Mar 17 2009

Twitter / Tweet Related Links

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 1:29 am

A couple of links that have been sat in open Firefox tabs for almost a week now. I need some sleep soon, so once again, please forgive the lack of accompanying text…

Best 80 tweets of February 2009 can allegedly be found here. Some of them made me laugh, others made me go and follow the original authors 🙂

Twitscoop – If you’ve seen a tag cloud before on a site/blog (like the one in the first sidebar here), you’ll get the idea. Basically, a constantly updated graphical display of what people are talking (via twitter, so in fact ‘tweeting’) about, like a list of hot topics. Link here.

Oh, and if you’re not sure what Twitter is, or how you tweet, twitter.com or Wikipedia’s page on twitter would be a good place to start.

[edit]
Just been reading through the Wiki, and it is possible that Twitscoop uses any hashtags present in tweets, rather than scanning each and every message in its entirety.

[edit2]
For any smart arses out there, no I didn’t forget to place this post in the Tweets category – if I’d done that it would appear as an ‘aside’ in this blog, rather than a normal post 🙂

Tags: , ,

Mar 14 2009

Saturday Afternoon Update

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 4:00 pm

Aunty Jean and Uncle Pete are here, the Wales vs. Italy rugby match is on, and I’ve finally finished adding the required privacy pages to around twenty sites that are currently displaying Google’s AdSense adverts. I hope to post a few links by Tuesday, that have been sitting around waiting to be published. I still need to find the photos for the Jimi wallet review (left my wallet in Tescos yesterday, returned after an hour or so to still find it sitting on the side of the till!), take and post more photos of Anna, and try to at least finish posting the 2008 Amsterdam photos.

Tags: , , , , ,

Feb 27 2009

Amsterdam 2008 Photos #6

Category: Amsterdam,Personal,Pictures — ChrisM @ 3:53 pm

In an attempt to not scare off my readers who don’t particularly want to see baby posts all the time, I’ll try to continue the posts from before. Here we are back in Amsterdam 2008 again, when Ira and I went over for my birthday. This is the first boat trip we went on with the not for profit St Nicholas boat club organization. We later went on an evening tour, to get a feel for the city from the waterways whilst it was dark.
We had a great captain who took us around, and unlike the large plexiglass covered tourist boats, we were able to fit into much narrower canals, take a peek in areas not normally toured around and even… well, you’ll just have to wait until the next post for information on where we went that had us hitting the deck!

Amsterdam Holland Chris Merriman Irina

As ever, click the link below to see a lot more pictures – if I display them all on the front page, the site would take a long time for everyone to load up.

Continue reading “Amsterdam 2008 Photos #6”

Tags: , , , , , ,

Feb 17 2009

No News And Feedburner

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 2:33 pm

To those friends that have been contacting us frequently, asking if the baby is born yet, don’t worry, we will let everyone know soon after the event. If you don’t receive an SMS from me v.often, check the blog, my twitter account or facebook for updates.

On a separate note, fetching data from feedburner.com seems to be slowing the blog down a lot right now. If this behaviour is the same in a couple of hours, I’ll temporarily remove the offending widgets. You should find that all post info is displayed BEFORE the slowdown anyway. I think I’ve finished fiddling with the sidebars now, so what you see today should be stable for a while now 🙂

Tags: , , ,

Feb 15 2009

MyBlogLog Problems

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 8:33 pm

The MyBlogLog widget (far right column, red background with avatars on it) is currently creating itself a 3rd column in FireFox and a similarly rooted display issue in IE7. Therefore, it will be removed until I get around to finding out what is wrong.
Which reminds, anyone else using the xMark WordPress theme have an issue with static PAGES (not posts) dropping their 2nd column to the footer position?

[edit]
Just realised that there are two MBL based widgets in use. I’ve removed the one that had registered visitor’s faces, the ‘recommended posts’ widget has no rendering issues, so is remaining.

[edit2]
Nope, the issue is still occurring within the ‘Meta’ widget. Time to try other stuff. Please excuse any temporary graphical glitches in the mean time.

[final edit]
OK, turns out when I last upgraded the DandyID services plugin, an option was either newly created, or mistakenly defaulted to a different setting. Reverted to normal, cleaned up a few other widget based problems, and finally should be back working again.

