 2000). However for the disabled swimming club back in Bedworth I needed a different approach. Although £32.88 for two years isn’t a bad price, domain registration is only between £3-£4 per year on it’s own through 123-reg and I still had (at the time) over 12 months left before renewal was due… so the search for free web hosts was on. The host needed to support PHP, MySQL and CGI scripts, and most importantly run the WordPress blogging framework. My first stop was www.free-space.net who were initially very good, a quick sign up process followed by a site review, then they let you loose with tons of features – everything worked great. Then, 4 weeks ago their server went down. They fixed that problem after 3 weeks but I am still unable to log in to the FTP server to upload files, and the web site content that was uploaded has been lost to the ether. That brings me to stop #2, the current host www.000freehost.com – an equally easy sign up, move my domains DNS to their servers and bingo we have a working site. Phew. I’ll keep you updated on the reliability of the free host because if they still perform well in a year or so I’ll be moving all my hosting across to there.

Oh yes… and this is post #12 for this month, which gives November 2008 the record for the highest number of posts on this blog in a month. Exciting stuff I’m sure. Wake up.

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