JordanH.net

Thinking Outside the Box

WordPress Themes have been around for a long while, but until very recently, many themes have been simple blog layouts and an extra page template here and there. However, there has been an increasing trend, arguably started by premium themes, where nifty uses of WP’s functions have allowed for unique features and more in themes.

Custom Loops

Custom Loops is probably the most significant of these changes. By letting the user put all their testimonials in one category, you could hide them from the main post display, then run a custom loop somewhere else on the page to display just the testimonials.

An easy way of doing this would be to run the query_posts function choosing only posts from one category, or even pulling a single, random post. Then run a loop like normal, and the post would be displayed.

Custom Fields

Custom Fields are also something which, until recently, seem to have been underused. It’s easy to get a custom field for a post inside your loop, just use the get_post_meta function and you’re good to go.

These have been used for image resizers, video embedding code and even changing the URLs for people reading your RSS feed.

Theme Options Page

Theme Options pages are becoming popular in free themes as well as premium ones now. Aimed towards users who don’t want to dive into their theme’s code, they can help setup a theme and more. These are more complicated pieces of code, but it proves they can be done.

It’s Not A Post!

The whole idea of a post being a couple of paragraphs of text has become less specific, with a post now being considered more of an abstract concept for a piece of content – videos, mini-updates and a lot more. The success of WordPress in part can be attributed to its extremely flexible themes system as that is what has pushed the boundaries of the software and let it become flexible.

This is ultimately the thinking outside of the box which many themes are heading to, and it will be interesting to see what new ideas and techniques are going to be used in the future.

National Rail Enquiries iPhone App

You may remember the popular MyRail Lite app which was released onto the iTunes App Store a while ago and then quickly withdrawn. Those who managed to grab the application before it was removed could still use it, although very recently a notification was displayed telling the users that National Rail Enquiries, the service which provides the data, had refused to renew their license with Kizoom, the parent company of MyRail. This effectively meant that from 31st March 2009 you would not be able to get the train information. Then it started getting awkward:

Very recently, National Rail Enquiries released their own iPhone App which does practically the same as MyRail Lite, however it is priced at £4.99 and there is no other alternative if you want to get the train times on your iPhone. How can this be fair – they prevent any other company using their data and then have full control of their pricing. I’m pretty sure that in any real world scenario – for example the recent BAA airports break-up – the Competition Commission would intervene. After all, information which is effectively promoting National Rail’s services should be free? Isn’t it public knowledge?

Any suggestions about what can be done? Is it worth starting a government petition or writing to the Office of Fair Trading? I’d appreciate your thoughts on this.

Is the cloud really the best place?

Every day people are raving about “web 2.0″ – how we’re moving all of our data to the “cloud” and how we can access anything, anywhere. We’re also being a lot more open about what we do online – especially when it comes to social networking. Only the other day TechCrunch suggested that Last.fm might be sharing user data with the RIAA, but when many users responded in uproar, other users came to the defence repeating that the users should have had common sense in the first place.

Why are we so open about sharing all of our data online? Is it the ease of use of sharing pictures on Facebook or Flickr – or is it the speed at which we can share them with friends, compared to the old days of sending them as file attatchments in emails? How much can we trust that our data will not be deleted, and not shown to advertisers or other third-parties?

When Facebook recently changed their privacy policies to remove a provision which stated that users could remove their data whenever they like, users responded with uproar. Eventually, Facebook backed down on their stance and re-added the clause to their privacy policy, but the question still remained as to what they could do with your data.

So how far can we go until everything that is ours is hosted in the cloud? How much of a risk to our privacy does this represent? Is the cloud really the best place?

For the short-term, I think that the cloud is beneficial to the growth of the internet, and is certainly the best solution for now, but in the future, we may look to another solution.

Site Updates

It seems a long time since I last posted on my blog – too long in fact. So I’ve decided to get a new design for my blog, make it my own (a bit) and start blogging regularly again. In the spirit of refreshing, I’ve removed a lot of redundant posts from a long while ago, and I’ve also removed the asides. There will probably be quite a few dead links left around the place, but they should be cleared up pretty quickly.

What do you think of the new design and the new logo? Feel free to leave a comment with your opinions!

Open Source Project Management

The open source movement is spreading quickly – there are better scripts, dedicated users, and the spirit of OS is overwhelming. You can practically find decent software for anything. However, the one thing I have never been able to find is an open source script as feature-filled and as easy to use as Basecamp.

Now, that’s not surprising when you consider that Basecamp is created by a company who invests thousands of dollars into development of it each year – but the prices to use it are extortionately high for personal developers and non-profits. In the usual case, you could Google for a bit and find some great solution which you can host yourself and is being actively maintained by the developers. But in the case of project management, there is only really ActiveCollab – and that went commercial a few years ago.

