Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Geek, geek and more geek.

WordCamp slides featured on Slideshare

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The slides from my presentation at WordCamp UK in Manchester over the weekend are now on SlideShare. I presented on the fantastic I’m a Scientist Get me Out of Here project website I have built for Gallomanor this year.

It’s best to read the notes in the “Notes on slide x” tab so that everything makes sense! I also link to some of the plugins I used at the end.

Amazingly, the presentation features on the SlideShare home page today along with a couple of other presentations from WordCamp UK! See the “featured” section in the right hand column. Woo Hoo!

I have still to finish my write-up of the weekend, but will hopefully get that done ‘real soon’.

WordCamp UK, Manchester July 17-18 2010

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The third annual WordCamp UK is taking place later this month in Manchester, which is just up the road from me.

Tickets are on sale now just £30. That’s £30 for two full days of meeting fellow WordPress users, publishers, designers, and developers.

The unconference is being held on the weekend of July 17th and 18th at the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School which is in Manchester city centre and just a few minutes walk from the main Piccadilly train Station.

There are four simultaneous tracks this year: General & user, Specialist & developer, Miscellaneous & spontaneous and a ‘Genius Bar’ (a range of WordPress experts available to advice attendees on a one-to-one basis).

I’ll be there, of course, and will be presenting on Sunday. I’ll probably hang around the Genius bar at times too. It will be a great weekend, if you are a WordPress user, developer, or designer, or are just considering using WordPress, you should come along.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Site Down – My fault

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Apparently this blog was down for two days, and I didn’t notice. 🙁

The problem came courtesy of a tracking a trunk checkout of a plugin. A change got checked in which broke some functionality I was using, and when I updated I picked up the change and didn’t check my site.

I really should know better. My only excuse: I have been out of the office for a couple of days and busy working for clients.

WordCamp Day 1 Roundup

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I’m back in my hotel room after a very long day at WordCamp UK. I’ve had a fantastic day. There were some good sessions, it’s a pity I didn’t get to see them all. That whole multi-track thing can be frustrating.

My own session got off to a poor start with technical difficulties. Eventually solved, but it threw me a little. I didn’t manage to fill my 1 hour slot, but it seemed to go down well enough. I got some good questions and feedback later.

It was great to see Matt again after so long. We were both interviewed and filmed after the last session by two different people, and I look forward to seeing the recordings.

I then went for a great meal with Matt, Westi, and a small group of people and it was really nice to just chat and chill with a fantastic bunch.

I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.

New Law Commission Site Launched

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A client site I have been working on just went live today. It’s a public consultation site for the Law Commission.

They wanted a commentable summary version of their current consultation paper and a general discussion forum. The original consultation paper, “The Admissibility of Expert Evidence in Criminal Proceedings in England and Wales”, runs to 98 pages, so the 15 page summary (plus end notes) works much better online.

site screenshot

It’s built on WordPress, of course, and the forum is BBPress

Check it out and, of course, it is a public consultation, so feel free contribute (registration required).

New Release: a DITA to WordPress Importer

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I’ve just released an eagerly awaited (by some anyway) DITA to WordPress importer. Take a look at the tool’s page to learn a little more about what it does.

This is not a general purpose tool. It is particularly specialized and only useful for people using the DITA Open Toolkit to generate web content.

Other developers might be interested because it does import static XHTML files and pick apart the content, extracting info, removing unwanted parts, and change others, as well as importing the body of the page into WordPress.

Take a look if you are interested on the plugin page (yes, I know an importer is not a plugin). Please leave feedback in the comments on that page.

That’s a lot of spam comments

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Akismet has caught 2,000,190 spam for you since you first installed it.

Two million is a ridiculous number of spam comments on my little ol’ blog.

I can’t imagine it will get any better, either.

I have to be thankful for Akismet. If you get a lot of spam comments, that you no longer have to deal with because Akismet protects you from them , please consider paying for at least a pro-blogger subscription. It’s well worth the money.