Steve's Space » site news

WordPress 2.6 Released

Steve — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:04:19 +0000

The developers of WordPress have just announced the (one month earlier than scheduled!) release of WordPress 2.6. There’s a fair few new features, with the major one being change-tracking – enabling you to view previous versions of pages and posts, and also compare the differences.

There’s been various other improvements too, including a real-time word-count, image captions and more.

As I’ve come to expect these days, the upgrade from 2.5 went very smoothly.

Widgets and other such niceities

Steve — Sun, 04 May 2008 15:20:00 +0000

I’ve updated The Wight One to be Widget capable, – surprisingly easy thing to do. The main reason for doing it was so that I could make use of the ReadySetFlickr plugin in order to display images from my Flickr account. Once I’m happy that the theme’s working (and when I’ve finally added the CSS for comments) I’ll package it up nicely and make it available for download.

After having tweaked the layout and CSS a little more, Porgy (on the right) no longer breaks things.

New Look Site

Steve — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:38:19 +0000

As you might have noticed the site’s now sporting a new theme. It’s not quite complete yet, but the main design is pretty much sorted. I’m calling it ‘The Wight One’, for fairly self-explanatory reasons. A number of the tweaks and features are inspired by Matt Mullenweg’s new site but I’m not anywhere near as stylish as Nicolò Volpato (the designer of his new theme).

I’ve also taken the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, 2.5.1 which apparently fixes a number of minor issues, and a couple of security vulnerabilities from the original 2.5 release.

Things I’ve yet to include in the design:

Photo gallery handling (I’ve got a design roughed out in HTML, but it’s not been converted to WordPress templates yet)
Comment styles
An alternative theme for mobile devices (which will be handy for my Nokia N95)
Probably a bunch of other stuff, but I’ll discover that later

The header image is a view of the cliffs toward the Needles on the Isle of Wight, and is from ThisParticularGreg‘s Flickr collection. The image at the foot of the theme is a view along Tennyson Down, and is from klbw‘s Flickr stream. Both are used under Creative Commons licences.

WordPress 2.5

Steve — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 16:34:27 +0000

Typical, just when I’ve gone round various sites, checking that they’re all up-to-date with WordPress, they go and officially release version 2.5! I’ll hang back a while before upgrading though, since I’m intending to change my theme anyway, and also that used on the DataSwift website.

Encouragement

Steve — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:19:21 +0000

Why is it that technology usually works fine when you’re ahead of schedule and could actually afford to wait for something to be fixed, but if you’re up against a deadline, anything that can fail, will? Due to my being ill last week, our latest school network project was in danger of over-running. We’ve brought it back under control, but halfway through the day, the Internet connection for all the schools on the Island went down. This mean that most of the tweaks and adjustments we had left (such as printer drivers, SMARTBoard software updates, a few software activations etc.) can’t be completed until at least tomorrow – which is when the students are back.

Still, the fact that it has affected all schools, and possibly the council as well should mean that BT fix it fairly promptly. Hmm… perhaps I’m not quite as recovered as I thought…

In an effort to post more -I’m not going to call it a New Year’s resolution, since that would be the quickest way to make it fail- I’ve added WordBook to both steve-c.co.uk and my Facebook page. It’s a surprisingly painless experience, and although it’s rather lacking in configuration options does appear to do the job.

Signs of life…

Steve — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 23:00:29 +0000

Shock horror – some form of update!

Actually, I’m mainly doing this as a dry run for upgrading WordPress to 2.3.2 for other places – if it was going to break any site, I’d rather it be my own. I’m (marginally) less likely to shout at me.
Another reason for this post is that without it, I’d not have made any changes here since 2006!

I fear most of my on-line presence is now at Facebook; I know it’s got a load of privacy issues, but I’m fairly sure I’ve switched off most of the major intrusive bits on my account (aside from the whole not-being-able-to-really-delete-your-account one anyway).

We’re up to 11 staff at DataSwift as of Wednesday – at this rate we’ll need another new office!

Whilst on randomly different topics, I’ve just watched the Bourne Ultimatum, and whilst watching the end credits noticed that there was one for “Pigeon Wrangler”. Also, there were specific credits for Bassoonist and Percussion, but not for the other members of whatever orchestra was used. Most bizarre.

Dropping in the ratings

Steve — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 20:20:46 +0000

Hmm. I’ve also just noticed that since switching over to WordPress, this site no longer appears anywhere near the top of search results on Google for ‘Stephen Courtney’. That’s possibly because I’ve not got my name anywhere in it!
Time to add some content methinks.

Work In Progress

Steve — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 17:46:47 +0000

Please excuse the state of this site, – I’m just getting WordPress setup. Installing WordPress itself is a piece of cake, but I’m having a fair bit of fun with the selection of plugins I’ll be using.