May 2, 2012

Using SimpleNote and iPad to Dictate

It turns out that the iPad’s dictation feature is quite good. Here’s a neat trick that lets me use SimpleNote to dictate through my iPad to my PC.

SimpleNote is a note taking app that works in a web browser or through an iOS app. It synchronises your notes almost instantly when you pause typing.  I discovered that I could use it alongside the new iPad’s dictation feature to quickly write things on my PC.

It’s so quick that you don’t see the synchronisation happen in the video – the text has appeared on my PC’s screen before I get the camera up to it.

I’m totally aware of the irony that if you can afford an iPad then you can almost certainly afford dictation software.

April 23, 2012

Kicking my CSS Browser Compatibility Habits

As my CSS skills have developed I’ve learned to avoid issues with older browser layout bugs and to use modern CSS selectors and declarations in a backwards compatible way. Some of these tricks have become habits, and I’ve decided that they’re maybe not necessary and are possibly actually slowing me down.

As I started a new project today I decided to quickly review my CSS compatibility habits. Here are my findings!

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April 16, 2012

Tech Notes: Hooking Actions on Options Framework Changes

This is a really short, sharp tech note for my own reference more than anything.

I use the Options Framework plugin as a way of quickly adding theme options to custom themes that I build.  I’ve been using it to store timeout values for data that’s cached using transients, but I wanted to force a refresh of the cached data whenever the theme options got saved.

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April 12, 2012

Tech Notes: CSS Sprites for list elements

CSS sprites, while a bit fiddly, are a great website optimisation, reducing HTML requests and load times. In fact, there was a great Smashing Magazine article posted just today about using them.

But I’ve always struggled with using them for bullets for list elements of variable height. Yes, I’ve used the :before and :after pseudo elements for such things, but I’d like to avoid doing so if possible: browser support is mostly OK, but not completely backwards compatible, and they’re harder to diagnose problems with.

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April 12, 2012

Tech Notes: Adding scripts using WordPress’ print_footer_scripts hook

I’ve used WordPress’ print_footer_scripts hook before so I don’t know why I only came across this yesterday. My own stupid fault really for making assumptions about how PHP works and is used.

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April 8, 2012

Campaigning, Communications and Change

A couple of weeks ago I attended FairSay‘s eCampaigning Forum conference. My main client, Ben Clowney from HandsUp, is well known in eCampaigning circles and has attended the conference for several years and, as his ‘Technical Director’ he invited me along so that I could get my finger on the pulse of the eCampaigning world.

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March 12, 2012

Tech Notes: Twitter Widget Pro not updating for Heart Internet users

I’ve had problems with the Twitter Widget Pro WordPress plugin not updating on several sites. I sat down and had a good trawl through the code tonight and it looks like it’s another ‘Heart Attack’ – a case of a Heart Internet feature preventing something from operating correctly.

Don’t get me wrong – I love my Heart Hosting and would highly recommend them, but if you’re hosting WordPress you need to know about this particular thing (and the WP-cron thing too!)

This same issue may apply to other hosts too, I’m not sure. If your Twitter Widget Pro isn’t updating then read on and find out.

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January 19, 2012

Tech Notes: WordPress Pagination in Custom Loops

Photo of Older Posts LinkI was implementing AJAX-based pagination on the Stop AIDS Campaign homepage yesterday and came across an interesting thing with WordPress pagination links in custom loops.

The Problem

I had a custom loop that was on the homepage, which is printed using the special front-page.php page template. I was picking up the “page” query var in my loop to print the right items, and then trying to use next_posts_link() and previous_posts_link() to print, well, the links that you’d think those functions printed from within a WordPress loop. (Remember that these might work backwards to what you expect – see the excellent Digging Into WordPress article for more)

But they weren’t working, always printing just the “next posts” link from the first page, regardless of what page I was actually on.

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January 4, 2012

Tech Notes: Website not sending emails to own domain

This is an issue I’ve come across several times.  Your website, call it http://mysite.com is hosted by a web host, but your email, with email addresses like me@mysite.com is elsewhere, perhaps with Google Apps. Your website sends out emails – this might be for new user registrations, notification of new comments, or any number of other things.  And most emails are fine, except those that are being sent to your own domain.  That is, an email sent by the website on domain mysite.com to an email address @mysite.com doesn’t arrive. What’s going on? Continue reading →

January 4, 2012

Tech Notes: Heart Internet and WordPress wp-cron job scheduling

This was a little fault that I found in my development environment, which I’ve recently moved onto my Heart Internet hosting as explained the other day.

The issue is specific to Heart Internet’s hosting and results in any scheduled jobs not running!  Scheduled jobs could include automatic updating, database cleaning and posting of scheduled posts, but could also include other features provided by plugins, such as automated database backup.

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