Weight and Stuff Report – 16 March 2010

Published Tuesday, 16 Mar 2010 19:28
Weight:  227.4 pounds (16 stone 3.4 pounds, 103.1 kg)

Not sure where that came from – up a pound today, mutter.

Today’s extra bit isn’t a photograph for once:

Coming soon

The future!

This is an rough preview of what Losing it[1] will look like once WordPress 3.0 is ready for active service[1]. The header will be one of my own images rather than the standard one you can see there, and there will probably be some more tweaks to the appearance, but this should give you the general idea.

[1] Currently in a generally well-behaved, but frequently changing Alpha, so I’m not going to run a live site with it just yet.

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Weight and Stuff Report – 15 March 2010

Published Monday, 15 Mar 2010 19:27
Weight:  226.4 pounds (16 stone 2.4 pounds, 102.7 kg)

Up just a touch today.

Here’s another of those “things you miss if you don’t look up” pictures:

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The detail on the dome is quite delightfully bonkers. Quite apart from the lovely ornate peak, there are all those little dormer windows surrounding it. You can see this building on the corner of Bath Lane and Blenheim Street in Newcastle.

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Ansel Adams 400 Photographs

Published Sunday, 14 Mar 2010 21:01

I’ve been trying to improve the quality of my photography, and quite apart from doing obvious things like taking more pictures and reading up on techniques, I’m making an effort to look at more photographs. I’ve been to a few exhibitions, and I’ve started getting some books of photographs. I’ll be talking about those as they reach the top of my reading pile, but I thought I’d mention this one now.

Ansel Adams, for those not familiar, was an American photographer best known for his wonderful black and white landscapes of the American West, perhaps most famously of Yosemite. Now there are lots of books of his work, ranging from small samples to enormous coffee-table volumes, but afer some dithering, I bought this one. As the title suggests, it’s a collection of 400 of his images, selected by Andrea G Stillman, who worked as and assistant to Adams for a number of years.

It’s printed on good, heavy paper, and the photographs are clear with plenty of contrast. The page size is on the small side, so some images do suffer from not being seen as large as they truly deserve, but that’s forgivable at the price.

As an introduction to the work of one of the most significant landscape photographers of the twentieth century, this book does very well indeed. One to look at again and again.

Of course, there is a danger with looking at photographs of this quality – if your’re not careful, instead of being inspired to make better images, you could find yourself giving up in despair. I’ll try not to do that.

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List Drafts Widget Revisited

Published Sunday, 14 Mar 2010 16:01

Quite some time ago, I unleashed my second attempt at a WordPress plugin – List Drafts Widget. It’s a simple thing, and it was stuck together from some code found on the WordPress forums and some tutorials on how to write plugins.

Well, time moves on, and WordPress with it. Version 2.8 of WordPress introduced a new squeaky clean object-oriented  method for writing widgets, and while the widgets written the old way will continue to work, there’s always a chance that old functions will cease to work with some future update, which would make my poor little widget crash, burst into flames, kick the cat (should you have one) or at the very least, stop working, which would be moderately annoying.

So, I did some digging, and read some tutorials, and borrowed some bits from other sites, and turned List Drafts Widget into a shiny new version that uses the new API and doesn’t appear to break anything, or nothing that I’ve noticed, anyway.

I’ll be uploading it to the WordPress Plugins Repository later, and you’ll be able to find it in the same place as the old one:

List Drafts Widget

Comments, suggestions, etc are welcome.

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Weight and Stuff Report – 14 March 2010

Published Sunday, 14 Mar 2010 13:21
Weight:  226 pounds (16 stone 2 pounds, 102.5 kg)

Back down again today, in the usual random oscillatory way.

Today’s bit of stuff is this little screenshot:

How much

This may take some time

This was the result of copying a large folder of images from my MacBook to the iMac. I think it may have been lying about the time estimate, as it seems to have finished already rather than keeping me waiting until some time in the year 10765 or thereabouts. Not sure if this is a peculiarity of Forklift or random weirdness, but it amused me slightly. And I’d rather have an insane over-estimate of time than the Microsoft-style guesswork, which once told me that it would take 20 minutes to move a very large file. And kept telling me that for the two hours or so it actually took…

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Moving towards WordPress 3.0

Published Saturday, 13 Mar 2010 19:50

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was playing with the development version of WordPress 3.0 (still in Alpha, may break at random times). As I’m intending to use that shiny new default theme, I decided it was time to have a look at how I do things in general to save effort in the long run.

The first thing was inserting the weight report thingy in those essential daily posts. I had been doing this by using Scott Reilly’s Get Custom Field Values plugin. That’s fine, but it needs some actual code inserted in the template files – several of them for most themes, though this would be cut down to the very handy loop.php in the Twenty Ten theme, which isn’t too hard, but it means that if the theme gets updated, I have to remember to edit it again.

So, I did a bit of tweaking, a bit of reading, and borrowed bits from Get Custom Field Values and another plugin to create a very basic plugin that drops the weight thingy in automatically without actually having to change of the theme files. It also means that if I decide to change to a different theme, I won’t need to edit that one either.

The next thing was the appearance of the site. While I’m generally happy with the look of Twenty Ten, I will want to change a few things, such as the base font. Now I could just edit the style.css file, but this could also cause problems when the theme is updated.

But fortunately, there is another way. WordPress has a very nifty feature called Child Themes – basically, you can have your own theme based on an existing one. All you have to create is a style.css file in which you defined only the styles that you want to change.

I found this really useful article on creating child themes which pointed me in the right direction. My test site is now working with that, and it all seems to be behaving itself nicely.

I’ll be playing with the test site some more over the next few weeks.

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No Such Thing As Society

Published Saturday, 13 Mar 2010 19:12

I mentioned the No Such Thing as Society exhibition when I saw it at the Laing Art Gallery in November, but I didn’t mention that while I was there, I bought the accompanying book. It recently got round to reading it, and what a damn fine book it is too. The title comes, of course, from one of Margaret Thatcher’s most famous statements[1]. The collection demonstrates that there bloody well is such a thing, thank you very much…

It’s a collection of documentary images of life in Britain between 1967 and 1987, together with a moderate amount of text talking about the photographers, the Arts Council’s support for photography, and the events in the country. Worth getting hold of if you saw the exhibition and would like to see the pictures again, or indeed if you missed it.

Getting a copy might be tricky now – there are just a few copies on Amazon.co.uk Marketplace, and some on abebooks.co.uk, with prices starting at around £30 and rising to over £300. But if you can find it at a non-exotic price, it’s well worth adding to your library.

[1] That’s the second, more polite version of that sentence

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Weight and Stuff Report – 13 March 2010

Published Saturday, 13 Mar 2010 18:55
Weight:  227 pounds (16 stone 3 pounds, 103 kg)

Bother. Up again today.

But never mind that, here’s a picture of something you’ll never see unless you look up:

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You’ll find that on Gallowgate in Newcastle.

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Weight and Stuff Report – 12 March 2010

Published Friday, 12 Mar 2010 19:30
Weight:  226.6 pounds (16 stone 2.6 pounds, 102.8 kg)

Hmmm. Down a bit today.

Your photographic treat for Friday is another sign where a little dose of spellchecking might have been a good idea:

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There seems to be a pattern here – this is at the same place as the chalk board I I mocked recently.

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Closedown

Published Thursday, 11 Mar 2010 23:44

This is pure genius. Thanks to the indispensable Look at This for this one:

YouTube Preview Image

Younger (or older non-Brit) readers might like to know that in the distant past, when I was a lad[1] and so on, the few TV channels that we had did not run 24 hours a day, shocking as that may sound, and actually closed down for the night. Closedown time used to be quite early by current standards – 11pm or even earlier, except at weekends where showings of old horror movies might drag things on to midnight or even later.

Originally, they used to close down completely, leaving a white dot to burn itself into your CRT TV while playing a high pitched beeeeeeeep to try and alert viewers who’d fallen asleep in front of Play for Today or whatever it was. But in later years, they ran looped pages from the Teletext service. Teletext is what people used to turn to for breaking news and cheap holidays in those distant days BEFORE THE INTERNET. It was all a bit slow and a bit crap (rather like the internet in dial-up days), but it was good for quick news updates.

And that’s a lot of words to explain the quite sublime joke in the video. If you’re as old as me, you won’t have needed to read any of  this, and probably didn’t..

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