New! Custom styles

I opened Google Docs this morning to work on a client specification and I was delighted to see that they’ve finally implemented custom heading styles.

It’s relatively simple to use. You can style selected text in the way you like, and then go to the heading style you want to change, click the fly out arrow and select “Update heading x to match selection”.

There’s some more information on Google Docs help.

Here’s a sample screen shot showing some custom headings I’ve applied to a basic document.

You can also, via the options fly out menu, save your current settings as the default style on all your Google Docs documents.

This is a really important update as the lack of styles definition was one of the reasons I wouldn’t use Google Docs to create work documents – it’s so important to have consistent styling across your work files, and I wasn’t going to settle with redefining heading styles every time I worked on a document.

That said, it’s not perfect though – we’re still missing style rules for lists, and there’s only 3 heading rules available (although I guess you could say that ‘Title” and “Subtitle” make up for this and really give you 5 heading styles). Also, the choice of available fonts is still somewhat limited, but the real-time collaborative editing functionality makes up for this in many ways.

I would be interested to see how these headings translate into PDF bookmarks for proper document structuring.

Blog updates

So far I’ve written 19 blog posts. This number is possibly slightly artificially high due to the posting of multiple photos in the new photoblog section of the website. However, I’m still feeling quite good about it, considering I only wrote 53 blog posts for the entire of last year.

Photography

On this little resolution I’ve really surprised myself. I’ve managed to get out for my 2k photo walk every single day of the year, barring two occasions. One of the two missed occasions I had a late night wander round my house taking photos of random things.

I’ve even gotten out in the dark, when it’s raining. So I’m feeling good about that – and more importantly, I’m enjoying it an awful lot.

The best photos are available in the Photoblog section, and you can see other shots from each day in my January album on Google Plus.

Other Stuff

How about the other points raised in my general resolution? Some things not too bad, others nothing has really happened – such as music, but I haven’t sorted out my studio yet and am just waiting for my new (second-hand) car to be ready before I can collect my studio equipment from my parents’ house.

Today the EU signed on to ACTA, but, crucially, it still has to be ratified by the EU Parliament.

The rapporteur for ACTA in the European Parliament, Kader Arif, quit yesterday and issued the following statement:

“I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.

“As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens’ legitimate demands.

“Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is problematic, whether it is its impact on civil liberties, the way it makes Internet access providers liable, its consequences on generic drugs manufacturing, or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications.

“This agreement might have major consequences on citizens’ lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.”

I think it’s important that people register their disagreement to ACTA as soon as possible. This is a similar moment to the SOPA/PIPA situation that arose in the US last week and we need to make sure our voices are heard so that has been drafted through a fundamentally undemocratic process can be stalled by democratically elected representatives.

Make your voice heard and contact your EU representative.

How to act against ACTA

1. You can sign the following petition to register your disagreement with ACTA.

   http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_save_the_internet_spread/?cRVpFcb

2. You can read about more ways to act against ACTA here:

   http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/How_to_act_against_ACTA

3. Share the video shown below:

Part of this section was to make sure that there was a bit of additional information about the image. Fortunately, as long as you’re not minimising your embedded metadata on the image, WordPress collects all of this information.

The inspiration for this functionality came from Walkernews.net’s post “Turn On WordPress Feature To Display Photo EXIF Data and IPTC Information“. I wouldn’t have had a clue how to get display the correct shutter speed information otherwise!

That post focused on editing your image.php template file to display EXIF data. I’m using a lightbox which precludes the need for the image attachment template file, and I wanted to output a definition list showing the important EXIF information pertaining to the featured image of each photoblog post.

