fordie’s Blog

After threatening to do it for almost a year, I’ve finally got round to changing the theme for this blog. I had planned to create my own theme, but having seen “HemingwayEx 1.0″ in an article by Smashing Magazine I decided that this was so close to what I wanted to achieve it wasn’t worth [...]

Yesterday I finally got round to making a start on re jigging the site. Over the course of the coming days (and knowing how these things tend to go probably months) you may see strange things happening with the layout of the site as I switch backwards & forwards between the current theme and the [...]

In preparation for launching a new design for fordie.co.uk in the coming weeks I’ve just been re-jigging the site’s categories. They are now organised hierarchically under either personal or technical. This hasn’t made any obvious effect to the look of the site yet, but it will (hopefully) help me achieve the layout I want for [...]

I ain’t afraid of no ghost! Ever since I started blogging, I’ve been trying to come up with a good way to get html into my posts so that can write tutorials. It’s something I’ve struggled with and as an upshot – I have two or three articles that are waiting to be published that [...]

I just update this site to WordPress 2.1 (Ella). The entire process took under ten minutes and so far, eveything seems to be working as it should! This is the first WP update I’ve bothered with and I’m not sure how many of the new features I’ll use (I already have a spell checker in [...]

It was never my intention to use an existing wordpress theme for this blog. My original plan was to build a theme myself, however a combination of time pressure & a creative mental block meant that I ended up with a theme that I’d downloaded (albeit slightly modified). My biggest stumbling block was that all [...]

At the moment I’m using google analytics, which is frankly overkill; plus it doesn’t tell me things like how many comments I’ve had in a given period. I’m also trying performancing.com’s metrics which do have more relevant reports for blogs but (and this is very irritating) you can’t change it to display in your local [...]

I decided it was time for a change of theme. I know I’ve only had the blog going for a couple of months, but I’ve not been entirely happy with the look of the site since the word go. The old “Almost Spring” theme was OK but not quite what I was after. The new [...]

It would be dead handy if I could post to my blog from a mobile. I rarely find time to right entries for my blog at the moment, being able to post quickly from the phone would be realy nice. I’ve been playing about over the last day or so with lifeblog from nokia. It’s [...]

xhtml compliant flickr widget I’ve made some changes to the flickr sidebar widget. When I installed it I didn’t realise that it used tables for layout, then I validated my page and found there where a number of issues in the widget; so I took it upon myself to sort out the xhtml. I have: [...]