Lonewolf Online

Folding Category Plugin 0.2 Released

Tuesday 20th November 2007  

I am pleased to announce the release of version 0.2 of the Folding Category List Widget for Wordpress 2.3+. This version fixes a few bugs and introduces new features:

• Full configuration via Widget Control Panel - no more editing the plugin source.
• Option to cache navigation structure to further reduce server load (experimental)
• Added unique ID for each category to enable CSS styling per id.

The plugin is available for download on the plugin homepage: Wordpress Folding Category Widget

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This post is filed under Wordpress Plugins by Lonewolf at 10:44pm

Folding Category List widget for Wordpress 2.3

Monday 5th November 2007  

As your blog gets more and more posts, inevitably you will create more categories to cope. Eventually your categories will take up more room on your screen, and scroll across many pages. I have a blog, which has around 300 categories, and with this number the standard Wordpress category list expands the page and pushes the content below navigation to three or four pages down.

In order to solve this problem, categories can be made ‘children’ of ‘parent’ categories, and a tree like structure is created similar to the folder view in Windows Explorer.

This plug-in provides a Folding Category Plugin widget for Wordpress version 2.3 and above. It is still in a relatively early phase of development, however it is being run on this website and my paranormal website (Your Paranormal).

Quick Features

• Only uses one SQL query so it does not put strain on server (except when post count is enabled)
• Priority based category selection where multiple categories are available (e.g. single post view)
• Wordpress 2.3 support

Please see the plugin homepage for further details and downloads: Wordpress Folding Category Widget

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This post is filed under Wordpress Plugins by Lonewolf at 10:27pm

Harvest Moon Rising

Thursday 27th September 2007  

Time for a quick update, the pain and swelling from my wrist operation are subsiding now which is good, and i’m sleeping better at night which is also good. Central heating has been broken all week, and last night was particularly cold. The cold doesn’t usually bother me, but this morning my fingers on be bad arm were freezing cold! They’re ok now though.

Last night was the Harvest Moon, so called because its brightness and high position in the sky mean that farmers can stay out well into the night to continue gathering the crops. Early evening, the Harvest moon is typically very orange, due to the Earths atmosphere, and last nights was no exception. Unfortunately I missed the shot I was hoping for (stupid clouds getting in the way) but I was able to get this one a bit later on. Still orange, but not as much as when it was touching the trees.

A few nights ago I was able to get my baby telescope (StarTravel 102) out to view the three quarter moon. My dad helped me out with all the equipment and I was able to take a few pictures through it at prime focus. The pictures never look as good on screen as they do through the eyepiece, I was a little disappointed with them as they just look ‘flat’. If anybody gets the chance to look at the moon through a telescope - do it! It is totally different than looking at pictures, or even binoculars.

Finally, I would like to thank my new laptop (HP TX1250 Entertainment Tablet) for helping me write this post! - My operation makes typing a little difficult and slow, but my new laptop has a swivel screen, making it a tablet with touch sensitive screen and with Vista’s handwriting recognition I can write reasonably fast.

 

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This post is filed under Astrophotography, Car Crash, Injury and Recovery, Computers by Lonewolf at 12:17pm

A week with Windows Vista

Monday 27th August 2007  

I have been using Vista on my new laptop for about a week now… and I hate it!!! There are so many annoying “features”, it crashes often and I really want to go back to XP!!!

Here are a few of my complaints about Vista:

1. Hard disk is constantly thrashing… What is it doing??? Just sits there with the light flashing and the drive ticking away.
2. Sidebar - I set it up how I want it, reboot because of “Updates”, reset to default, or gadgets are randomised
3. Explorer - I set the columns how I want: details view (filename, filesize, file type, modified date, attributes), select this as default for ALL folders, go to a new folder - columns change (filename, album, artist, rating, or camera, date taken etc…) even if the folder does not contain music or pictures. If I go back into the folder I set up, its now in thumbnail view.
4. Constantly asks my permission several times to do something - e.g. delete a file “Are you sure you want to delete New Folder” YES. “Windows needs your permission to continue” CONTINUE, You must execute this command as an administrator, JUST DELETE THE ******* FILE!!!!!!
5. Turn off account control (disables above point) and security center constantly reminds me that “Your computer is at risk”
6. Some games (ie the ones that I play) will not work on Vista

I have more annoyances than I can possibly go into here. I hate Vista.

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This post is filed under Windows Vista by Lonewolf at 11:32am

24 Hours with Windows Vista

Monday 20th August 2007  

I bought a new laptop the other day, an HP Pavilion tx1250 “Entertainment PC”. This is a fantastic piece of equipment, 12″ touchscreen display which can be flipped over to so it can be used as a Tablet PC, 160GB Hard Drive, multi format CD/DVD burner, AMD Turion 64 x2, Wireless, Bluetooth and loads of other features. But enough of the laptop, this is about Vista - the new operating system from Microsoft.

First impressions are that it is very nice looking, the Aero version has transparent “glass” windows which look very nice, 3D task switcher (alt-tab) which shows previews of the window. There is a lot of user interface improvements, and lots of changes which at first are either difficult to find, or have been renamed to something else, but once you do find them you think to yourself “oh yeah, that makes sense now!”. Other changes are so simple, and so effective, they become natural.

Going back to work on an XP machine, and it feels somehow… old and outdated.

I really wanted to hate Vista, with all the talk of driver incompatibility, spyware, privacy (or lack of), digital rights management issues in the press… but all I can say is that my first impressions are (unfortunately) quite good. I like it.

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This post is filed under Computers, Windows Vista by Lonewolf at 1:24pm

Trials and Tribulations of SEO

Friday 29th June 2007  

The internet is a very competitive market these days, and getting high rankings on search engines such as Google and Yahoo is becoming more and more difficult.

When I started this site 18 months ago, I only had a few pages, most of which was relating to my Honda Civic. I wrote a couple of articles about removing the radio (a task which is quite tricky) and removing the rear speakers (again a tricky task). I hadn’t even heard of SEO when writing these pages, but within 6 months they were ranked in the top 10 for Google. Today they both rank number 1. So if I can write a high ranking article with no knowledge of SEO, why doesn’t any of my other pages rank high now I know a few SEO tips?

There are a few pages relating to Astronomy and Photography that I have been trying to get higher rankings for since January, make a change… wait a month and see what happens. Sometimes hits went down, other times they went up slightly. Search engine ranking remained the same, or went down.

So where am I going wrong? Maybe the key is to unlearn my SEO knowledge and revert back to 1990’s style websites…

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This post is filed under Search Engine Optimisation by Lonewolf at 10:26am