Changes on Stuff by Sarah

Wed, 15 October, 2008 – 5:37 pm

After a fair bit of thought I'd decided to merge the two blogs on this domain back into one. I separated them a couple of years ago to allow me to focus on the subject of AIS (Automated Income Streams) and earning online, however due to work constraints and the frequency of posts that I have on this subject, I've decided to bring everything back into one blog.

I hope that there's content of use from my other blog to my AIS subscribers. A lot of it is technical and/or business oriented so it should be of interest. It also means I only have one blog to maintain with updates to plugins and the core WordPress files, which is always a bonus!

I've redirected all of the feed URLs to the correct URL so no changes need to be made by any current subscribers. Everything's been redirected URL wise so I'm hoping that nothing falls apart! Of course if you do spot anything please let me know

Posted in Blogging | 6 Comments »

A few jQuery Additions

Tue, 7 October, 2008 – 6:16 pm

I've been adding in a few jQuery additions to this site recently, and will be adding a few more. Nothing will stop working if you don't run JavaScript, I'm not that ignorant You'll just notice that on the sidebar on the right, some of the lists are now 'closed', click on the plus/minus sign to open them up. Also on the single posts the comment form has been hidden and if you click on 'Leave a Comment' it will appear (I wonder how many comments I don't get now with people not realising it's there…?!).

I've still got a bit of playing to do, but just so you're aware, a few things may change. Hopefully for the better

Any thoughts on the comment form though? I like having it out of the way until it's needed but obviously don't want people to think that the form has gone. Time to have a bit of a think I guess. All opinions/thoughts welcome

Posted in Web Development | 3 Comments »

Bit of an Update - Autumn's Here!

Sun, 5 October, 2008 – 8:15 pm

Yes, the autumn is here, the heating is on! Things have been pretty busy over the past two weeks. Work is still very busy, and my half year profits show an almost 50% increase on last year, which is, of course, good to see considering the whole credit crunch and the way a lot of businesses seem to be suffering. I also finally managed to understand and use Subversion and have finally got my first WordPress plugin into the WordPress plugin repository! I've had the alotted space available for a few months but just couldn't work out how to add my plugin, however after a bit of searching I came across some instructions that made it all clear. Once I got my first plugin online, I immediately requested to add my new Page Menu Editor plugin to the repository as well. 24-48 hours later and that was in too

Last week we both went back to school. We decided to enrol on the Spanish for absolute beginniners evening course, which is held about 5 minutes around the corner from us. As we want to go to a few various countries that use Spanish, we figured it was a good idea, plus it gets us out the house one evening a week. We've had 2 lessons so far and it's an 11 week course. Hopefully we can then continue on to the standard beginners course and maybe take it a little further. The Spanish we've learnt so far is quite similar to Italian too (with them both being derived from Latin it's not a surprise) so that's always handy too

Then on Friday we finished work early (well if you can call 5pm early!) and drove over to besides the Mersey as the QE2 Cruiseliner had docked in Liverpool for the day and was then due to do a quick tour of Britain before traveling out to Dubai where it's going to become a hotel and casino. I've never seen the QE2 before so it was literally the last chance to see it. Of course we took a few photos of it during the day, and also returned later on to get some shots in the dark before it left at 10pm. You can see all of the photos I took on Flickr. I've also been trying to finish my Photography blog off, and just need to finish off adding some more photos and content, however that should be finished off soon

Posted in Personal, Photography | No Comments »

New WordPress Plugin - Page Menu Editor

Fri, 26 September, 2008 – 10:01 pm

I've been improving my old Custom Page Title Attributes plugin, and have effectively added to the flexibility this can give by adding an additional text field to allow you to easily change the anchor text (menu label) of the page in the wp_list_pages() output. Okay, that sounded quite technical…!

Basically (I say that word far too much!), by default WordPress offers you two text fields for a static Page (note the capital P for a WordPress Page) - Title and Post. Ignore Post, we know what that does. The Title field supplies content for the page title (wp_title()), page header (the_title()), the anchor text in the menu (menu label) and the title attribute of the page link in the menu (these last two are generated by wp_list_pages()). That's the same content 4 times, and not always appropriate!

Let's look at WordPress for a CMS point of view. We have the front page. We want a nice long 75 character page title to help with our SEO. We've got the All in One SEO pack or the SEO Title tag plugins for that job - great! Okay, we want a slightly shorter but just as meaty header. However we only have about 100 pixels for the menu label and let's face it 'Home' is usually the best choice. However, we don't want 'Home' as the header. So up until now, to combat this, I've removed the_title() from theme files and used the title field for the menu label and hardcoded the title into the content area (ie. put the title into a h2 within the content field).

That's fine for me, and anyone who knows what a h2 is, but let's face it, most clients don't and it's really not a good idea to try and explain them! So to get around this I figured that I could just use the same idea for replacing the anchor text as I already had for the title attribute, a couple of hours (and fun and games with pattern matching) later, I managed to get the new plugin working.

So, without further ado or rambling from me, feel free to go grab my latest plugin - Page Menu Editor and let me know what you think

Posted in WordPress | 2 Comments »

Personal Update and Bird Photography

Sun, 21 September, 2008 – 10:16 am

It's still pretty busy here workwise. As one thing starts to come to an end and the stress eases off, 2 or 3 more jobs come along to just escalate it to another high! Next week is going to be a bit of a nightmare for work as clients have left things too late and seem to expect me to just work 24 hours plus invent a few more hours into the day to get everything they need done in time.

So this week was welcomed as we were going away on Wednesday for a few days break plus a visit to a county show that's only on once a year (so not something you could reschedule!). Despite all the bad weather we've suffered in recent weeks, also resulting in the cancellation of another country show we were due to go to 2 weeks ago, on the day of the show the sun was shining and the weather quite warm! Actually it's been the first time in years where I've been to the show and it's not rained! Of course we took our cameras along, just in case there was anything good to snap.

After a bit of wondering around I spotted that the falconry show had started in one of the arenas so made a beeline for that! I managed to get a few good shots of a gorgeous and cute barn owl, one of which was whilst it was in flight. They also brought a Falcon out, which decided that it didn't want to fly, and an Eagle. All my photos from the day can be seen in my Flickr Set.

We've now got 2.5 weeks of solid work and then we're off to Dublin for a short break, which should keep us going then until Christmas

Posted in Personal, Photography | No Comments »