29th March, 2008
Some grass had taken seed in with my glass bowl of Cape Sundew (drosera capensis) and rather than unearthing it and killing it, I decided to re-home it in a decorative blue glass bottle, where it has been growing happily ever since.
29th March, 2008
As we continue to develop the Ocean Addict website it was decided that the forum needed to be as robust and powerful as possible so this meant installing additional forum software, in the form of a Simple Machines Forum. Once this was done, clearly there needed to be as much integration for users as possible, from logging in to styling the user interface, so I set about searching for a method of bridging WordPress and SMF.
I quickly found http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smf-a-simplemachines-bridge/, which seemed ideal. That is until after diligently following the installation instructions the plugin caused the entire site to break. Fortunately WordPress’s plugin system can be rescued by simply deleting the offending plugin.
Searching for much longer wielded a solution based on the first. The stuff that can be found at http://www.earthorbit.com/opensource/ DOES work and works well.
25th March, 2008
I’ve uploaded photographs of the ruined Berry Pomeroy Castle after a visit there.
21st March, 2008
I was fixing my second year idat203 Negotiated Project (since moving it caused various hyperlinks to break, making viewing it in action pointless) when the flurry of discontented emails about the new i-dat website design started in the DAT forum (roughly around two hundred… million so far methinks).
So while testing my project I decided to see what it would make of the site, bearing in mind that the idea of this piece was to reveal what you aren’t meant to see in a website. This project will react to the quality of the underlying code in a site in the sense that it looks for individual words to fit into ever smaller spaces. Crap websites, ie. ones that haven’t been hand-coded but are rather churned out of some program like MS Word tend to clog up the project with huge chunks of code, which never get displayed. However humanly-readable, XHTML compliant sites, the sort that have had effort put into the coding side produce wonderful results like as can be seen in this example of the i-dat site:
15th March, 2008
For the Ocean Addict website I have been looking into open source solutions to creating a form of CMS to link together the main features now wanted for the site. An obvious choice might be something like Joomla! or Drupal but we have already got together the blog frontpage and a store, so instead the site is heading for WordPress. I’ve heard of WP being used before as a CMS, it is known for its flexibility but until now I have never considered using it as anything more as a blog.
An excellent page bringing together a whole range of resources to do just this can be found at:
http://www.graphicdesignblog.co.uk/wordpress-as-a-cms-content-management-system/
Before now I have experimented with the nextgen gallery wordpress system and the wordpress simple forum.
13th March, 2008
As a follower of the Half Life 2 series, naturally I have tried Portal and was kept amused by it for a little while, solving a series of puzzles with the portal gun set by a mad AI computer obsessed with cake.
However in my search for ideas for something I could make in Flash for my final year autumn term module Scripting for Digital Media (IDAT311) – (I am thinking I may as well get a long headstart on as much as I can now) – I found an amazing recreation of the portal game in a 2D Flash form. It can be found at http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/ – Portal: The Flash Version
10th March, 2008
I have uploaded yet more dartmoor pictures to my flickr account!
(Mist rising from a stream in the Autumn sun.)
4th March, 2008
A big thanks to the guys at FRED who took ‘we owe you a beer’ literally for the work I did updating their existing flash website and creating a mobile version.
Having been asked what my favourite beer was ‘for a survey’, to which the answer was Barcelona’s Estrella, I was sent 24 bottles! Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised.
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