Mike Little's Journalized

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.