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Running the Gandi.net API on their PAAS

Phil Banks — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 21:02:47 +0000

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 [...]

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Red Lodge Conservation Group

Phil Banks — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 09:07:23 +0000

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 [...]

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Resolving wpautop and Shortcode problems

Phil Banks — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 21:29:30 +0000

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 [...]

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Responsive Tables with CSS and jQuery

Phil Banks — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 09:03:25 +0000

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 [...]

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Advanced CPT Filtering in WordPress

Phil Banks — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:54:49 +0000

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 [...]

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UK GovCamp 2012 in review

Phil Banks — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:34:50 +0000

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 [...]

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Heading to UKGovCamp2012

Phil Banks — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:20:53 +0000

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 [...]

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Highlighting Custom Post Types in the menu

Phil Banks — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:16:31 +0000

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 [...]

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Conditionally loading plugin scripts in WordPress

Phil Banks — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:39:29 +0000

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 [...]

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York House photoshoot

Phil Banks — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:03:20 +0000

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 [...]

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