Running the Gandi.net API on their PAAS
I recently setup a small server monitoring script using the APIs from Gandi and Monitor.us – both services I would recommend – to use as a module within Status Board. There was one small quirk – I decided to run it from a Gandi PAAS instance and discovered that the PEAR install they provide doesn’t ...
Red Lodge Conservation Group
Lately I’ve been working with the conservation group in the village where I live. They were awarded Big Lottery funding for promoting and growing the group, and decided a website was an ideal partner to traditional leaflets. A local designer was contracted to design the print media and I built the web site around the ...
Resolving wpautop and Shortcode problems
Background WordPress offers quite a friendly hybrid WYSIWYG / HTML editor that makes publishing easy even for those with no HTML experience. One of the ways it accomplishes this is through a function called wpautop. This runs on the_content as the page is drawn to insert <p> and <br/> tags as needed. By inserting them ...
Responsive Tables with CSS and jQuery
One of the big problems with Responsive Web Design is dealing with fixed size elements, especially iFrames and Tables. While a table can be flexible, there will also be a minimum size past which it will spill out of it’s container or be cropped/trigger scrolling, depending on your CSS setup. Whilst working on a site ...
Advanced CPT Filtering in WordPress
Prior to WordPress 3.1 you could only use one meta_key : meta_value : meta_compare in a query_posts. This meant that you could, for example, get the custom post type (cpt) product, filter it to get only those products that have a price >= 100. However you could not then orderby department ASC. Neither could you get ...
UK GovCamp 2012 in review
As mentioned on Thursday, Friday was the 5th UK GovCamp and the biggest yet. The day started well (with free t-shirts and lots of tea/coffee & biscuits), and even 260 people introducing themselves to the room was kept on schedule. You can see the agenda agreed on Flickr courtesy of David Pearson. There was a ...
Heading to UKGovCamp2012
Tomorrow I will be getting up at silly o’clock to drive to Cambridge, park, walk 2 miles to the station, train to Kings Cross, tube to Victoria and a walk to Microsofts UK HQ. It’ll take about 3.5 hours, but, based on the reports from last year, worth every minute. This will be my first ...
Highlighting Custom Post Types in the menu
There seems to be a problem/oversight in WordPress at the moment (afaik). You can generate Custom Post Types (CTP) easily enough, and have them visible on any page using templates/the loop, but when you click through to a single CTP WordPress assigns the current_page_parent to the default posts page. For many that will mean highlighting ...
Conditionally loading plugin scripts in WordPress
I’m a big fan of WordPress – it’s both easy to use as an author and easy to develop for. There are also a huge amount of free (and paid) plugins to extend the core functionality. Unfortunately there is a downside – most plugins do not conditionally load their files only on pages that call ...
York House photoshoot
Last weekend I had the pleasure of staying at York House in Tetbury. While they won’t be opening until spring 2012 – just in time for the Gold Cup – this boutique bed & breakfast was ready for it’s first photoshoot. After spending an evening with the proprietor Brock Bergius discussing plans for the website ...