May 30 2007

Ira Staying In Astana

Category: Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 9:55 am

Wow, luckily, she had not started packing yet, as her work no longer need her back in Moscow for a 3rd week. It will be nice to have her all to myself for once 🙂

Before I forget, I meant to link to another plug in yesterday. For anyone who hasn’t noticed yet, if you look at the bottom of the right hand side bar, you will notice a random picture is now displayed. It takes photos that I have previously published, at random, and displays the post title, and Alt tag for the image. You can download it here.

This post is NOT sponsored, in fact the reverse is opposite – I made a $5 donation to the plugin author, as I had been looking for something like this for a while. I didn’t want to have to modify any theme files. Oh, and if you check the (American) author’s gallery, you’ll see he has been to Almaty (just after the time Ira and I got married in Astana!)

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May 30 2007

You Can Now Subscribe To Comments!

Category: Friends,Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 1:03 am

Just a quick note to let you know that courtesy of the Subscribe To Comments v2.1 Plug In, you can now be e-mailed whenever someone replies to a post that interests you.

Of course, you could always subscribe to this blog’s RSS feeds (Yep that big orange button on the right is for the feed of posts, and you can also subscribe to the comments feed). However, some people are not yet comfortable with feeds, and others may simply only want to be notified when comments are made on the posts that interest them.

Anyway, give it a try the next time you leave me a comment (oh yeah, Dad, Nick, Alex Clarke, Seb & Con, Balzhan, Chris Barry, Christina, Dana & Asen, Emma F, Gavin, Jo Swale (neé Yates), Kate (she who must be obeyed), Keith, Natalya K., Ramon, Tom, Tanya & Steve you are all VERY naughty… I know most of you have occasionally checked the blog out, but haven’t yet left a comment! It really is very simple, and it reminds me that you still check in here) ChrisD gets a special mention for commenting once in a blue moon, and still having not posted his comments on his last trip to Kazakhstan, some 6 months later. He is hopefully coming over again this year, some time after Alex C.
So you miscreants are being e-mailed a link to this post, to remind you I’m still here 🙂 I’m hoping some of your e-mail accounts don’t have over-active spam filters.

PS This post isn’t sponsored, I’d been looking for a plug in with this sort of functionality, without any need to modify the theme’s files.

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May 15 2007

Possible Solution To Technorati Issues

Category: Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 2:06 am

If your blog has stopped appearing in Technorati’s directory, so you get

Sorry :~(

We’re sorry…we don’t have a blog by that name. If this is your blog, ping us so we can put it in our index!

when you search on a link like this – http://www.technorati.com/blogs/www.chrismerriman.com , as opposed to just searching via their search box, there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

If your blog hasn’t been flagged and deliberately removed from their directory, you can try turning off GZip compression.
The procedure for this depends on your blogging system, but for fellow WordPress users, all you need to is goto your dashboard, click on the Options link, click onto Reading, and untick the Use GZip box. Save, write a post as normal (assuming you do already have Technorati’s ping address in your list). You can also try a manual ping, by logging into Technorati and going to the My Account section.

If you use something other than WordPress, have a nose around your options, or failing that, there is a server-level mod you can make – see http://support.technorati.com/topic/411/

If it doesn’t work, my apologies for raising your hopes, but it has helped some people. I’m still waiting to see if it will sort this blog out or not…

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May 04 2007

The Austrian Job…

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 3:39 pm

Ready for an interesting idea?
How about a road trip across Austria?

STOP, come back…

PLEASE

thank you 🙂

Ok the unusual part is the choice of transport being used. Nothing as infeasible as a pogo stick or piggybacks from locals.
No, the idea is to traverse the country on a Yamaha Neo. Thats right, a 50cc engine to cross Austria!

Moped across Austria

The moped of choice is like the one in that picture but, wisely, a windshield has been added, to try and cut down on some of the splatter thrown up by the trucks trundling past.

You can check the project page for the Austrian Moped Trip for details, and see what still needs to be done. Fancy sponsoring the rider and getting some kudos and publicity? Contact him now 🙂

This post is NOT sponsored. The guy riding is the whizz behind my current favourite plug-in – WP-HeadlineAnimator, downloadable from here.

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Apr 12 2007

Before I Forget

Category: Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 4:32 pm

I need to write a quick note on, and big thank you to the author of, wp-headlineanimator. To go straight to the plug in pages, check here and here.