The Function

/**
 * Create a definition list containing EXIF data of featured image (if exists)
 *
 * @param	string		$post ID
 * @return 	echo definition list
 */
function pa_the_post_thumbnail_exif_data($postID = NULL) {
	// if $postID not specified, then get global post and assign ID
	if (!$postID) {
		global $post;
		$postID = $post->ID;
	}
	if (has_post_thumbnail($postID)) {
		// get the meta data from the featured image
		$postThumbnailID = get_post_thumbnail_id( $postID );
		$photoMeta = wp_get_attachment_metadata( $postThumbnailID );
		// if the shutter speed is not equal to 0
		if ($photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed'] != 0) {
			// Convert the shutter speed to a fraction
			if ((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']) > 1) {
				if ((number_format((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1)) == 1.3
				or number_format((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 1.5
				or number_format((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 1.6
				or number_format((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 2.5) {
					$photoShutterSpeed = "1/" . number_format((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1, '.', '') . " second";
				} else {
					$photoShutterSpeed = "1/" . number_format((1 / $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 0, '.', '') . " second";
				}
			} else {
				$photoShutterSpeed = $photoMeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed'] . " seconds";
			}
			// print our definition list
		?>
			<dl>
				<dt>Date Taken</dt>
				<dd><?php echo date("d M Y, H:i:s", $photoMeta['image_meta']['created_timestamp']); ?></dd>
				<dt>Camera</dt>
				<dd><?php echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['camera']; ?></dd>
				<dt>Focal Length</dt>
				<dd><?php echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['focal_length']; ?>mm</dd>
				<dt>Aperture</dt>
				<dd>f/<?php echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['aperture']; ?></dd>
				<dt>ISO</dt>
				<dd><?php echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['iso']; ?></dd>
				<dt>Shutter Speed</dt>
				<dd><?php echo $photoShutterSpeed; ?></dd>
			</dl>
		<?php
		// if shutter speed exif is 0 then echo error message
		} else {
			echo '<p>EXIF data not found</p>';
		}
	// if no featured image, echo error message
	} else {
		echo '<p>Featured image not found</p>';
	}
}

Please note

I’m working off the assumption that if there’s no shutter speed meta EXIF information, then the image probably doesn’t have any of the EXIF information and so we just display an error message. Conversely, I’m also assuming that if the shutter speed is listed, then all the other relevant EXIF data will be there. Feel free to add more checks!

In my case I didn’t need copyright, title, caption, or credit information, but you can easily add these in by calling the following.

echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['copyright'];
echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['title'];
echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['caption'];
echo $photoMeta['image_meta']['credit'];

Usage

I’m using this in single.php, within the loop. You can use it outside the loop if you specify the $post->ID. As it’s in my single.php but I only want it to show up in my photoblog category I’m using a conditional query before any output.

<?php if (in_category(3)) {    ?>
<h3>EXIF Data</h3>
<?php pa_the_post_thumbnail_exif_data(); ?>
<?php } // end if in_category(3); ?>

Conclusion

Hopefully this offers a fairly solid option for including EXIF data in your posts. You can check it out over in my photoblog section.

If you can think of a better option, please let me know in the comments below. If it worked for your site, drop me a comment so I can see it in action!

It took a lot longer than planned and changed from being just a new WordPress theme to being a much more fundamental re-structuring of the whole site.

I’d been thinking about this for quite a while and knew that I didn’t just want a new look, but wanted to break the website down into three main sections to allow people to follow areas individually if they so wanted.

Subscribe as you like

The first thing I’d noticed is that my posts tended to be split, broadly, into Journal posts and Technology posts.  I know for example that my family, and probably a lot of my friends, aren’t too interested in the technology stuff and so I wanted to make it easy for someone to subscribe to just one or the other.

So the important thing was to make it easy for people to follow the site how they wanted, and catching the news they wanted. These two main categories have been joined by a third “Photoblog” category as I’m being far more proactive with my photo-taking this year.

You can now subscribe to these categories through RSS feeds (such as Google Reader), or via email. New posts from the category you wish to follow will be delivered to your inbox.

I plan to follow this up with some updates for following posts via Twitter, Facebook or Google+, but let’s take it one step at a time. You can get email subscriptions for my Journal, Technology posts, Photoblog, or the whole lot.

Categories vs Tags

I also noticed that I was using categories in what felt to me the wrong way. Essentially I was using categories in a way I could use tags. I had so many categories on the site and many of them only had one or two posts in them – not a useful way to browse the site at all.

