OK so its Sunday name is “Swing”, but here’s my most recent knitting achievement. Its a hat, with long earflaps that make a scarf:
I has a nice bit of garter stitch around the brim:
And here’s a closeup of the fabulous pompoms:
Over at the Well Designed URLs Blog they’ve started a movement to tag all urls-that-suck on del.icio.us and they will later rank the top ten sites with utterly rubbish URLs. I think this is a great idea and will be adding my own as I come across them.
Since my recent struggle with Joomla! Pretty URLs I have been wondering whether it was really worth the effort. Suffice it to say that I am now convinced.
You can see how I’m getting on at del.icio.us/lornajane/urls-that-suck. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Today’s quote of the day comes from a reply to the Freshmeat article Geek Chicks
You don’t become a geek, you discover that you are one
I have to look this up every time I do it so here’s a fast tutorial on changing the letter for a USB storage device under Windows XP. I’m using this for my newly-flashed iriver that I told you about recently.
Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management. Your device will be listed and if you right-click there’s an option to “Change drive letter and paths”.
I love PHP. I’ve worked with a fair number of languages and I have to say that I absolutely love PHP. I love its cleanliness, its elegance, and its fabulours online documentation and community support.
I come across a lot of people in various walks of life who rubbish the language because of various perceived (usually historical) weaknesses. So when I saw this article from DevZone I felt I had to post and say how much I agree with it. I also think that the PHP community might benefit from a little more self-promotion once in a while … but it seems that everyone is rather too busy “solving the web problem” (the original aim of PHP) to worry about little things like that :)
Well the website for my netball club is definitely going ahead, They are even more up for it than I imagined! So you can find the new site at www.shipleynetball.org.uk and hopefully it will actually get some content soon.
I installed a new copy of Jooma! which was just as easy the second time as it was the first – you literally sit down to install it and before you remember you forgot about your coffee, its done and you’re already fiddling with the administration tool. This time I installed some extras.
I can’t say enough about how much I like the eventlist component from schlu.net. In addition to the date management bit which I tried out before, I’ve also installed the calendar module that is also available. I know its very alpha but I haven’t managed to break it yet and its exactly what this module needed! Also it makes sense for the users on the netball site to click on a particular saturday and see all the fixtures by day so that’s very good.
Another thing I must mention again about this component is the locations functionality. We play at one of five venues and you have to input the venues before you input the events but then once the address information, directions and whatever have been input they get associated with the fixture automatically … and its got a google maps link too :)
Pretty URLs are something I feel quite strongly about. They’re strong and human-memorable which I think counts for a lot. I understand they’re also really good for search engines although I’m not an expert and I am under the impression that search engines kind of read your content these days. Well this was a complete faff from start to finish. It took me literally two hours from start to finish and that was only because I gave up, set the thing up manually, and sat down to write this before bed. Here are the steps I think I probably needed to follow, in the order it happened.
Anyway I still like Joomla! and I think its going to be a nice simple interface for the people who are going to be writing articles for the site so I’m still quite pleased with it, if temporarily exasperated! If anyone knows what I was missing then suggestions are gratefully received.
Its all sorted and we’re booked onto the London PHP Conference in February. Its a bit of a geeky thing to do as a couple I suppose but I’m really looking forward to it. There are some speakers that I will be positively star-struck to see in the flesh (Cal Evans and Rasmus Lerdorf) and some people that I’m really looking forward to meeting in person that I have had contact with online.
Due to the exciting way that train fares work here in the UK, its much cheaper to travel to London on Thursday evening1, stay both Thursday and Friday night in a hotel in central London and then travel back on Saturday afternoon. To be fair the journey back is cross-country and takes 4 hours but I upgraded the tickets to first-class for £3 and we won’t be changing trains so I’m sure it will be fine.
I’m really looking forward to hearing the talks and meeting the people at the conference, I’ve never been to anything like it before and I can’t wait! Also two nights in central London with Kevin can’t be a bad thing :)
1 To put this in perspective, its costing us £9.50 to travel on Thursday night and the walk-on Single Fare is £273. It really pays to be organised.
