Apr 09 2012

Still Have The Strange Frames? (Corrected Display Version)

Category: WordPressChrisM @ 9:19 am

So far there is no sign of an updated ShareThis plugin for WordPress, meaning that if you have not yet disabled the facebook like option, you will probably still have two transparent frames at the top of your blog (see the Strange Boxes On Your Site post). If you prefer, the ShareThis forum users have provided a couple of other options,
1st is taken from here
(oh, before I forget, to use either of these bits of code, change any {{ or }} you see to [ or ] respectively. Even using the code tag in WordPress, the info wasn’t displayed correctly)

Hi, sorry my poor english
I made this trick and work perfect
To the bottom of page, before {{/body}}

{{style}}
.fb_reset#fb-root div {top:-3500px !important;}
{{/style}}

the default range is {top:-2000 } but my page is more long of this range

or you could use the second option, taken from here

Just add:

#fb_xdm_frame_http, #fb_xdm_frame_https { display:none; border:none; }

to your style.css
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wp-photo-album-plus-empty-box-showing-on-my-page?replies=5#post-2735629

An explanation offered within the WordPress forum mentioned above is the following…

Facebook is adding additional iframes for security reasons and they did not realize that user agents’ default styles sheets in some browsers contain rules such as iframe{border:2px inset; } , they will probably fix this soon, but this is a problem on facebook’s behalf meanwhile you can fix this issue by either css code directly for these iframes:

#fb_xdm_frame_http, #fb_xdm_frame_https { display:none; border:none; }

or you can add to your css reset rules:

iframe { border:none; }

Please follow any of those links to see who exactly should be given credit for the discoveries. (I’ve just stuck to disabling the fb like option for now.)

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Oct 29 2011

John’s Photos – Tim’s First Week

Category: Anna's Photos,Tim's PhotosChrisM @ 1:59 am

Just a quick post here, for people who haven’t yet ventured over to CeltPhotographic.com or seen them on facebook yet…

First we have Anna proudly displaying her World’s Best Big Sister t-shirt
Anna Merriman - Big Sister!

Then we have a few from when Tim was still yet to arrive, and Irina looking great 🙂
Irina Merriman
Irina Merriman
Ira Merriman
Irina Merriman
Ira Merriman

Now we have one of Anna, then a few of our family together…
Anna On Her New Phone!
Irina, Tim & Anna
Irina, Tim, Anna & Chris Merriman
The Merrimans Smiling!

Finally, we have some of just Tim…
Tim Merriman
Tim Merriman
Tim Merriman
Tim Merriman

OK, next I’ll find those YouTube videos that are waiting to be embedded.

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Oct 21 2011

Every1 now back @ home.Anna se…

Category: TweetsChrisM @ 3:20 am

Every1 now back @ home.Anna seems proud of her little brother.We’ll try & put up a proper post with pics soon.Check JohnK’s facebook account

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Oct 20 2011

Tim Has Arrived!

Category: Personal,Tim's PhotosChrisM @ 7:46 am

Excuse the lack of long posts recently. With Tim (obviously) arriving at an unknown time (7.46am, 20th October in the end), I’ve not been able to commit much time to just sitting down and writing about news from Kazakhstan or even catching up with Anna’s pictures. I’ll try and get some pictures of Tim up this weekend, but in the mean time check out Celt Photographic (John’s blog) for some pictures, or head on over to one of our facebook profiles.
There you go, wrote this on Friday and didn’t have time to finish it off or publish it, sorry.

I have included a few photos below taken straight from John’s blog…

OK, as with Anna, Tim had his domain name registered and a basic blog put in place shortly after his birth. Any posts on this blog that are photos or videos of him will be automatically imported to his site, for people who don’t want to visit for anything else. Weirdly enough, his site can be found at TimMerriman.com.
The date and time of this post has been recorded as Tim’s birthday.

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Nov 19 2010

PS3 FanBoys, Look Away Now

Category: VideosChrisM @ 11:50 pm

My thanks to ChrisB for posting the following video up on Facebook. As I may have mentioned already on this site, I’m hoping to get a Kinect for Christmas. Partially for the intended use (playing games and interacting with some menus on the Xbox without using a controller), but also because I’m fascinated by the potential for other uses when the USB device is plugged into a Windows/Linux (or even a Mac I suppose!) box and drivers (already created) and applications and bodges (some already out in the wild, some currently in alpha stages) are used. Yes, the whole Minority Report-style waving your hands in the air to select and move objects around has a short term appeal to it, but just check what the guy does in the clip below. As mentioned within the comments section on the video’s native YouTube page, the possibilities of what can be done if you could use two or three Kinects around a room at the same time are very interesting.

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Nov 19 2010

Tory HQ (Or Not?)

Category: In The Media,VideosChrisM @ 1:08 am

I finally watched some footage of the protests that occurred in Central London, after a friend linked to them on FaceBook. Not surprisingly, there were a few incidents not covered by the articles I read and the few broadcasts I managed to catch at the time. One thing, there seems to be some confusion as to whether this was actually the Conservative Party’s HeadQuarters, or “just” their campaign HQ?

At approx 8m15s – OK, obviously not mature, but the Star Wars (Death Star?) theme tune humming through a megaphone raised a smile.
13m50s – of the little video footage in TV news broadcasts of the protest I saw, I don’t remember hearing the crowd’s reaction (boo) to when an idiot dropped a fire extinguisher from the roof.

Part 2

1m43s It is NOT a government building, not sure why he said that.
8m25s Mob mentality – we’ve got a stick!!!
9m30s Perhaps it was not fair to hold so many people, but very much standard practice I believe, often just to keep a demo on it’s allotted route/out of “no-go” areas. Here they are apparently being held to find the ring leaders.
10m08s good tune, however the image of a CCTV camera in a suit raises one question in my mind – how many policemen will be watching this YouTube upload to identify “criminals” that they didn’t manage to catch with police surveillance cameras?

In general, from these clips, the police seemed very restrained, I was expecting more thuggish behaviour. I could be wrong, but I think they all kept their ID numbers on their shoulders as well. Perhaps since digital video capturing equipment is so prevalent now, they are more careful. Or it could just be that the protesters were (in the main) tame?

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Nov 03 2010

Tweeting Posts And Posting Tweets

Category: WordPressChrisM @ 10:12 pm

Although I have not had the time recently to sit and read through my twitter friend’s tweets very much, I do still use the twitter service itself a lot. This blog has the Twitter Tools plug-in installed, which provides a lot of integration of customization between tweets and posts.
Every time I create a new post on this site, a tweet is automatically generated under my Twitter account, which has the post title, and a link to the post itself. This obviously helps encourage a few people to visit my site, and through an app in Facebook, sets my status update as well. If you write a post about bar reviews, and don’t want to have to manually create a tweet explaining you’ve just published the post, this plug-in makes a lot of sense.
Also, every time I tweet, a blog post mirroring the content is created on this site. I find this very useful, as if I’m out and about with my phone, whether I’m writing a tweet from within PockeTwit (possibly with a picture included), streaming an (at the time) live video from my phone with Qik or publishing my location via Foursquare, I don’t need to either instantly repeat any information from a different program, or wait until I get home and remember to mirror the data elsewhere. Obviously I still need to remember to actually embed the pictures/videos later, as I appreciate that some people don’t have the time to click on external links, but the Twitter Tools plug-in definitely saves me a lot of time.
There are related Twitter Tools plug-ins that cover…
Bit.ly URLs (to automatically shorten long URLs to keep within the 140 character limit imposted by Twitter. You can also use it to track visitor activity related to those links, if you have a bit.ly account).
Exclude Category (if you don’t want to have a certain group of posts tweeted about, this helps you.
Hashtags (which as you can probably guess, correctly handles hash tags. If I mention #UKNews in a tweet, then the corresponding blog post will automatically link that hash tag to the relevant search URL on Twitter.)

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Oct 27 2010

Please Tell Your Friends

Category: WordPressChrisM @ 8:21 pm

Next in this series of posts describing the plug-ins I use on my various sites is the ShareThis plug-in (I’ve linked directly to the WordPress specific section of the site, to read more about the system in general, just click their logo at the top of the page). Although no longer activated on this blog, I keep it installed, and on the other more niche orientated web sites, it is active.
Even if you don’t happen to use Social Bookmarking/Networking sites a lot yourself it is quite likely that your visitors do. I suppose if you only ever write about Max Bygraves albums, then perhaps your average reader doesn’t fall within the typical market sector that use reddit, stumbleupon or twitter, however it can’t hurt to try it out.
The plugin adds an expanding area to the bottom of each of your posts, which contains links to whichever schemes you hope your readers will submit the post to. For example, if a visitor finds your post very informative, they have the option to submit the URL to facebook or twitter or digg, with some of the fields pre-filled. You can also use the data collected to check some statistics about your visitors. To be honest, the plug-in didn’t see much use on this site, and as I was having problems with CPU throttling from Bluehost at one point, I disabled any plug-ins that I couldn’t justify keeping live.

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Oct 20 2010

Spreading The Data Around

Category: WordPressChrisM @ 11:27 pm

One of my aims when technology is involved in my life is convergence. I like it when services, devices or general concepts are integrated at some sort of level. If one of my gadgets is capable of interacting with another, even if only by linking to it via several other devices or services, I want to see just how far it can be pushed.
As a simple example, if I post some thoughts about Kazakh Driving from my phone (via a tweet), that tweet (which will originally appear at twitter.com) is then automatically published on this blog, and also then posted as a note in my facebook profile. (Actually it is duplicated in facebook, as I use a different method to pull in tweets as status updates. I think the notes version will automatically embed pictures from a post on this blog, where as the status update is obviously just plain text).
So… Tweet (twitter) >> Blog Post (chrismerriman.com) >> facebook note …
reply left on facebook note >> blog post comment created
Anyway, if people leave a reply to my post on facebook, in the past this would be split from any conversation that occurred natively on this site. Now, using the Facebook Comments TNG plug-in, comments left on any facebook notes are automatically imported back into this site. If friends choose to comment on my status update, this isn’t picked up, but I am happy to have at least some of the discourse unified in one location. If you happen to import your blog posts to a facebook page (most often this will be if you run a business or club), this can also be catered for.

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Sep 15 2010

No Prison Time Today

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 8:26 pm

Today I am glad to report that Anna has not managed to lock me onto the balcony, and that in general she has been very well behaved. I also noticed that I had been very slack in embedding videos and importing phone pictures from twitpic into the blog. So, if you look at the first couple of pages for this site, you’ll now see the pictures and video that previously required you to click on a twitpic or qik link. Unless you normally read these posts via my facebook profile, in which case I think the videos automatically embed over there? I’ll go and check some time.

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