Oh yeah baby… my swimmers love it!
So yeah, The Badja and I are having a baby… meet the currently named Peanut Halfpenny
Peanut Halfpenny
Read my full post over at The Parent Hub, our new site for Parent’s blogs, reviews of products and, hopefully one day, a thriving and friendly community.
Just a quick post on how I managed to get my Ubuntu Software Center working at work where I had a proxy between me and the Internet which required username and password authentication.
Image: Jake Setlak 2002
Now really this should have not been an issue I think, since there’s a “Network Proxy” setting in the “Preferences” for Ubuntu but for some reason the Ubuntu Software Center doesn’t seem to take note of this (or the authentication details for username and password at least).
So anyway, this is how I got it working through a proxy on my 11.04 Ubuntu. Basically you need to edit the /etc/apt/apt.conf file with a line like the following and replacing user, pass, host and port with the relevant dertails.
Acquire::http::proxy "http://user:pass@host:port/";
Hope this helps.
Last night I noticed that the Lanyrd event info that was meant to be listed in my blog sidebar was no longer working. I was, at the time, using the My Lanyrd Widget which was up to a time working well… but then I noticed it had just stopped working.
I had a quick browse on the Lanyrd site and noticed that had some official JS and code which could be used to display a badge on your site showing pretty much the same info as the above mentioned widget had been doing.
And so, after an hour or so of coding the Lanyrd Splat Widget plugin for WordPress was born. I immediately requested a repo on the WordPress.org site and as soon as this was approved my checked in the code and the Lanyrd Splat Widget was launched!
The Lanyrd Widget in action
The plugin has settings for the maximum number of events to show as well as the format and of course the Lanyrd username of the info to use.
The Lanyrd Widget Settings
The plugin pulls the info from Lanyrd every time the page is loaded, which is obviously not ideal. I had toyed with the idea of using the ics feed which Lanyrd provides and then using transient storage inside WordPress to temporarily cache the data. I decided to not use this for the time as the route I’ve taken pulls only the data needed and also supports richer data. My view on this may change in time… we will just have to see how this performs.
The Lanyrd Splat Widget can be downloaded from the official WordPress.org plugin repository.
A whole year has now passed since I set my goals for 2011 and as such its time to wrap up and have a look back how I did.
As far as the year as a whole this has been mostly successful. The house has come such a long way that I’m truly blown away with how homely it is and how much I love what the Badja and I have done to the place. Sadly we didn’t complete all the works (carpet, downstairs loo) as we run out of cash. These items are still on the list though and will certainly be being passed onto the 2010 Goals list
I’m an awful human being, really I am. I haven’t done this (again). This will also be being added to the 2012 list but I may up the anti somehow to make sure that this does get completed (at least once).
As per the last update I’ve actually put on a stone this year… FAIL!
I made a good start to this goal and got some sketches together including this one of a manga-esq Badja. I’d really like to have done more but as you will see later some other things came up requiring more urgent attention.
Although I didn’t actually release a WordPress theme into the repository my Responsive TwentyTen plugin has now been mentioned across tens of WordPress blogs and was also mentioned in one of the talks at WordCamp UK 2011. I also made several other WordPress themes for bespoke projects.
So I’ve been playing a fair amount with Android and have started work on an app for Forrst as well as playing with the NFC functions and more camera interaction. No app was officially released into the marketplace… so a partial success here I think.
This was always going to be a stretch goal… and sadly as at this time I think it’s out of reach.
Yup, we can tick this one off. One of the kind Dribbblers recruited me following my submission of some design work as well as some begging and pleading. You can check out my Dribbble work at http://dribbble.com/toddhalfpenny
As well as all these goals I planned for myself several other things of note occurred in 2011 which should probably be mentioned here.
Some time back in September whilst holidaying in Falmouth The Badja had the idea to start up an online craft business. It would focus on home-made craft items and craft kits supplying folks with designs, materials and all the other bits they need to create their own pieces. From the inception we duly started work on the business plan and all the other things needed to get this up and running.
On November 21st Designs and Such launched running on a WordPress site built by me and co-designed with The Badja.
This latest WordPress 1 Minute Wonder installation covers a couple of quick alternative steps that can be taken to dramatically increase your site performance… and yes I’ll be honest and say that actually to cover all 3 steps here it takes more like 10 minutes.