Well its early days in our relationship but so far, Joomla! and I are getting along just fine. Since I installed it I’ve had a proper fiddle with most of the bits and pieces (mostly turning things off actually!!) and now its looking much better.
Since I’ll want to introduce fixtures, I’ve used a calendar extension called EventList from schlu.net and its fabulous. It took me ages to get the idea that to change how a category displays its items, you edit the menu item that points to it. It still seems like a bit of a funny concept (what if you link to it from somewhere else?) but it really works now I’ve figured it out. I used this to stop the date and author being displayed in the “Venues” section, since they don’t mean a lot. To remove the same information from the individual articles I edited each article individually.
I’ve also changed templates, there are loads available to download but I was struggling a bit with ones I didn’t like or didn’t know how to change. In the end I chose the “sporticus” one from www.rockettheme.com, it was easy to change the colour and I made some other changes to it as well.
At one point I got quite stressed with the layout of news articles on the front page, one or two was fine, but three did a funny layout with one at the top and the next two next to each other. Once again its the menu item property, I changed the number of columns to put all the articles in line with one another and it looks great!
The other thing I must mention is the community, I’ve registered for the forums but so far have been able to find things I needed just by searching the threads. The tone of the forums is much nicer than I’ve seen elsewhere and most of the Joomla! gang seem keen to spread the word. I must also give a special mention to my phpwomen friend and personal Joomla! consultant, Amy who has been very helpful and even answered questions before I ask them :)
As a geek, I sometimes create websites for other people or organisations who don’t have the technical skills to create them themselves. Tonight I’m meeting with the Netball Club Committee (well they are meeting and I am gatecrashing) to discuss whether a website would be useful for them.
The thing is, for a non-technical person, it seems that anything is possible on the internet, so some very interesting conversations will result. These are usually started with the line “Wouldn’t it be cool if …” and end with things ranging from “the website could phone you and tell you someone replied to your forum post” to “we had a dancing reindeer all over the clean and stylish site you just redesigned … as its Christmas”. [1]
I’ll let you know what requests I get hit with tonight, I’m hoping they’ll think that news and events will be enough to be going on with but we shall see!
1 I ignored the first and ended up giving in to the second request.
After I wrote about the death of a gadget, I decided that I would definitely just go out and buy something which would make music, to use in the car and at the gym, which wouldn’t matter if it died too. So I got one of these logik orbit mp3 players (mine was actually black). I thought it would fit the bill, it was dirt cheap (35 GBP for 2gb player), little, and had multicoloured backlight which I love!
Not such a good idea. It had an internal battery that never seemed to hold charge for long. The mini-usb connection was a faff but that was the least of the problems I had. Often, it would play and show the battery as half full or even more, but if you turned it off for ten minutes when you stopped at a service station and then asked it to play again, it just wouldn’t turn on. This thing took longer to boot than my sister’s windows machine, an old hand-me-down from me with goodness-knows-what installed on it. I regularly ended up on a long drive or in the gym with no music, not something I enjoy. The best was when we used it in the car while visiting over Christmas. I had never really noticed before but it doesn’t correctly identify the tracks. When playing a track, it would show you 3 random pieces of information. They weren’t even necessarily an artist, an album and a title – you would just get any three. My favourite was “we will rock you” being labelled as “Kylie” sung by “Andrew Lloyd Webber” from the album “various” :)
So I got an iriver T20 from Scan’s Today Only for a little over fifty quid.
Its beautiful. Its cute, its tidy and its elegant. The biggest downside was that it is a “play for sure” player, but following instructions from a couple of sites, it was possible downloaded the manufacturer’s new firmware and turned the device into a normal USB mass storage that can be seen and understood by Linux as well.
This device is tiny (did I mention it’s also quite cute?), has a lovely quality of screen, a separate line in socket and a USB connection that retracts into it when not in use. The menus are not terribly intuitive but so far I haven’t found anything I wanted to do and couldn’t find out how. The battery doesn’t seem to go flat at all, it plays ogg-vorbis format and frankly its the best thing I have spent money on in a long time. Isn’t it satisfying to have something that you really like?