I had a few problems with the configuration of this plug in, and contacted the author, asking for a little assistance.
A few days later, he contacted me via Skype, and explained the mistake I had made in defining the path to the font file I wished to use. We then hit another snag, apparently, my server doesn’t support EXIF detection. Oh no I thought, I’ll have to find an alternative (ha ha) plug in. NOPE!!! As we were chatting away (once I’d remembered to re-enable AGC in the mic input ) he re-wrote the plug in code and sent it to me. I was as happy as a pig in muck. (He’ll be including the modifications in the next release I believe)

For a demonstration of what the plug in actually achieves, see the graphic below.

OK, looks pretty, but I could have (eventually) knocked that up in PhotoShop, right? Wrong, that file isn’t static. That is to say, each time I add a new post, that picture will reflect that, and show the new post.
OK, great, but the point of it is…. ?

Well stop thinking about your own site, and think of the applications this image could have in the wider cyber-world…
e-mail signatures, forum sigs, anywhere you can refer to a URL, you can now have an enticing image that shows the readers your most recent posts. Whilst RSS feeds can achieve something simlair, most forums wouldn’t allow the sort of code required to be used in a sig, and this approach, once setup, works really well.

Although putting your site in a forum sig/mail sig is hardly new, having so much information packed in should certainly help your image&hyperlink to be noticed quicker than any other posters.

Stargazer kindly displays the code you need to use to show the graphic, hyperlinked to your site, in terms of HTML, and if you are using it in a forum sig, it is pretty much the same, you just need to remember to swap out the HTML tags for their BBCode equivalent.
so,

[a href=”http://www.yOuRsItEnAmE.com/”][img src=”http://www.yOuRsItEnAmE.com/wp-content/animator.gif”][/a]
(you’d need to change the square brackets [ ] for pointed < >, I swapped them to prevent WordPress from misinterpreting the text as script, can’t figure out how to tell WP to just plain ignore HTML tags right now)

becomes

[url=http://www.yOuRsItEnAmE.com/][img]http://www.yOuRsItEnAmE.com/wp-content/animator.gif[/img][/url]

I chose to add a small border to my template image, as the forums I use vary in colour themes, and without the border, the white background contrasts to greatly on dark-themed sites. I’ve still not figured out using a transparent PNG and keeping the transparency in the resulting GIF file, but I’m going to try and work on it a bit more before bothering the author again, quite so soon.

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Apr 07 2007

Other Videos That Got Uploaded To YouTube Today

Category: Eating Out,Friends,Kazakhstan,Personal — ChrisM @ 12:41 am

This is the video from our first (and last :< ) visit to Tom‘s flat. We went round with Walton and had a nice meal, and spoke with one of his student’s.

This is a video of a Kazakh drinking game, recorded at Ira’s Dad’s birthday celebration, in 2003, I think.
You have two teams, two bottles of vodka, and have to serve a shot, drink it, tidy up, and repeat, in a relay team.
It will make (a bit) more sense if you just watch it, I promise…

Again from the same party, here we have some Romanys(?) singing for us

From last year, we have Irina and I shooting shotguns at a salt water lake near by

Dubai dune driving is next, from 2005, when Ira, myself and the in-laws all went to UAE

This one is to check whether or not AlexC actually reads the blog properly. It was filmed back in Bourton On The Water, which seems like a long, long, long time ago now

Almost done :-)… This is from a party back in the UK, where someone bought their Dad’s Land Rover to a party. Not too unusual around Cirencester, except this one had a couple of cool hidden extras…

Finally we have a clip from a Russian news channel. There had been an accident in a mine, and there were rumours of an alcohol problem with the miners there. Just as a responsible looking representative came on air (live!) to dispel such scandalous thoughts, someone pops into the background. (This is from a while ago, there were apparently no serious injuries reported)

And yes, I’m well aware all these YouTube videos are making the front page of my blog untidy and excessively long.
Tough, I kept forgetting to sort out and upload some videos, and it was now or never.
Also, astute readers may notice a temporary bug or two since the re-installation of WordPress and the new theme was chosen. I’m not sure whether the problem with advert code not being processed when you click on a category is a problem with the theme, or the plugin I use to display the ads, but I’ll try and find out.

