Recommended plugins: Flickr Manager and Twitter Tools for Wordpress
(Warning: geeky blog ramblings ahead…)
The frequency of my posts on this blog tends to fluctuate from sometimes several a day to a more-common one every six months.
Strangely, though, the most random things inspire me to write on here. Recently, I’ve been spending more time on Ken Rockwell’s excellent photography website – kenrockwell.com: it’s packed full of expert advice and tips (and the occasional unbiased praise for a certain computer manufacturer, although it’s entirely justified praise in my humble opinion).
Seeing a site which is updated at least once a day by someone whose life is obviously taken up by their job, family and all the other miscellany that goes with them, and still has time to update a website with interesting content, always reminds me that there are literally loads of things I’d like to ramble on about on this website.
Not, of course, that I’m assuming anyone wants to read it, but still, I should write it down, mainly just in case I forget, more than for anyone else.
I’ve also been trying to tie my life together a bit more. I use Twitter (in fact I use it much more than I update this blog, since a 140 character limit is much less daunting than no character limit), and I’ve linked my Twitter account to my Facebook status updates, so I can annoy my friends on Facebook through Twitter’s text message update service.
I also post my favourite photos on my Flickr photo stream and, while I’m not entirely happy with the idea that every photo I post should appear on my blog (I sometimes use Flickr to host random photos, like things I’m selling on eBay, for example), I like to be able to integrate the two a bit more.
Step up Twitter Tools and Flickr Manager.
Twitter Tools basically allows you to update your Twitter feed with a notification when you write a new blog entry, and it can also post to your blog when you update your Twitter feed. It also uses some clever black magic (or it could just be a PHP string comparison…) to allow you to turn on both these options without ending up in some kind of black hole-creating feedback loop.
Definitely worth a look – you can find out more on the Twitter Tools Wordpress plugins page.
Flickr Manager button in the Wordpress editor
Flickr Manager is also a lovely bit of code. It adds an extra button to your Wordpress media toolbar, and clicking it pops up an interface very similar to your “add image” popup. It can resize your photos, lets you add captions, and generally makes life very easy if you don’t want to have the hassle of uploading your photos to Flickr, and then having to upload them to your blog as well.
Find out more on the Flickr Manager Wordpress plugin page.
Posted by Alex on Wed 10th June 2009
Fireshot: grab screenshots of webpages with one click
I don’t know why I didn’t look for this before. Maybe I did but I didn’t find anything very good. Anyhoo…
I’ve just discovered an excellent plugin for Firefox, called Fireshot. It has a lod of options, but in a nutshell it makes it one-click simple to grab a screenshot of a webpage to the clipboard.
This is excellent for me because I find it a pain in the neck to put together thumbnails of websites I’ve created or just want a screenshot of.
Anyhoo, Fireshot – grab it here (Windows only at the moment).
Eeeeeexcellent :o)
Posted by Alex on Tue 9th June 2009
Danielessex.com is online – go take a look :o)
A friend of mine who, according to his Twitter feed seems to spend half his life going to excellent events, has set up a blog which he’s cunningly called…
Do wander over and have a read when you have a chance. Thoroughly good chap, what-what.
Posted by Alex on Mon 8th June 2009
Some summery photos
I’ve been wandering around wielding a camera again. Some of the results are below (click to see a larger size, or find more here).
Thank you for humouring me… ;o)
… and a couple by Jeni:
I love summer. More photos here if you’re interested – thanks for looking :o)
Posted by Alex on Mon 8th June 2009
The BNP as MEPs?
I have no doubt that minds far greater, and far better educated in matters of politics than mine, will debate for some time yet how it came to be that the British National Party has secured itself a seat in the European Parliament.
Since I am a political atheist (yup, I don’t believe in politics, Santa Claus or council tax…) I’m not going to comment, but the indignant coughing and spluttering from tonight reminded me of the rally I attended at the start of 2007 when Oxford Union was due to allow BNP leader Nick Griffin and “controversial historian” (to quote the BBC’s news article) David Irving to speak.
