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{ Monthly Archives } January 2008

Battrick Search Strings

I’m not expecting a flood of traffic now I’ve started with the blog, but it’s interesting to see how people are finding my site. Part of the content I have is for Battrick, a cricket management game I play. There’s a few spreadsheets I’ve created, and other tools and stuff - the BT community seem to find it useful. Despite the in-game links posted in various places, it seems managers are still using Google to re-find my tools. This is from this month’s stats:

Search strings for this site, January 2008

OK, so some queries have only had one hit, but I think it’s pretty conclusive what people are coming to my site for! I’ve yet to add the content to WordPress, and when I do I’ll be changing some of it around a bit, and hopefully make it even better. It currently ranks 11th in Google, just for the word Battrick, which isn’t bad at all!

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2008 01 24 Battrick Comments (0)

FC Fixtures

This is a reference post for those Battrick managers using my Timetable-Helper, part of the Battrick-Helper spreadsheets.

It seems that the scripts that generate the fixtures list for First Class (FC) games in Battrick, “see” the leagues differently to how they are generated at the start of the season. In short - what we see at the front-end is different to what the back-end thinks it is.

There is only one FC fixtures pattern, and it is based on league position — however, the reset leagues do not show the correct positions!

Here’s how to work out what number you need to enter in the FC Position box on the Timetable-Helper.

Go to Club->Pavillion->FC League->Fixtures. Here’s a screenshot of my FC league fixtures:

FC Fixtures for Battrick

Now, map the teams on to this pattern:

1 vs 2
3 vs 4
5 vs 6
7 vs 8

So, my team, Jargon Busters is actually starting off 7th in the league, rather than 3rd as it shows on the league table. Consequently I would put “7″ into the FC Position box, to get the correct Home/Away data in the spreadsheet.

FC Position box

Nineone ACC would put “1″, JG’s superstars would put “2″, Ólafur Pái would put “3″, London Pride would put “4″, dirts allstars would put “5″, Bluemooners would put “6″ and Alalminore CCC would put “8″.

This should then give the correct Home/Away data for the FC games:

FC games

The One Day (OD) leagues were generated correctly, so you can simply enter the league position as you see it into the OD Position box. Mine is position 5, as per the screenshot earlier.

Update: It seems that there was indeed a bug! The fixtures list for the FC games were generated against the OD standings (in the separate leagues of course) of the teams in your league, rather than the FC standings! This should be corrected for the start of next season, so there should be far less confusion!

To clarify: The teams in my league are starting from the following OD positions this season: 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 5, 5, 8. As I was one of those’s 5th places, then my FC fixtures this year follow that of the 7th place team. I’m not quite sure what happens if there’s a tie between OD rankings.

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2008 01 23 Battrick Comments (1)

Alison

A man has taken stunning pictures of his daughter over the course of 32 years, capturing her life story. It’s worth a look: http://www.behance.net/gallery/Alison/49837

2008 01 20 Random Comments (0)

Review: hReview WordPress Plugin

In a previous post, I’d mentioned that I’d installed the hReview plugin, but then deactiviated it due to “problems”. A comment from the author of the plugin, Andrew Scott, asked what those problems might be, and I realised that I simply hadn’t given the plugin a fair go before dismissing it. Below is my review of hReview (marked up as a microformat *using* hReview, naturally), though my styling could do with a tweak.

hReview WordPress Plugin

product

hReview WordPress Plugin does the job well

The plugin installs fine, and activates without a problem. It appears on the Write Post page as either a star or the word “hReview” (depending on if you use the visual editor or not). Selecting the star/hReview brings up a dialogue box where details of the review can be entered in. Comparing it to the hReview specs, I can see that it does cover most of the items, although some of the optional bits are missed out.

Screenshot of using the plugin to write a review

When I first used it, I’d tried using the type option to specify a product. In the visual editor this just came up as a single word in a paragraph of it’s own. Now a word is not a paragraph, so perhaps this should be marked up as a span instead. Looking at the code view, I can now see that some inline styles had been applied so that the paragraph was set to display: none; anyway. Now I know I can hack the plugin, or my own CSS, but I would prefer this word to be in a span, capitalised, with a colon, before the item name - so in this review it would have said: Product: hReview WordPress Plugin. Other types would have the same effect. Simply having (optional) data included in the source for the sake of a microformat, yet not displaying it visually is kind of against the microformat principles.