Tags: , ,

Jan 31 2009

Happy Birthday Irina

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 1:25 am

Today is my beautifully pregnant wife’s birthday. We are all heading over to a nice restaurant in the evening with another Irina and her boyfriend. I’ll try to remember to take some shots, I’m just hoping it will be someone else’s turn to stay sober tomorrow – we need to have someone who can drive 24/7 now, as Ira already counts as full term, if the baby had been born already.
Another 10 days until the first predicted date (9th Feb), the other being the 13th. Given the randomness of nature, who knows when the happy event will occur?
I hope Ira (and lyolik) have a great time tomorrow, and that she displays her joy-inducing smiles at some point 🙂

Tags: , , ,

Jan 17 2009

Busy Saturday

Category: Friends,Personal — ChrisM @ 9:48 pm

Busy day so far, as there have been lots of little things here and there to sort – finally received an Orange 3G SIM card for my phone today, so been trying to test speed improvement over the old EDGE/GPRS connection. The aerial guys (Hayden Communications) came and fitted an aerial, amp and wiring fitted for the house, so can get freeview in each room, and have Sky piped upstairs to the older TVs. Finished off recovering and reinstalling Kevin’s PC – put Windows Vista Ultimate on after recovering his data, and another one that is taking a while this evening is sorting Dave’s laptop. Another case of recovering data (this time through a Knoppix Live CD), wiping drives completely and then reinstalling the OS. Certainly a lot easier once you have network connectivity and can just access keyboard, mouse and display via LogMeIn. Thanks to Oleg once more for the heads up on their free service.
Anyway, hopefully all will be sorted on Dave’s laptop, or at least stable and able of carrying out the basic computing functions.

Tags: , , , ,

Dec 12 2008

WordPress 2.7 Upgrade

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 2:15 am

Finally, I should hopefully be categorising posts at the same time as creating them. This may seem like a silly aspect of blogging to focus on, when there are quite a few more major changes than an AJAXed movable layout for the boxes in the Add New Post page, but being able to relocate the Categories (and other obviously) box to the top right, where I’ll notice it BEFORE hitting the Publish button means a lot less hassle for me. I tried out the upgrade on my test site first, and having seen no major issues (the FireStats beta (1.60) plugin needed an update from Beta2 to RC3 to prevent an error being displayed on the dashboard) went ahead (following database backups) with this site. If anyone notices anything (NEW!!!) looking weird or out of place, do please drop me a line.

Tags: ,

Oct 30 2008

100K Almost!

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 3:53 pm

As I write this post, the blog is 332 people away from having received 100,000 unique visitors since it began (back in July 2006). In case the phrase ‘unique visitor’ is new to you, this is basically one person visiting the site. If they return within 24 hours, the repeat visit does not count towards unique visitor statistics (unlike a simple hit counter). Also, any visits from bots or spiders (from the search engines mostly) are not counted at all by both statistic packages I currently use (AWStats and FireStats).
So, if someone visits my site once a day all through October, my stats would show an extra 31 unique visitors. If they visited 31 times in one day, only ONE unique visitor is recorded. Anyway, thanks to those who know me and pop in occasionally to see what is new in our lives over here, thanks to those of you who come here from the search engines (I use a plugin that pings me each time I rank well for a google search) and especially those of you who come back again.
I’ve recently cut down on the adverts displayed on this site, especially those that were only shown for American visitors – the ads weren’t at all content-orientated, sometimes looked tacky, and to be completely honest were not generating anything like the income I had hoped for. You’ll also never find any sort of pop-up, pop-under, or full page sponsorship advert before you can access the site; each to their own, but I hate them when I’m randomly browsing around, so don’t want to inflict them on my visitors.

Tags: , , , , ,

Oct 25 2008

Area Specific Widgets

Category: WordPress — ChrisM @ 4:20 am

Long term readers (as in REALLY long term, those who were pressganged encouraged to start reading 18 months ago) will remember the fun and games I’ve been through to get area specific widgets to display on this blog. Originally I used the King Text widget, though WordPress 2.2 (2.3?) broke critical parts of the code, and no updates were to be found. I then moved onto using some PHP code within ExecPHP widgets (probably fixable, but I’m a hacker of other peoples code, not a proper coder), though this then prevented me from using PHP within the actual widget I wanted to display. Now it looks as though there is a decent solution. Slayer’s Custom Widgets is able to ensure that any of your current widgets are only displayed on certain pages/categories/posts etc. This would mean I can once again play around a little more with code, and find new and interesting ways to break this site 🙂 As I don’t have the time or inclination to repair my potential goof ups for now, I’ll leave experimenting with this plugin for now, I just wanted to post a quick heads up for other WordPress users who might be interested.

Tags: , , ,

« Previous Page — Next Page »