On top of that, my usage of tags to group similar posts was all over the place. I had over 1,500 tags in use on the site, the majority of which only applied to one post – again not very useful for browsing posts on a similar topic.

I used the WordPress plugin “Categories to Tags convertor” to first make sure that all my posts were tagged with the old categories to which they belonged. Then began a painfully slow process of going through my tags and consolidating. A few tools helped me speed this up, mainly Term Management Tools, although at the end of the day it was still quite laborious.

By the end of it, I reduced the number of tags from the aforementioned 1,500+ to 63! The intention is now that these tags will provide a common grouping for posts on a similar topic. Tags are shown at the top of each post and if you’d like to see more posts about a particular tag, just click to view those posts.

It’s all fairly basic stuff, but I’d let it slip over the years, and it needed to be reined in.

Issues

Sadly I also encountered a major issue, one which I never resolved either. For some reason in the movement from live site -> development site -> live site, all my images got messed up. It’s a long and complicated story and has something to do with my serialised data in my MySQL database getting messed up. I think.

If you’re interested in reading more about this, there are two threads over on the WordPress support forums: Image Sizes Lost and Major issue with image sizes being lost, only full size images being shown. It’s scintillating reading I promise you.

In the end, sadly, I couldn’t work out a way to fix it. Just couldn’t get my head around the issue. So I just got a list of all posts containing featured images and galleries and manually went through the list and re-uploaded the images. It’s all working now and no longer are featured images showing up as their full resolution (which looks very very bad). I had to edit over 100 posts. That was not fun.

Anywaaaay..

That’s a quick round-up of the new website. I hope you like it. Feedback welcomed in the comments. Also note that if you like the post you can share it out on Google+, Twitter or Facebook, or add it to Evernote using the toolbar at the top of the page.

This dilapidated sign on Market Street in Ballycastle points to a shop which appears to no longer exist.

I’m a little confused as to what the word after “shop” is meant to be. Either it said “shopiooyds” or it said “shop ooyds”, neither of which make any sense to me. Perhaps it’s a Ballycastle thing.

I’m a little concerned I didn’t get the focus quite right in this photo. I shot with an aperture of f/2.0 which should have given me a little breathing room. I’m wondering is my vague sense of blurriness actually just the sign being so old and covered with algae. I was also a little torn as to whether this would be better in black & white. I think it is, if nothing else for emphasising the age of the sign.

I hope you like it, any thoughts or critiques, please feel free to leave a comment.

Pieces of broken bottle glass found in various locations attached to a plaster sculpture.

The weather was horrendous today and I just couldn’t face up to going outside and attempting to take photos.

So for the first time this year I didn’t make it for a 2km walk. It was bound to happen. It’s difficult to find spots to take photos in the rain here in Ballycastle.

Anyway, I did a little tour of my flat and took this close-up photo of a sculpture  Adrianna made a while ago.

This foot bridge at the easterly end of Ballycastle’s beach leads out to a rough outcrop of rocks which is constantly exposed to the mercy of the sea.

Generally you can get over to this foot bridge without getting your feet wet, but today I needed to time my movements with the lowest ebb of the incoming waves to get out to it to let me take a few photos a little closer to the waves (but at a safe distance I assure you).

I felt it was quite beautiful contrasted against the bright white of the thrashing surf.

As it was the end of the day I had to use a wider aperture than I would have liked, but I think this photo has come out ok.

What do you think?

A swinging tire is suspended from this large chunk of steel in the playground near my apartment. It’s one of those shapes that always draws my eye when I walk past it and I think I could take quite a few photos from different angles before I got bored of it.

I’m not entirely sure about this photo. I like the shapes created by the silhouette of metal, but I’m not sure whether the over-exposed sun at the centre is a bit too much or not.

I pushed the blacks a fair bit in this one, and slightly darked the blues to match what I was seeing when I took the photo. Hopefully it appeals to someone!

A church in Ballycastle shows a small glimmer of light from inside illuminating the stained glass.

There’s actually quite a few churches in Ballycastle. I haven’t worked out which ones belong to what religion, but they’re always pleasant to photograph. I’ve already featured some photos of statues at the front of this church.