I don’t claim to know where or how to draw the line between the right to free speech and one’s obligations to allow others to live without fear of xenophobic attack, but I wonder if this is another sign we’re heading down a dark path.
Feel free to read more about this result on the Times or BBC sites (since I already have these articles open in Firefox). I’m off to bed. G’night :o)
Posted by Alex on Mon 8th June 2009
Another geeky bootnote: Drupal’s ‘calendar popup’ module breaks CSS in Internet Explorer
(I’m jotting a lot down here today, mainly work-related geeky notes to myself. Feel free to ignore… ;o)
This morning, while demo-ing the development site I’m working on at the moment, I was horrified to see that all the CSS had vanished, leaving me with a very bare and broken-looking site.
The problem turned out to be caused by Drupal’s “calendar popup” module, and disabling that module seems to have returned everything to normal, but of course now I don’t have a calendar popup on date fields. Very frustrating…
Posted by Alex on Thu 26th March 2009
Geeky Drupal-related bootnote: ‘HTTP status request fails’ – fixed
I’ve been having a problem for the last couple of weeks with the Drupal website I’ve been working on where the webserver couldn’t resolve any external URLs, which meant that the website couldn’t check for updates, send e-mails, or access anything on the internet because it couldn’t resolve web addresses through DNS. Drupal was reporting the error “HTTP status request status: fails”.
The problem was in PHP only – command line nslookups and pings were working fine, and I was completely stumped.
It turns out that the problem was caused by a DNS server failure we had a little while back and, while the server came back online very quickly, Apache wasn’t able to get itself together.
To fix it, all I had to do was issue the following two commands at the command line:
- apachectl graceful-stop
- apachectl -k start
… and voila – all working again.
What a pain in the arse… ;o)
Posted by Alex on Thu 26th March 2009
The hard part is keeping it…
After a soul-destroyingly long hunt, and possibly the most botched-up example of a job interview I’ve ever given, I’ve been offered a job for the next few months working with a division of the NHS on one of their websites, based at London Bridge. Yey!
I can’t go into details about *why* I botched the interview – just believe me when I say I couldn’t have stuck my foot much further into my mouth if I’d tried. Still, I got the job, so it can’t be too awful… Unless they employed me with the sole intention of punishing me for the next few months. Stranger things have happened…
All I’ve got to do now is keep the job. Sure, I’m qualified to do it, but that doesn’t mean I’ve not got any nerves about the position.
Anyway, have something random: here’s an example of a Nice Rejection Letter – yup, they do exist…
Posted by Alex on Thu 27th November 2008
Embarrassment: when your portfolio says all the wrong things about you… ;o)
(Geeky stuff ahead) When you’re applying for jobs as a web designer, it would seem logical to make sure that it shows you in a good light. For example, when you’re telling people you can design websites which work well in all the common web browsers, most potential employers would be justified in shredding your CV when your portfolio actually looks more like a broken Etch-A-Sketch than a web page on Microsoft’s favourite internet mangler, Internet Explorer.
Oops.
Anyway, lesson learnt – my portfolio now doesn’t look a *total* mess in Internet Explorer, although I’ve had to do a bit of simplification to make sure it’s working (I don’t have all day to rebuild it, unfortunately), and hopefully I haven’t missed out on too many good positions as a result of not testing in Internet Explorer.
Life goes on :o)
Posted by Alex on Fri 21st November 2008
Ross/Brand – how not to let a molehill become a mountain (version 2,137)
This thought-provoking blog entry by the BBC’s Steve Bowbrick on how the BBC might have been able to avoid the media storm is well worth a look:
This is interesting for me: in my last job at Portsmouth students’ union, I remember trying – and failing – to express as eloquently as Steve has exactly why openness in a crisis is A Good Thing, and this school of thinking – be open and honest with your stakeholders and always maintain a dialogue – is one I really do believe in (uhhm, unless you’re MI5…).
Well worth a read, especially if you’re in a position of power in any company. Or if you’re bored ;o)
Posted by Alex on Tue 18th November 2008