In the below investigation I based “performance” on Google’s PageSpeed rating and Yahoo’s YSlow and this was run against a newly launched online craft store site called Designs and Such.
Using the PageSpeed tool (in Chrome) it was possible to see that I had several un-optimised images on my site. I processed these with the free optipng tool and instantly saw an increase in 6 PageSpeed points and 2 YSlow points. Not bad for something which anyone can do.
Now there is some stigma around having lots of plugins on your WordPress site and the detrimental affect it can have on performance… now whether you back this line of thought or not* sometimes plugins can really benefit your site in this context. Now please be sure to backup your DB (or entire site) before using any plugins which might modify you’re .htaccess and potentially other files in your installation.
For my investigation I installed the W3-Total-Cache plugin and configured it just to cache and minify my HTML, JS and CSS. The results were staggering… I saw an overall increase of 11 Google PageSpeeed points and 12 YSlow points
Another step, this time plugin-free, should immediately give some good results. Simply by adding the following lines to one of my site’s .htaccess file I saw a further 4 point increase in my PageSpeed score and a 1 point increase in Yahoo’s YSLow rating.
The following lines do 2 things, add expire headers to static files such as CSS, javascript and images and also removing ETags. Of course please backup your .htaccess before doing any of this.
#Expire Header ExpiresActive On ExpiresDefault A0 ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000 ExpiresByType image/png A2592000 ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000 ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000 ExpiresByType image/ico A2592000 ExpiresByType text/css A2592000 ExpiresByType text/javascript A2592000 FileETag none
This is defining a 1 month expiry for all content covered by the files types listed above. Note if you do this there’ll be implications if you want to modify any of the files, like CSS, and have the changes to affect immediately.
This technique (and more info on it) was found over at Tips & Tricks HQ
So in total by carrying out the above steps I saw the following performance increase. Of course the results will vary site by site but I believe that with Search Engines using site performance as a factor when ranking your site that 10 minutes spent here will be of value.
Google PageSpeed Increase = 21
Yahoo YSlow Increase = 15
* When speaking to @westi at WordCamp UK (or WordCamp Manchester) in 2010 he said that putting code in plugins rather than the core should result in no performance hit… of course it depends on the quality of code
9 months have now passed since I set my goals for 2011 and so it’s time for another update… of dear!
Well that’s it I think for this quarter.
So last weekend (16-17 July 2011) I upped and offed to my 2nd WordCamp. The previous one was in Manchester (UK) in 2010 and I had an absolute blast… so much so that there was no way I was going to miss out on some of the key things that a WordCamp has to offer;
Happy Campers
This years WordPress followed a familiar “3 track” structure which was semi-logically split in terms of the talks and discussions that were held in each. Being a developer of WordPress themes and plugins I had planned to mostly stay on the “developer” track but started my Saturday off listening to a panel chat about “WordPress in the Enterprise”. This was an interesting opportunity to hear about issues that I had never been exposed to before and was glad to have listened… even if it turned into a “how can WordPress play nicely with a Microsoft core IT setup” stalemate.
Next up I listened to Rachel McCollin chat about “WordPress and Mobile”. She covered the numerous ways in which devs and users can get a more optimal experience on mobile devices. I was particularly thrilled to have my Responsive TwentyTen plugin mentioned. This session also gave rise to some very helpful discussions from the audience on their experience and approaches to dealing with mobiles. In my personal opinion I think that actually all approaches are currently flawed… it seems that users and the device market are all running off at lightning speed and it’s leaving web designers and developers a little flat footed in truly understanding the ins and outs of it all.
StinkyInk WordCamp UK Swag
I then jumped back to the “general” track to hear Nick Garner talk about advanced SEO. This was a real eye-opener it terms of me realising that my knowledge is very shallow compared to someone of Nick’s calibre. His talk covered some extraordinarily useful WordPress plugins which I will certainly be looking into.
Another session I took in on the first day was Noel Tock’s thoughts on “running your own theme marketplace”. He was a very engaging speaker and presented some very thought provoking lessons from his time at ThemeForce. Oh, for info on the slides etc from WordCampUK 2011 head on over to the wiki.
It was during this session that I actually missed my second fifteen seconds of fame from WordCamp 2011 as over in the main room Kimb Jones‘ popular “WOW plugins” session included my Widgets on Pages plugin. I was honoured to have this mentioned along with plugins some as Gravity Forms and the like… though I ‘spose I should own up and say that I’d been pestering Kimb all year to get it included!
