I’ve been planning on a blog redesign for at least 6 months now: probably more.

Not much has happened.

A kick up the bum

I got all excited, I made a design, and then I did about a day’s work on the CSS. And then nothing. In order to nag myself into getting more done, I have decided to launch the unfinished theme. This is it. As you can see, its a little rough round the edges.

Shamed into action

The hope is that I will actually want to have a working site, and will thus push on with, well, finishing it.

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.”

Paul J Meyer

Multiple header sizes…

Are an important part of website design

Even though I never…

…use ones this small!

Things I could do

As you may realise, I’m also using this post to throw a variety of elements into the blog, so I can check I have styling for them all. I also need to display some numbered and bulleted lists, but I can’t think of a relevant list to write. So, instead…

My favourite colours:

• Blue
• Purple
• Golden Yellow
• Black

Least favourite books ever:

1. Granddad with Snails
2. The Go Between
3. Not really got any others.

The end of the post

Thanks for reading! Keep nagging me to finish this!

I’ve been keeping track of the WordPress haikus for the last few years. So far I’ve got one for 15 releases!

Rather than updating this post every time I update them, I’ve moved it to the Projects section of this site, so you can check it there for infrequent updates.

Keep waiting for that haiku interview, but until then, keep reading All the WordPress Haikus…

Have you got a list of a million items on your to do list? Welcome to my world…

The internet is a wonderful invention, but it can be used for good or evil. In the midst of trying to get stuff done, I’m constantly distracted by other things to click on, to read, to learn about.

“It’s a job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish.”
~J. R. R. Tolkien

Twitter is my absolute No 1 stop for distraction, but its such an amazing/terrible invention that I’ll give it a post all its own at some another time. For now (and as a further piece of procrastination) here is a list of five of my favourite sites for wasting my time:

Lifehacker

Lifehacker is a fantastic place to read interesting articles about becoming more productive. It’s hacking your life: literally trying to reset how we function, and find more efficient ways of living life. Of course, if you mostly just read Lifehacker when you should be working, its going to be, rather depressingly ironically, totally counterproductive.

Favourite bits:  Why Coffee May Not Be Helping, Wallpaper Wednesdays, Always Up To Date Guide For Rooting Any Android Phone, The Headphone Cable Hack

Slashdot

Slashdot was named specifically to be annoying to pronounce. Try saying ” HTTP colon slash slash WWW dot SLASH DOT dot ORG” – fun, eh? That’s pretty geeky, and a perfect introduction to the site, which gives news about tech, web and geekdom, with a slant towards open source. I find it a great place to fantasise about having the tech chops to be a true sysadmin – even if I suspect I’ll never get further than running my own home server.  The comments are also always detailed, informative and entertaining.

Favourite bits: Ask Slashdot - users post their own technical challenges for community help, Slashdot Polls – see large scale responses to tech questions that relate to life. Also, check out the Quotes right at the bottom of each page.

Engadget

A lot more polished than Slashdot, Engadget is my place to learn about all the exciting new shiny gadgets that are coming to the world over the next few months. Despite the fact I never buy any of them, and generally have no desire to own one, I still read in depth reviews of new phones, laptops and gizmos frequently, when I could be better spending my time.

Favourite bits: Generally just enjoying reading the latest articles, but the Reviews are my favourite, regardless of the item. Engadget is also my preferred source of Liveblog when there’s a new Apple/Google/Palm/etc launch event.

BBC News & Timeslive

As a little bit of a news addict, I tend to visit two main sites: BBC News for my UK hit, and Timeslive for South African snippets. The BBC are blatantly the best news organisation in the world, and their site is a testament to that – its currently the fifth most visited site in the UK. Whilst less well written, I enjoy visiting the SA Times website to get an inside flavour of how things are going in South Africa: since we are planning to move there, its good to know when a government department can’t account for £100 million of its budget.

Favourite bits: The front page of each is my main port of call, but I also rather enjoy the BBC’s Science & Environment section, and Times Live coverage of SA Politics. When I want to feel especially low, BBC Sport are always there for me with the latest Orient scores…

Reddit

Of all the sites mentioned here, Reddit is the only one I’m slightly ashamed of. The self styled “front page of the internet”, it is a community, much like Slashdot, where articles and links are upvoted to gain precedence on the site. However, it has a much more puerile mix of images, links and comments. I’m a recent convert from Digg to Reddit, and whilst I spend less time on reddit than on the others above, it’s definitely a good destination if you urgently need to put off doing something. I refuse to register an account or I’ll never get anything done again!

Favourite bits: The never ending stream of irrelevance that is the front page, but also AskReddit, where people present their real world problems and are *generally* supported, encouraged and helped, with a sprinkling of sarcasm and trolling.

So, there we go. I hope this list helps you to not achieve something in your life quite soon. Just reading this post has probably been a good start!

I‘ve been hanging out over at the WPMU-DEV forums quite a lot over the last few months, and I decided to contribute to the community with an update of one of the plugins for MarketPress.

MarketPress is a pretty good, simple e-commerce plugin for WordPress, but it lacks a grid layout option. This plugin adds that feature.

Anyway check out the new page, where you can download version 0.3 of the MarketPress Grid Plugin.

In keeping with my post about hiding simple changes to a site in php, I thought I would share my method for hiding bigger changes using .htaccess.

My other method is great if you are just changing one file, but tonight I am upgrading the MediaWiki installation over at MedRevise, so I want to hide the whole site until I’m done.

I didn’t just want a blank space, so I sent my visitors to the MedRevise blog, where I put a “Sorry, I’m updating!” message, whilst keeping it so that I could still access the site myself.

How did I manage this magic? I simply changed .htaccess file to the following:

I’ll take you through it:

1. First off, RewriteEngine On turns on the Rewriting system in Apache.
2. Then RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^123\.123\.123\.123$ tells Apache “For all ip addresses except 123.123.123.123, do the next line“.
3. Finally  RewriteRule 302 [^/]*$ /blog/ sets up a temporary rewrite of any files from root to the blog directory. The 302 redirect tells search engines that this is just a temporary redirect.

Perfection.

Image by Ian Britton. Thanks!

As any of you who follow me on twitter will know, I have become a proud member of the South Yorkshire WordPress community.

One Tuesday night a month, my twitter feed becomes an irritating and alienating place for my followers, with endless repetitions of #sywp, alongside jabbering about SSL, Custom Post Types and the many amorous moods of @mkjones.

Since we are trying to publicise the community, we are hoping to make the official SYWP blog a little more lived in. As a result, I just wrote a roundup of this month’s meeting. There’s a snippet below:

This month was attended by the usual bunch of marauding geeks, with free coffee prepared and waitered by the servant hearted Kimb Jones. This nearly made up for the disappointment of Jag Gill failing to provide cake…

Anyway, there were three main talks this month (aside from the usual debates on the command line vs GUI, and on whether iPads are pointless). As ever, you can read back through the twitter stream for #sywp, and imagine you were there too.

First up was Paul Marshall, talking about his company’s experiences using Buddypress…

Read the rest at http://wordpresscommunity.thegisthub.net/2011/news/may-roundup-events-security-and-wordpress-on-windows/

Join us at the next SYWP at the GIST Hub on the 2nd Tuesday of every month. More information on the community group site…

I was asked to talk about search engine optimisation at this month’s SYWP. It went down fairly well, so I’ve included the talk below: