Life, The Universe, and WordPress
A super-authentic Chinese restaurant on Vicar Lane, just on the edge of Leeds city centre. Crazy music, nonchalant waiters, and spot-on dim sum – exactly like being in China. The price is very reasonable too, and there’s a bakery downstairs should you want more on top of your glutinous fun.
Very picturesque part of North Yorkshire and best associated with the Brontës.
I recently upgraded to a gigabit router, with the intention of having my various computers and backup devices all wired in together and backing up at gigabit speeds. The router (a Billion 7800N) worked great, and the wireless-N speeds are very nice indeed. However, when it came to connecting to my Mac using an Ethernet cable all I got was:
Unassigned IP Address 169.x.x.x
I’d actually experienced this before while staying in a hotel and trying to use their free internet but had assumed it was the hotel’s problem. Not what I wanted to see from a new router.
If you’re in the market for a quick and simple way to display a Gravatar in a WordPress sidebar then check out the recently released Gravatar Widget plugin, as seen on WordPress.com.
Some of the features of the plugin:
Apart from bills the only thing that comes through my post box are flyers for local pizza companies and private hire taxi firms. I wish I could get Akismet for my post box (or maybe this already exists – a big dog).
Anyway, a while back I found an unusual hand-printed business card had been slipped in alongside the junk. I almost threw it away before noticing that it contained the URL for a WordPress.com blog. On closer inspection it turned out to be an advert for a blog about the area in which I am living, and which must have been hand delivered by the author – an unusual way to promote a blog. I can’t imagine that a similar online method of promotion would have made it past spam filters.
The card reads:
Over the coming days, weeks, months and years I am going to write and tell you about my life here in Spitalfields at the heart of London. How can I ever describe the exuberant richness and multiplicity of culture in this place to you? This is both my task and my delight.
The blog itself is an interesting read and I’ve already learned about several places of interest in my local area, as well as reading about some of the more colourful local characters. It seems that sometimes hand delivered spam is ok.
One question I am frequently asked about HeadSpace is whether there are any guides. The HeadSpace page lists the ones that I’m aware of and now includes two nice articles that were written by Andrew Kolyvas and posted on Site Sketch 101:
Thanks Andrew!
Earlier on this year Matt Mullenweg got in touch to see if I was interested in doing a bit of work for Automattic, with the idea of allowing people to post to their blog using email. I jumped at the chance and after a few months of part-time tinkering and a shock exposure to MIME, out came Post by Email and an introduction to the vagaries of spam.
Today marks my first day working full-time as a ‘code wrangler’ for Automattic. As a prelude to this the past three weeks have been spent manning the support desk at WordPress.com, which has been enormously useful in learning how WordPress.com works.
Suffice to say that I’m very excited about what’s coming up, and I’m looking forward to working with the rest of the team. There’s a whole bunch of good stuff going on and after having spent four years using WordPress, writing about WordPress, and developing more than a few plugins for WordPress, I can’t wait to get stuck in.
Hard drives. From my first exciting 20MB drive to the 1TB beast now keeping my backups. And where you have drives you surely have drive enclosures. Here I’ll be looking at the shiny silver and white Icy Dock MB662 RAID enclosure.
The MB662 is not a complicated NAS storage system. It has no web server, no iTunes software, no ethernet port or media server. It does however have a couple of flashing blue lights and this list of features:
So finally, after an extended development period and many people asking ‘are you ever releasing it’, I’ve released the theme files for the Guangzhou WordPress and bbPress theme.
As I say elsewhere:
Guangzhou is a two-column fixed width theme for both WordPress and bbPress. It is highly configurable, with two widget areas (sidebar and bottom), as well as customisable skins and many other options. It supports threaded and paged comments, making for very flexible discussion pages, as well as separating pings and trackbacks from comments – essential to keep the flow of conversation consistent.
Guangzhou has been in use on this site for over a year now and drives the appearance of both the main website and support forum. One of the main reasons for selecting bbPress for the forum was it’s integration with WordPress, and this theme brings this even closer.
I even took some extra time to make a short video:
Note that this theme requires WordPress 2.8 or bbPress 1.0
Although lacking in new features, this release includes a rewrite of the administration Ajax to use the WordPress provided admin-ajax functions, as well as moving all JavaScript fully into the jQuery world. Hopefully this will solve any issues caused by strange server setups.
In addition, a Japanese translation has been provided by Naoko McCracken.