The Saturday social was another great chance to chat to folk I hadn’t yet caught up with and I was lucky enough to be sat at the same table as Scott Cariss who turns about to be keen on security and told me of File Monitor Plus which is one of his plugins… I suggest that one and all install this right now!
The social also gave me the chance to retain my title of “last man standing” which I earned the previous year… though to be honest the competition was light and with the help of the lovely WP Sites folk I had the title (or at least a 1/3 of it) in my pocket for another year.
The Sunday kicked off despite my tiredness inflicted by the night before at some place called Fuzzy Ducks and I dived straight into a session on setting up and running local WordPress meetups. I soon discovered that one was already running in London and I hope to be going along to their meetings in the future. If you’re looking for local WordPress meetups in the UK then head on over to the WordCampUK wiki.
The day then took a more technical spin with Rob O’Rourke showing off how you can pretty much bring all content needed in a site into the welcoming arms of WordPress’ CMS capabilities. It was in this talk that I learnt of Custom Nav Walkers… something incredibly powerful that I think would benefit most theme developers doing bespoke work.
Dave Coveney was up next in the main room talking about some of WordPress designers and developers biggest mistakes… along with some sensible talk and humour this got us all thinking about how we could be doing things better.
The last core session was that where the “site doctors” give a lending hand to the (very brave) few who have queries on topics spanning everything to do with WordPress and websites in general. This is one of the most valuable sessions I believe as the floor is pretty much opened up to everyone to give their tupence on how to improve SEO, better help clients, increase security and pretty much anything else you could imagine.
And there you have it… my views (or at least the cutdown version) of WordCamp UK 2011. Big thanks should go to the WordCamp UK core team, the speakers and sponsors and all who helped put such an engaging and enjoyable weekend together.
Just a quick post to highlight the solution to a recent WordPress issue I had when trying to upgrade WordPress release using the “Upgrade Automatically” option. The error I was seeing was:
Incompatible Archive.: PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature
Even for someone who may be technically minded this is a little unhelpful… but thankfully the solution (in my case at least) was to free up some space on my hosting account. So it seems that the cause of the issue (or at least one of the causes) is that there was not enough space available for the automatic WordPress upgrade to take place.
In this edition of WordPress 1 Minute Wonders I will answer a question which I frequently get emailed about… and that is how to style widgets next to each other when using my Widgets on Pages WordPress plugin.
In this post I have 3 widgets in one of the sidebars created by the plugin. I have named the sidebar horiz.
To get the Widgets to display as they do above there was some extra CSS that I had to add to my theme’s style.css file to get them to display like this… here it is.
#horiz {
overflow: auto;margin: 10p;padding: 10px;
}
#horiz .widget {
float: left;
width: 25%;
padding: 2%;
background: #f1f1f1;
border:1px solid #999;
-moz-border-radius: 10px;
-webkit-border-radius: 10px;
-o-border-radius: 10px;
border-radius: 10px;
-moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 7px #999;
-webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 7px #999;
-o-box-shadow: 3px 3px 7px #999;
box-shadow: 3px 3px 7px #999;
margin: 0 1%;
}
I have put a fair amount of styling in there to make them look a bit more appealing but essentially the important bit that makes the widgets sit next to each other can be done with just the following;
#horiz {
overflow: auto;
}
#horiz .widget {
float: left;
width: 25%;
padding: 2%;
margin: 0 1%;
}
In the first section we style the whole sidebar (you would replace .horiz with whatever you had called your sidebar), making sure that the content overflow is set to auto. This makes sure that any content following the sidebar does not also creep up alongside the widgets.
The second section styles the widgets (all three in this case). The key part here is the float:left; which makes them site alongside each other.
I use a service called Ribbit to handle my voicemails and they send me a text and email of the transcribed message as well as an mp3 of the audio. As it’s a free service I tend not to be too worried about the exact content of the message as long as I get the general idea.
Today though, I received an amazingly baffling (not to mention “blue”) transcription of a voicemail that was left for me… and I thought I’d share it with you all;
Translation:
Regards shit just wanted to have please go understand now Bridges a log so conflict legal due to any of the keeps issue and the construction any finance to.
Actual message left:
Hello Todd, Pankaj here. Just wanted to have quick chat to understand, erm, whether the logs are confirmatory or… do you see any other issue in that because the scripts are now running fine as expected.
