Archive for the 'Work' Category

Confluence link to the current page

For my current Confluence project, I’ve used Adaptavist Theme Builder to customise the View/Upload Attachments screen and I wanted to add an explicit link “back” to make it easier for users to return to the current page. I could have used Javascript, and so much of Confluence depends on client side scripting that it probably wouldn’t have been a problem… but I do like being POSH, so I wanted to keep it simple and just have a regular HTML link.

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Confluence links to create pages from templates

I’m working with Confluence to create a wiki for travel agents can record their research holidays. It is hoped that their colleagues can use first hand experiences of the resorts to promote them.

We wanted to have an easy and structured way for people to add pages, for which we’re using Confluence’s templates feature. Templates allow a two step page creation process:

  1. Enter information into a structured form (e.g. in our hotel page template, we ask for information on the food, accomodation and view), and select “insert variables” (I know, awful button title).
  2. Review what you’ve entered on the standard Confluence edit page (all the information from the form fields will have been inserted at the relevant points in the page).

A great piece of functionality but too many clicks involved. To create a templated page you have to:

  1. Click into the space administration section (already not ideal for a “regular” staff member)
  2. Select space templates from the menu
  3. Find the template you want
  4. Finally, select “create page from template”

With some technical jiggery-pokery I’ve managed to get this process down to one click, “create hotel page”, and I’ve done this without cracking into Java code (which is the programming language Confluence is written in). Continue reading ‘Confluence links to create pages from templates’

I’ve made a useless WordPress plugin…

…which you might find useful if you develop plugins with system requirements, like a particular version of PHP. This plugin is a simple proof of concept for a method of messaging the user when they activate a plugin.

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Exclude Pages now hides child pages where appropriate

Exclude Pages (my WordPress plugin which allows you to remove pages from site navigation) now handles child pages more gracefully. Previously, when you excluded a page any child page would drop down a level, taking it’s place… not what I wanted, and not something I’d noticed because I was only dealing with single level navigation when I wrote the plugin. Continue reading ‘Exclude Pages now hides child pages where appropriate’

Simon Wheatley: Introduction to WordPress at BarCamp Leeds 2007

My session for BarCamp Leeds was on “An Introduction to WordPress”, and I put together a nice graphical presentation for it… only to find the laptop playing up and unable to connect to the screen!

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Ignoring visits by IP address in Mint

I use Mint to track the visits to this website (Hi everyone who’s come to look at the Dress a Doll pages!) and it’s a great stats package. One of the issues I’ve had recently is that I constantly delete my cookies in my day to day web development. Unfortunately Mint uses a cookie to ignore visits from the site owner. Surely there was a way of ignoring by IP address? Of course there is, ignore by IP is in the advanced preferences. But where are the advanced preferences? I couldn’t find any link or button to reach them but following the instructions in the link above, I clicked on “preferences” and then pasted “&advanced” onto the end of the URL.

Setting SVN:Ignore on the command line

One of the (only) things I miss in my move to the Mac is TortoiseSVN, a really nice Subversion client which integrates with the Windows shell giving you all the Subversion commands on a right click context menu. SCPlugin for OS X is coming along, and what they have is very nice, but they don’t have it all yet… still, good effort guys, thanks.

One function missing from SCPlugin, and from the Subversion bundle on Textmate, is the ability to easily set the SVN:Ignore property. Setting SVN:Ignore on a file or directory means that SVN will never bother you with trying to add or commit it. I’m always heading for the command line, then getting confused and failing to remember how to do the business… so for my benefit here it is (and embarassingly for my memory it’s actually quite easy):

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BarCamp Leeds

Very excited to be signed up for my first BarCamp, and the first BarCamp Leeds ever. Big thanks to Deb, Imran Ali, Tom Scott & Dominic Hodgson for organising this.

Now I’ve just got to work out what to talk about, ideas so far:

Lots of thinking and then planning to do…

Update: or split testing…

Exporting from MySQL to CSV

Everytime I need to do this I go into at least five minutes of Googling for a decent solution. The problem is that a lot of people don’t have access to the commandline, so the solutions all reference PHPMyAdmin which is, you know, OK, but I don’t use it or want to install it just to export some quick reports. Other solutions are similarly indirect.

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Staggering onwards is not good

For animals, pain is a signal that something is wrong and it needs fixing. If pain didn’t exist we’d all be accidentally leaving our hand on the burning gas hob, or on the electric bar fire and wondering about the burning smell long after we’d been injured. We want to know when something isn’t right, and we want to know as quickly and “loudly” as possible.

Writing (programming) a web application is similar. Continue reading ‘Staggering onwards is not good’