Author Archives: lornajane

11 Jan
2007

Dating Joomla!

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 :)

11 Jan
2007

Wouldn’t It Be Cool If …

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.

10 Jan
2007

Gadget Update

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” :)

Better things

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?

07 Jan
2007

Rowan Big Wool Mittens

I can’t really knit. I must have been able to once; I knitted toy snowmen as christmas presents for my friends when I lived at home. But its something that I can’t just pick up and potter along with like I can crochet. For my birthday I received hobbhy craft vouchers (thanks Kath and Geoff!) and the “Stitch and Bitch: Knitters Handbook” which has a lot of tips about picking up dropped stitches as well as really clear instructions for every knit stitch I’m going to need for a while.

So when I wandered into hobbycraft and they had six balls of Rowan Big Wool in “whoosh” (that’s funky pink to you and me), I decided they must have had my name on! Here are the first fruits of my knitting revival ….

This doesn’t really do them justice though, so here’s an alternative presentation, they’re still cooler than this one shows them though!

Watch this space for matching items to appear :)

07 Jan
2007

A Winter’s Wrap

Thought I’d show off my most recent crochet creation as I haven’t been keeping the site up-to-date with stuff lately. I received an invite to a Christmas Ball from a friend in the Army, and accepted. My summer ballgown (I slimmed back into the pink one mum made – yay!) was going to be a bit chilly at a winter ball so I thoughtit would be good to have something to throw over the top.

A half-hour conference in the wool shop saw me with some Dolce Vita by Wendy in shade 499, no idea what its called but it looks white to me, with slightly fluffy sparkly bits. I saw this pattern on Dot’s site and thought I’d have a shot:

And the stitches in detail:

While working a small prototype I decided to add extra non-pattern rows into mine, so I have half the shell patterns that hers does. The finished article is 76 inches from wingtip to wingtip and about 18 across. It would have been longer but I basically ran out of time – I was still putting the border on it at the pre-event drinking session :)

04 Jan
2007

Joomla! greetings

Next week I’ve been asked to go to the netball club committee meeting and tell them a bit about what a website is and whether I should be making them one. In order to get my brain in gear I’ve been thinking about tools that would be suitable for this … I have been looking for a reason to try out Joomla! for a while, because the phpwomen.org site uses it and I don’t know much about it. Anyway last week I read a good review of it in LinuxFormat which reviewed a number of CMS tools and rated Drupal best but gave Joomla! the same score but said it was simpler.

So I’ve just installed Joomla! for the first time and it was as easy as falling off a log :) Actually it might have been even easier than that, once I set off through the process of installing it then suddenly I was all done and fiddling with the admin tool! This product has a very active community behind it so I was quickly able to grab some free templates and suchlike, very cool (especially as they look quite complicated to write from scratch) and appealing to my instant-gratification appetite.

Items, Categories and Sections

All items (my items are like articles, I’m still learning so not sure if this would always be true) have to go into a category, and all categories have to go into sections. It is necessary to set up the sections and categories first, before creating anything to go in them; the Joomla! manual explains that these are like folders and drawers and your room would be a mess if you didn’t. Its easy to move things around later anyway so that’s no big deal.

I found it confusing to add a link to a section and realise that this would then list the categories within it, rather than the items. However I got around this by removing the menu item and creating a new one which pointed directly to the category.

Table – Content Category

The default section listing is horrible, its a big table with the date, the author, the section, the title, the phase of the moon and a bunch of filters and other navigation. The category in question is a list of netball venues and there are about five of them! I faffed around with templates and had a bit of a dig in the code (I knew there was a reason I always use PHP stuff even though I rarely fiddle with the code as it only causes upgrade nightmares), but I couldn’t work it out.

To cut short a long story, in which I learned the true size and depth of the Joomla! community from the sheer volume of material that’s around, what I actually needed to do was edit the properties of the menu item (obviously!) to make the category display differently. I’ve turned off all the guff and now I’ve got a nice, tidy list. sighs contentedly

First impressions

First impressions are that I love Joomla! but I’d need a good reason to install a tool with quite this many capabilities. This website uses textpattern and that’s more than enough for every day, but Joomla! can handle so many different types of content that there’s hardly anything you can’t do. Anyway the main purpose of the new site is to show fixtures so I will soon be trying out some events calendar extensions … I’ll let you know how I go!

02 Jan
2007

My 2006

Well, here we are, 2007 and another year has gone. I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions (I do have a problem with winter blues so January is a rubbish time for that type of thing for me), but there is always a touch of nostalgia when Big Ben strikes. Here’s my year in brief:

Being unemployed

In January I mostly worked my notice period at my previous workplace, having resigned two days before Christmas more or less on a whim. My boyfriend and I did some maths and figured we’d be much better off if I gave up my job, and our home in Oxfordshire, and I sat in his bedsit unemployed – so I did. It was very hard to leave the good friends I made while working there, so hard in fact that I refused to have a leaving do at all in case I cried (which I did, lots, but not until I was in the car on the way home on the last day – thanks Nic!). I did manage to arrange a trip to the other office in Glasgow as well, to hand over some bits and pieces, and had a fantastic night out with the people there, thanks guys :)

My parents were out of the country in January (a month in New Zealand, lucky things!) so, ably abetted by my sister, I took the opportunity to squirrel everything away at their house. They have been laid back about it but actually I think they just haven’t looked in the loft lately … or the garage, or the shed, or my bedroom!

All Change

Once I then got to Leeds, our new location of choice, I had a job to find. I had lots of interviews and a couple of offers straight away so that was good. We also moved house again, across the city, although since all my stuff is at my parents’ home it was quite straightforward. I do recommend moving without furniture! I started my new job which was quite daunting as I do struggle with new places, and met my new netball team which was fab.

Disaster strikes

I fell over at netball and trashed an ankle in the third minute of my second netball match for Shipley which left me hobbling for quite a long time. In fact, I didn’t drive for five weeks and was off the netball court for a lot longer. Its stronger now, but still not right. Apparently I damaged the ligaments and they will take a while to sort themselves out.

Summer Holidays

We didn’t get a holiday really, although we went camping with friends twice (Cromer in Norfolk and then somewhere in darkest Derbyshire). I don’t mind camping at all, my parents first took me camping at 4 months old (apparently!) and I was a girl guide too so its no hardship providing you are quite organised about it. That said, I did forget both the kettle and the matches this time … oops!

Relocation … or not

The house saga really took up the back end of the year, along with a few parties and an awful lot of netball, and here we are again in January. I feel a very long way from where I was this time last year … putting everything in boxes and thinking that in a few months I’d be unpacking them again. Well those boxes are up mum’s loft still and we’‘re no closer to knowing where or when we’ll unpack them. I’ll probably have completely forgotten what we have, or replaced the things I thought I could manage without and then couldn’t!

Still, who knows what the future holds … my New Years Resolution is to keep facing forwards – what’s yours?

30 Dec
2006

Office Dress: Bags

In the final in this mini series of office dress, I’ve covered suits, shoes, and now its the turn of bags.

I am a hoarder of all things, not least of handbags. I’m forever buying beautful bags and then finding that actually the one I was already using is more useful/comfortable/practical. The best solution would clearly be to use my pink Berghaus rucksack for work just I like I do in “real life”, but it doesn’t really fit in that well with my office image :)

For work I think there are some basic requirements which a bag needs. One is to be pretty spacious as I need my umbrella, wallet/phone/keys combo plus a cardigan or scarf, hairbrush, tissues, gum, lip balm and painkillers. In addition I often pack my mini flask of coffee, maybe a snack or even some lunch, maybe to drop off at the postbox, a music player, and who knows what else (knitting, notebooks, maps, assorted gadgets, penknife, kitchen sink, you get the picture). It must fit onto a shoulder or shoulders, I used to be fine with bags to hold in my hand but since having some RSI problems it isn’t comfortable. Oh and they need to shut at the top to keep the rain out!

Pretty bags are a complete non-starter, they quickly get dirty and often are designed for looks rather than strength. I’m not geeky enough for a briefcase and anyway since I don’t carry papers its completely the wrong shape. I have one I use for intervews and rectangular just isn’t useful! On dry days I have a largish turquoise coloured bag with two sections and handles long enough to put them on my shoulder and tuck the bag under my arm (just). My other favourite is a black leather (actually plastic) record bag which at least keeps most of the water out and looks good with my suit.

I am constantly changing between handbags though, and leaving things behind in the old one! It doesn’t help that I don’t dress remotely smart at weekends and there’s also a weekly office dress-down day to complicate the issue. Maybe I will just give up and go back to the rucksack – it worked when I was a student – what do you think?