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.