MichaelOldroyd.co.uk

WordPress Post Formats made easy

Brief History of Fonts on the Web

For years, web designers have been yearning for custom fonts in web design. It’s a real shame that web fonts didn’t really take off with IE4 in 1997! The web was a different place back then, web design was a pretty new thing. Bandwidth was highly constrained at the time, so one could not imagine waiting for web fonts to load. Microsoft’s container format of choice is also EOT, which is a Microsoft proprietary technology. Although everybody slates it’s proprietary and closed nature, it was sort of a good idea. EOT provides domain locking, encryption, sub-setting and compression – all good things for convincing those behemoth font foundries to allow web embedding licenses.

Now is a better time than ever to move away from the standard web-safe fonts. Mainstream browsers have caught up with IE, over a decade later. Here is a short history lesson on the many techniques that Web Designers have been using to get beautiful type into their pages.

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Friday Update #1

My ten visitors may have noticed it was quiet over here for the last week and a half. For the last fortnight, I have been moving home. We began sorting and packing our belongings 3 weeks prior to that, yet we were still moving things out at 10:30 the night before the deadline. Probably because there was so much to clean and fix at the old place. It’s quite amazing how much shit you can stuff into one house. In total it’s taken a full week just to move our stuff and fix the place up. This includes 3 1/2 hours to get a sofa through a door, which was ridiculous. I did feel guilty that Bob – our sole surviving goldfish – was one of the last to move.
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Speeding up your page load times

Just by configuring your site and server in the right way, you can get much faster and responsive load times out of your CMS. With mainstream open source CMS software, you are given the ability to add bolt-on functionality. It’s common for each of these add-ons to provide their own set of CSS definitions, images and JavaScript. This makes these add-ons easy to implement for non-technical users. If you aren’t careful though, you will end up with tens or even hundreds of CSS and JavaScript files. This has a performance penalty, which can affect your rankings in the SERPs.

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Override core widget output in WordPress

Another snippet for the WordPress theme developers out there. I decided that the category widget didn’t display the post count in a very nice-looking way. So I found a nice support post that demonstrates the user of add_filter() to alter output of the category widget. Not the most ideal way to do things in my opinion, but it does the job.

add_filter('wp_list_categories', 'cat_count_span_inline');
function cat_count_span_inline($output) {
	$output = str_replace('</a> (','<span>',$output);
	$output = str_replace(')','</span></a>',$output);
	return $output;
}
php

Via wordpress.org

Templated 410 Error Pages in WordPress

The 4xx class of status code is intended for cases in which the client seems to have erred. Except when responding to a HEAD request, the server should include an entity containing an explanation of the error situation, and whether it is a temporary or permanent condition. These status codes are applicable to any request method. User agents should display any included entity to the user. These are typically the most common error codes encountered while online.

via Wikipedia

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National No Smoking Day…

I am always disappointed when No Smoking Day comes along. Each year I realize it’s upon us, feeling guilty having just bought a pack earlier in the morning. This year was no exception. Unlike most years though I have been trying to give up, consistently failing to do so since February.

The difference this year is that I heard about the event from Twitter. It’s a weird shift that I have noticed this year in particular, which started when I was following the coverage of the Egypt protests. One of the users I was following tweeted that Mubarak had fled the country, so I then tuned into the BBC’s live coverage on my phone. I would probably have only heard about it in passing the following day whilst I caught up on the news. Obviously, this was a major international event, and generally you only find out about things which matter to whom you follow. I don’t think I would ever rely on Twitter alone for news alerts, but it’s good that we don’t have to rely on an editorial process before we learn about events unfolding as they happen.

On the smoking bit, I hope that others have been more inspired by today than myself. I will prevail eventually; a spot of willpower, and maybe slap a patch on tomorrow.

New site design live

I’m happy to say that after buying my domain nearly four years ago, the site is now live. It’s the first design that I am generally pleased with. Planned updates include adding support for mobile browsers, and the right sidebar needs some work, and comments lists have been left slightly neglected. There will be some QA tests of available mobile plug-ins at some stage, though I hope to avoid the “Instant iOS” styling that the popular ones provide.

The design is under technical review, so if anybody notices any rendering issues feedback would be appreciated. The theme is built from the ground up, loosely based upon the skeleton theme Bianco. There’s some CSS3 sprinkled around; differences in older browsers are intentionally not addressed. Rendering bugs in IE6 won’t be fixed, lets not go back to the mosaic browser either :) .

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Record and Wipe CDRW discs via CLI

I find that the GUI tools in Ubuntu are buggy with some disks and drives that I use. The two lines that pretty much make “Brasero” redundant:

Record ISO to Disc

cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdwriter isofile.iso
bash

Blank a CDRW

sudo cdrecord blank=all -immed dev=/dev/cdrw
bash