Using the dialogue box, once the content of the review has been inserted into the post editor, adding more content means looking in the code view and working out which bit you want to edit. This is fine if you have any idea about HTML, but may be scary if you don’t. Clicking the star/hReview button again brings up a blank new review box, rather than being able to edit the first review. Perhaps clicking the star should bring up the existing review, but have a button on the dialogue box for a new review (a form reset button in effect).

Lastly, part of the spec mentions the use of dtreviewed, reviewer and license. These are optional data that can be included with an hReview. Sadly, the current plugin doesn’t cater for these, which, although they are optional, may be important to certain reviewers. Ideally, the dtreviewed could be added to the post date (the specs do suggest this), and the reviewer could be added to the author data, marked up as a hCard (the specs say parsers should look outside the hReview if a reviewer can’t be found inside the review). Of course this would mean adding it into the WordPress templates, which may or may not be possible via scripting the DOM. Alternatively, settings on the dialogue box would be better and solve the problems above, as the reviewer may not be the poster, and the review date may not be the posting date. A drop down list of common licenses should also be available - those who know what they are can use it, or it can be optionally left blank.

Overall, the plugin does the job it claims to, and I admit that my previous comments were unfair (I’ll go highlight it in that post shortly). It would be nice if the Operator / Tails Firefox addons offered support for hReview, and perhaps the author of hReview may wish to contribute to those as well.The Operator addon does offer hReview support, although this hReview wasn’t detected due to what I believe is a small bug in the plugin - see the comments. If you intend to carry out reviews of any sort, and use WordPress, then the hReview WordPress Plugin from Andrew Scott is for you.

My rating: 4.0 stars
****

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2008 01 19 WordPress Comments (3)

Malaysia photos

Whilst I’m busy posting some other photos, I might as well post a selection of photos from Malaysia.

Petronas Towers - Day Petronas Towers - Night Looking out Monitor Lizard Melaka at night Melaka Straits at night Hamster Cage Balls of fluff Xmas party - Dave & Jess

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2008 01 17 Malaysia Comments (1)

Sydney photos

Although I didn’t get around to reviewing our trip to Sydney, we have now sorted out the photos. I haven’t decided whether to upload them all to Flickr or not, but here are a few selective ones from Sydney.

Sydney Harbour Bridge Gary and Sydney Opera House Katie and Sydney Opera House View from Sydney Tower Together in Sydney Grey Nurse sharks Katie and Taronga Zoo sign A couple of big’uns Giraffes Gary in Taronga Zoo Kangaroo or Wallaby Wallaby Koala Tasmanian Devil Blue Mountains Katie and Fran Gary and Fran

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2008 01 17 Australia
Katie
Me Comments (0)

Web Projects

I’ve got so many web projects on the go at the moment, it’s difficult to keep track of them!

  • This very blog - I’ve recently changed themes, and it needs updating to fit in with how I want it to look. In fact I eventually want to turn this whole garyjones.co.uk site into something that’s run completely with WordPress.
  • MNNC.net has recently had WordPress added to it, so that as part of the re-design, I can use WP as a CMS. I’m supposedly using Basecamp from 37 Signals to keep track of the project.
  • For the Battrick game I play, I’ve developed some resources that have become popular within the BT community. I eventually want to integrate it more into the rest of this blog site with WP, as well as still develop the resources that exist.
  • The Battrick site itself could do with some front-end code updating, so instead of moaning about it, I decided to do some investigations and tests to offer comprehensive examples and feedback on how the site could be improved.
  • My Development section is another section I want to add to integrate into WordPress. Lots of template customisation needed, along with some CSS, so I can keep my code examples.
  • Leovanna.co.uk is my Dad’s site that I built, but we now want WordPress to run the whole site, but only look like it’s running the news section. Some templates and static pages will help with that, once I’ve worked out exactly what I’m doing with the MNNC.net site. I’ll also need to find some suitable plugins too.
  • I had an “epiphany” this morning, as Katie called it, and thought of a new tool that I would find useful for myself. I often review websites to give constructive criticism on how they can be improved, and this webReviewer tool (I haven’t got the cheek to call it webReviewr in Web 2.0 style) would allow an easier way of writing it up, as well as giving reminders of areas to check. I’ve drawn out some ideas, but not produced anything yet.

