Urban Giraffe

Unassigned IP Address

John — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 09:53:51 +0000

I recently upgraded to a gigabit router, with the intention of having my various computers and backup devices all wired in together and backing up at gigabit speeds. The router (a Billion 7800N) worked great, and the wireless-N speeds are very nice indeed. However, when it came to plugging in my Mac using an ethernet cable all I got was:

Unassigned IP Address 169.x.x.x

Gravatar Widget

John — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:25:15 +0000

If you're in the market for a quick and simple way to display a Gravatar in a WordPress sidebar then check out the recently released Gravatar Widget plugin, as seen on WordPress.com.

Some of the features of the plugin:

Email address of Gravatar taken from a user on the blog, or any address
Change size of Gravatar
Image alignment
URL for Gravatar (when someone clicks on the image)
Add arbitrary text to your widget
Fully localized

A New Kind of WordPress Spam

John — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:57:17 +0000

Apart from bills the only thing that comes through my post box are flyers for local pizza companies and private hire taxi firms. I wish I could get Akismet for my post box (or maybe this already exists - a big dog).

Anyway, a while back I found an unusual hand-printed business card had been slipped in alongside the junk. I almost threw it away before noticing that it contained the URL for a WordPress.com blog. On closer inspection it turned out to be an advert for a blog about the area in which I am living, and which must have been hand delivered by the author - an unusual way to promote a blog. I can't imagine that a similar online method of promotion would have made it past spam filters.

The blog itself is an interesting read and I've already learned about several places of interest in my local area, as well as reading about some of the more colourful local characters. It seems that sometimes hand delivered spam is ok.

Spitalfields Life

HeadSpace Guides

John — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:05:39 +0000

One question I am frequently asked about HeadSpace is whether there are any guides. The HeadSpace page lists the ones that I'm aware of and now includes two nice articles that were written by Andrew Kolyvas and posted on Site Sketch 101:

HeadSpace Guide

SEO Tips

Thanks Andrew!

Automattic

John — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:41:23 +0000

Earlier on this year Matt Mullenweg got in touch to see if I was interested in doing a bit of work for Automattic, with the idea of allowing people to post to their blog using email. I jumped at the chance and after a few months of part-time tinkering and a shock exposure to MIME, out came Post by Email and an introduction to the vagaries of spam.

Today marks my first day working full-time as a 'code wrangler' for Automattic. As a prelude to this the past three weeks have been spent manning the support desk at WordPress.com, which has been enormously useful in learning how WordPress.com works.

Suffice to say that I'm very excited about what's coming up, and I'm looking forward to working with the rest of the team. There's a whole bunch of good stuff going on and after having spent four years using WordPress, writing about WordPress, and developing more than a few plugins for WordPress, I can't wait to get stuck in.

Icy Dock MB622US-2S RAID SATA Enclosure

John — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:43:29 +0000

Hard drives. From my first exciting 20MB drive to the monster 1TB beast now keeping my backups. And where you have drives you surely have drive enclosures. Here I'll be looking at the shiny silver and white Icy Dock MB662 RAID enclosure.

The MB662 is not a complicated NAS storage system. It has no web server, no iTunes software, no ethernet port or media server. It does however have a couple of flashing blue lights and this list of features:

Supports 2x3.5" SATA I/II drives
Up to 4TB capacity
USB 2.0 + eSATA (Silicon Image 5744 chipset)
Hardware RAID with six settings
No software required
Screwless design
40mm adjustable speed fan
Hot swappable
Compatible with Windows and Mac
Supplied with USB and eSATA cables

Guangzhou Theme - WordPress and bbPress

John — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:10:44 +0000

So finally, after an extended development period and many people asking 'are you ever releasing it', I've released the theme files for the Guangzhou WordPress and bbPress theme.

As I say elsewhere:

Guangzhou is a two-column fixed width theme for both WordPress and bbPress. It is highly configurable, with two widget areas (sidebar and bottom), as well as customisable skins and many other options. It supports threaded and paged comments, making for very flexible discussion pages, as well as separating pings and trackbacks from comments - essential to keep the flow of conversation consistent.

Redirection 2.1.15 - New Ajax and Japanese

John — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 07:57:21 +0000

Although lacking in new features, this release includes a rewrite of the administration Ajax to use the WordPress provided admin-ajax functions, as well as moving all JavaScript fully into the jQuery world. Hopefully this will solve any issues caused by strange server setups.

In addition, a Japanese translation has been provided by Naoko McCracken.

A Case of a Weak Escape

John — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:35:46 +0000

All of my plugins should now be WordPress 2.8 compatible. For the majority of them the only issues involved were based on the use of the WordPress SQL escaping function. Previously I was calling this statically:

wpdb::escape

A bad habit I probably picked up from somewhere back in the WordPress 1.5 days that has stuck around. In WordPress 2.8 this function no longer works statically. The simple fix is to change it into:

$wpdb->escape

All About Email

John — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:03:49 +0000

I've been doing a bit of work recently for Automattic, culminating in Post by Email. If you've not seen it yet it's a nifty way of publishing a post to WordPress.com by sending an email. Text and attachments are all converted into a WordPress post, and everything works just as if you'd typed it into a browser. All told a very quick and simple way of publishing.