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Mar 16 2007

Heaven Sent…

Category: Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 12:20 am

And now for something a little more positive…

I’ve needed to upgrade my WordPress install for quite some time, but I’ve always procrastinated at the crucial moment – the idea of losing data or simply having the site down for an extended period of time, if an error occurred, has always made me put it off until ‘next weekend’.
Well 8 minor revisions and one major have passed by, until I found the elixir that has eluded me all this time. I’d taken a look at TheCodeCave‘s approach – a script that automates the process, but I chickened out once more, mainly due to the fact that I wasn’t too sure if I had shell access to my hosting account, and didn’t want to bother MattG with questions, as he is quite busy right now.
Anyway, onto the main course – a plug in that does everything for you. From what I read, if it didn’t work, I’d not suffer any loss, and when I installed the plug in, activated and ran it, it happened so quickly I was convinced it had failed, but without an error message. A quick couple of checks later, and hey presto, I’m running WordPress 2.1.2 ! Next time a stable release is announced, a couple of seconds work, and I’ll have upgraded again. (For those too lazy to read the description linked above, some people may need to alter the permissions on files & directories for the process to complete. If you’re not sure what CHMOD means, go ask your local guru to hold your hand through the process :>

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Feb 24 2007

Recent Plugin Additions, Chimps Go Hunting And Kazakh Crap Items For Sale

Category: In The Media,Kazakhstan,Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 1:44 am

Recently added to this blog, plugin and widget wise, is

Do Follow – Allow commenters own sites to get the juice they deserve :>
PostPost – A way of automatically adding content (in my case adverts) after your posts. (Also has a lot of other options available)
WordPress Related Links – I’m still not 100% on whether to keep this one or not. It adds links to related sites at the end of my posts. Will have to monitor sometime, and check it isn’t just earning someone else a lot of money from my drivel :>
Google Sitemaps – I’ve had this installed since the first day this blog existed, but never got round to using it for some reason. As I had to re-create all my article web sites, and so re-submit their site maps, I decided to give this plug in a go.
Cloudy – Finally, a plugin & widget that does what I need, without having to remember to edit some PHP next time I wipe a file accidentally. The word cloud you can now see on the right, in the second column, is the result.
Continue reading “Recent Plugin Additions, Chimps Go Hunting And Kazakh Crap Items For Sale”

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Dec 08 2006

This Week, I Have Been Mainly Using

Category: Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 3:51 pm

OK, as promised a long, long time ago, here are all the Plugins & Widgets used on this site. Some links are not directly to the author’s site, as a few domains have expired, or their servers are too flakey to rely on…

About Me – A wonderfully simple, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin widget.

Adhesive – This plugin’s effect will be familiar to forum readers, as it keeps a particular post ‘sticky’ at the top of the page, rather than naturally slipping down the page as newer posts appear.

Akismet – This is wonderful! It has prevented me from having to manually check almost 100 spamming comments so far. There are alternatives, and other approaches, but it has certainly saved me a lot of grunt work…

All Consuming – This is responsible for showing which books I’ve read recently, and which I’m currently reading. I noticed a bug/feature in an earlier release, and the author kindly gave me credit for noticing how to fix the error. This problem has now been solved properly, but it was good to see my thoughts actually helped someone…

Auto-Hyperlink URLs – If I forget to assign a formal hyperlink to an internet address, this plug-in tries to help.

Commenter Spy – not quite as scary as it sounds, just gives me a shortcut to find the approx. geographical location of a commenter’s IP (or more accurately, their ISP).

GetWeather – The 3 weather reports on the right hand side of each page are generated from this plug in.

IM Online – As in I’m online and IM (instant messenger). Shows whether I am connected to the internet with Windows Live Messenger and Skype.

King RSS Widget – WorkInProgress – will edit my post once I’ve used this plugin properly.

King Text Widget – VERY, VERY useful widget. It allows you to basically convert any script or normal plugin into a widget. Currently used extensively on this site, at least until ‘proper’ widgets are found for each purpose.

Manage Me – Makes managing multiple posts/comments a lot easier in the admin area for this blog. (Author’s relevant post used to be found at http://www.stilglog.com/wordpress-plugins/manage-me/ , but site is down, as of 10/04/2009 at least)

No Ping Wait – Currently disabled for trouble-shooting purposes, but this plugin allows me to carry on working immediately after Publishing a blog entry, rather than waiting for a response from each service I ‘ping’ to inform them of a new entry here.