If I can get all these done by the time we head back to the UK, I’ll be pleased, but I don’t want to spend all my time here doing them, however much I enjoy it all!

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2008 01 13 Me
WordPress Comments (0)

Review: Amazing Melaka blog

Amazing Melaka (website reviewed by Gary Jones on 2008-01-10)

Good for tourists and locals

I happen to come across a very interesting blog called Amazing Melaka. Now it’s supposedly for tourists, but I think that we’ve been here a short enough time to still count as tourists.

Certainly it had some reviews of places to eat, and local attractions that a “normal” tourist might miss, and that I wouldn’t mind seeing, as well as keeping up to date with the local Melaka news and developments.
It was well written, with a good layout. It’s so good, I’ve included the feed from it in the sidebar.

My rating: 4.5 stars
****1/2

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2008 01 10 Malaysia Comments (0)

Still breathing?

Er…no.

A little while ago I mentioned that I’d bought a new toy - something to improve my lung capacity. I kept at it for a few days, but then it got put in the shipping and I didn’t see it for another 6 weeks. The shipping has now all arrived, but I’ve yet to find the motivation to start it up again. I thought this might happen, and it’s why I usually question Katie when she gets some new fangled idea or product. It’s unusual, but it seems at the moment I’ve fallen on my own spike.

However…

Since I’ve been out here, I’ve been playing more squash, badminton, tennis, and starting from tonight, futsal (a few minor differences to UK 5-a-side footy), and all in the heat of Malaysia. I even tried going for a run one morning with Andy, but that ended quite suddenly for me and convinced me I’m not cut out for long(er) distances. The squash courts are in the condo and are free, so I can go smack a ball around there whenever I want, along with some games against the guys on a Monday. Badminton is a gentler affair with mostly beginner ladies, but it helps me to keep my touch going and can practise plenty of drop shots. The futsal though is great, and I really enjoyed, even made missing our weekly jaunt down to Spring Garden Corner (local Chinese restaurant whose name I always mix up) worth missing. I was surprised I could just about keep going for the best part of a couple of hours, although I did get some painful cramp in both legs towards the end. Water and salt should sort that.

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2008 01 10 Me Comments (3)

Fixing the blog, Part 2

I really liked the Hope theme that I had for a while as I thought it looked great. There were a few minor problems with it, but I’d emailed the designer and she said she’d try to look into it. Apart from not being widget-ready, some of the latest themes have got microformats embedded into them, and this is something I wanted.

“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards” - Microformats.org

In short, they add certain class names to HTML elements. Sandbox is the first known theme to have hCard and hAtom microformats, and the Barthelme theme, which this site is heavily based on, is a follow on from that. I’ve also added an hResume plugin and a hReview plugin (plugin removed, as it wasn’t working well) (see my review of this plugin) to really offer some good data to the world. Following on from my previous problems, I still couldn’t display the thumbnail-linked images on their own page. I could in the default theme, so the problem had to be with the Barthelme files. This time attachment.php was the starting point, and after comparing it to the default attachment.php I could see that there were two important lines of code missing from lines 7 and 8:

<?php $attachment_link = get_the_attachment_link($post->ID, true, array(450, 800)); ?>
<?php $_post = &get_post($post->ID); $classname = ($_post->iconsize[0] <= 128 ? ’small’ : ”) . ‘attachment’; ?>

Without those lines, $attachment_link and $classname are not defined, and so the image doesn’t show. Well it now works, and so the only thing left to do is to tweak the theme even more to my own liking and add some more posts!

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2008 01 09 WordPress Comments (4)