There was a fork of it – ProjectPier – however it appears that development is running slow and is nowhere as developed as it’s original software – never mind Basecamp. The only other software packages for this are outdated and have poor user interfaces. I’m sure that with a bit of inspiration, the open source community can start something which is just as good as Basecamp, but comes with no price.

Any thoughts on this idea?

To (Mobile) Me or Not to Me?

Sorry for the awful title of this post…

I’ve currently got an iPhone 3G and am planning on getting a Mac in the future. I’m quite won over by Apple’s MobileMe service, other than the fact I am going to have to do a lot of migration with email addresses etc from Gmail over to MobileMe. Is it worth subscribing to MobileMe, and is it worth all the effort having to migrate email addresses, forwarders and then telling my contacts to change their email addresses?

Which is better then? Gmail or MobileMe?

Mobile Fotos

After having a great experience with Twittelator Pro for my iPhone, I decided to buy another paid app from the App Store. In particular, I was looking for a good Flickr application, and it didn’t take me long to find Mobile Fotos.

The application is quick and easy to use. You can view almost everything – sets/tags/groups/favourites/contacts – and it caches photos when you view them, which is a useful feature. You can save pictures to your iPhone, and assign them as a contact’s picture really simply.

Uploading is a snap, and despite some users’ complaints about images being uploaded upside-down, my test upload (a picture of @ruby_gem’s ferret) uploaded fine. There’s a wealth of options you can fill in when you upload too, such as privacy and picture type (photo, illustration, etc).

There’s also the option to view nearby photos and “explore” interesting and recent photos. Finally, there’s the ability to search for photos too. Something I would like to see added would be the ability to view collections, currently it’s not possible to do this via the app.

Mobile Fotos is a feature-plenty Flickr app for iPhone, and I definately recommend it for any Flickr enthusiast. The price tag is rather cheap (I think it was about £3), and it is really helpful. Well done!

I’ve uploaded a few pics of my usage of the app:

PHPNW '08

Today I’ve been out to PHPNW ’08, a web development conference at the Manchester Central Convention Complex (formerly the G-MEX). I was helping out so I had an early start, and was in Manchester for 8:30am. It got off to a great start, and over the day I met some great people and saw some familiar faces too.

One of the most interesting talks was the Getting Started with Zend Framework and the From HTML to Drupal in 30 Minutes (although it may have been better suited to 60 minutes!). I got a free T-shirt and some cool goodies too.

They’re one of the first conferences to utilise the http://joind.in/ service which helps attendees give feedback on the talks and can provide some constructive criticism to the speakers. It’s a really cool ‘Web 2.0′ idea, and I hope it takes off with many other conferences using it.

Encouraged by the great time I had today, I’ve booked a ticket for BarCamp Sheffield next weekend (the Sunday to be specific). If you see me there, feel free to say hi!

How the little guy can do something…

It’s quite typical in this day and age to turn on the television and see yet another news report about starving children in Africa, people dying in Bangladesh or something similar, and it’s quite typical to disregard it as nothing much and flick over to another channel. It’s not hard to think that poverty is something that doesn’t affect us and is only a problem in third-world countries. I think it’s time we all thought again.

Poverty is something that can be very close to home. Albeit not to the extremes which are saw in places like Africa and Asia, it’s still there and something, which again, is very easy to turn a blind eye to. You may find these facts hard to believe, but one-fifth of the UK’s population don’t have enough to live on. That includes almost 4 million children. The amount of children in poverty has doubled since the last generation, despite advances in technology and availability of benefits.

We’ve all wore the white band, but has that actually meant something to us? Of course we can’t donate millions ourselves, and most of the time we can’t see an actual change, but there are tons of things we can do which, when done by a lot of people, can make a huge difference. There is a great list here of a small things you could do which could make a big difference on the lives of people in poverty all over the world.

Yes, your average Joe doesn’t have a million pounds to give away, but there’s nothing stopping him clicking a button or donating the money he’d spend on a coffee to help out those in need.

Today is Blog Action Day, and thousands of blogs around the world are joining together to make a combined effort to make people aware of world poverty. This is a great example of how many people can do a small thing, but when it’s combined together makes a massive difference.

There’s an endless amount of things you can do to help, and it’s amazing what the world can do when people pull together.

Photo from SamPac on Flickr. Statistics from Oxfam and JRF. Part of Blog Action Day 2008.

Television

I’ve been waiting ages to get a High-Definition Television, and yesterday the wait was worth it! I went to Tesco and eventually decided on buying an LG 32in Television (32LG3000). I got it home, set it up in my room and I was stunned by the awesomeness of HD!

The picture quality is really good. It’s not 1080p, but it has a sharp, stunning picture and a 15000:1 contrast ratio. It’s got a brilliant backlight and the screen seems huge in my room!

I’ve got my Xbox 360 and my PS3 hooked up to it now, and I’m on my second attempt of downloading the new Burnout Paradise updates for PS3. I’ll be reviewing those later!