Simple Cache – Prevents identical data from being constantly reloaded. As an example, the weather report for Cheltenham, Swansea & Astana aren’t likely to change every 5 minutes, so this plug in checks the last time the data was retrieved from GetWeather’s servers, and if it was recent, will simply serve the cached data.

VideoPop – This allows me to post videos with a simple pop-up player, rather than requiring people to know too much about file types etc.

WhoLinked – Displays which sites link to this one.

Word Stats – This allows you to easily post (& automatically update) the vital statistics of your blog. It can be downloaded from Google.

Zap_NewWindow – This one makes sure that if a reader clicks on a link in one of your posts, the site will open in a new window, so you don’t lose the reader. There is an annoying pop-over ad at his blog right now – close it, then close the new window/tab to see the real text.

Sidebar Widgets – Without this, none of the widgets mentioned above would work!

The theme currently used on this blog is Ainslie Johnson’s Chameleon 1.1.

Oh, and btw, this post’s title refers to a Fast Show quote, in case it makes no sense to some people…

[EDIT]
OK, having compiled this list, I remembered a couple of things I wanted to try out, so you can now add the following two to your list of things to check out if/when you have a WordPress blog…

Inline Ajax Comments – This means you can check the comments on a post without leaving the main page. Took me a while to trouble shoot the insertion of two simples lines of code. I finally realised that the ‘Show Comments’ text would only actually appear under posts that already had a comment! (Used to be found at http://kashou.net/blog/inline-ajax-comments/ , currently the whole site just appears to bring graphic up)

WordPress Mobile Edition – Trying to view this blog on a PDA or SmartPhone just takes too long (GPRS speeds not being that great in Kazakhstan at least) & results in a difficult page to navigate (even with a good browser like NetFront on a PDA), so I decided to give this plugin a try. It seems to work like a charm, picking up both IE & NetFront on the iPAQ…

[EDIT2]
24/2/07 Update

Do Follow – Allow commenters own sites to get the juice they deserve :>
PostPost – A way of automatically adding content (in my case adverts) after your posts. (Also has a lot of other options available)
WordPress Related Links – I’m still not 100% on whether to keep this one or not. It adds links to related sites at the end of my posts. Will have to monitor sometime, and check it isn’t just earning someone else a lot of money from my drivel :>
Google Sitemaps – I’ve had this installed since the first day this blog existed, but never got round to using it for some reason. As I had to re-create all my article web sites, and so re-submit their site maps, I decided to give this plug in a go.
Cloudy – Finally, a plugin & widget that does what I need, without having to remember to edit some PHP next time I wipe a file accidentally. The word cloud you can now see on the right, in the second column, is the result.

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Nov 28 2006

Message For Tom, Message For Other Tom And Another Thing

Category: Friends,Personal,WordPress — ChrisM @ 2:19 am

OK, first for Tom from LifeOf2Me, I keep forgetting to mention THIS link to you when we meet in the real world… Not sure if it will be of any use to you with your work (if/when the school gets closer to actually needing syllabuses/lesson plans etc.), but I thought it might be of interest to you at the very least…

Second, for the ‘other’ Tom (nowt personal, if I’d met you first, ‘our’ Tom would be the ‘other’ ;>), are we still meeting up Tuesday evening? I’m assuming your flight plans haven’t changed. Anyway, we’ll all be out drinking somewhere, hope you are still coming.

Finally, my HHUUGGEE thanks to the creator of the theme I use for this site; for a while I’d wanted to alter the colours used for hyperlinks – whilst the previous grey was definitely in keeping with the black version of Chameleon I’d chosen, a couple of visitors had mentioned that when I post links, it wasn’t very obvious sometimes. I found this to be true when I’d been up all night, and ended up randomly pushing the cursor around until I found what I needed. Anyway, I digress, Ainslie spotted my request 1/2 day after I added it on one of his posts. I then neglected to check back for an answer for a while, and when I discovered his speedy response, I followed up with another query (still a newbie with CSS – I can bodge/cut’n’paste/guess some things, but I wasn’t sure which value to alter for link colours…). Lo and behold, some 39 minutes later, he had the answer.

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