As a regular cyclist you have to be very aware of not only the traffic around you but also the condition of the road ahead, an unseen pothole could cause serious damage to your bike or even you. Your local council has a duty to make sure that dangerous potholes and damage to road surfaces are repaired, but obviously they need to know about the damage before they can do anything about it. That’s where a new web site set up by the CTC comes in, fillthathole.org.uk has been set up so you can easly mark the location of the damage on a map, generate it’s grid reference you then write a description and this is sent to the relevent council by CTC. There is also a companion site for off road cyclists called ClearThatTrail.org.uk. I’ve already logged one pothole on the A91 and will probably log more soon.
Search Engine Friendly WordPress
There are many articles out there detailing ways in which to make your WordPress blog search engine friendly, or SEO, many recommend using plugins such as SEO title tag and Google site maps. There is a good article over at Devlounge detailing the main things you need to do to become search engine friendly.
Portable applications
I carry a few key applications around with me on my pen drive to make life easier when moving from PC to PC. Most of these are slimmed down versions of the applications making them more suitable for pen drives etc. I came across the Portable Apps site which has helpfully gathered together a whole bunch of these light weight versions of popular applications such as FireFox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice amongst others. You can either download the individual applications or the pre-built suite. Most of the applications listed I already use so it will be interesting to try out the suite.
How to get a Windows tax refund
Did you know that it may be possible if you buy a new computer and do not intend to use the Windows OS it comes with you may be able to to get a refund of the licence fee from the supplier. As this article on Linux dot com explains, it might be hard work but it is possible as you are legally entitled to either accept or reject the EULA. This might be worth trying if you intend to run Linux or some other Open Source operating system….why pay for Windows if you don’t intend to use it?
iPhone
The new Apple iPhone looks ultra cool but with a hefty price tag ($500). It has no buttons, it’s all touch screen controlled. It’s a phone, an iPod, you can store your photos and surf the web. Have look at Steve Jobs presentation. There is no doubt this will be a winner for Apple and I look forward to seeing it’s release in the UK, but the price, as with many Apple products may put a lot of people off and as usual in rip off Britain a $500 US price will translate to a £500 UK price, not the £258 it should be..ho hum.
Jet Man
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Yves Rossy. This is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen, Yves Rossy is the jet powered flying man. This must have been one of the most fantastic experiences ever. You can watch the video and read more about Yves exploits…amazing.
Not moving to the isles :-(
Well we finally received notification from the National Trust for Scotland that our application to live on the Isle of Canna was not successful. Apparently they received over 500 applications from the UK, Europe and from as far away as Australia. I will be interested to see who is finally chosen though.
WordPress Themes, Plugins and XHTML Compliance
The vast majority of WordPress themes available today claim to be valid XHMTL, and indeed I have no reason to disbelieve any author who makes this statement. Problems seem to arise when you have a particular theme + a range of plugins activated and XHTML validity goes out the window. Now this may be caused by the theme, individual plugins, combinations of plugins or indeed certain theme/plugin combinations, I’m not sure. A recent example on my own site where one theme throws up 5 errors on W3C Validator and with the same plugin combination another theme throws 85 errors, whilst a 3rd has no errors. I won’t name the themes but you can see my point, as both themes claim to be valid XHTML. When a theme generates a small number of errors I will attempt to fix them but in cases where there are large numbers of errors I simply won’t bother.
IE 7
I downloaded and installed IE 7 yesterday, not because I particularly wanted to but like it or not it will be shipped in most new PCs soon and will become the most common browser. So if you build web sites etc. you need to test on IE 7. The first thing that struck me was the extremely long installation time, the installer downloaded fairly fast but it wasn’t clear if all the files needed for installation were downloaded then or whether some were downloaded during the installation. Also, during the installation there was no options available, such as quit or pause, once you’d started you had to finish. For no apparent reason the menu bar is hidden by default and strangely appears now an again for some reason, I have now figured how to turn it on. It also broke my site layout, which works fine with FF and Opera so I guess we’re still going to have to write workarounds for IE.
Island living…Well maybe.
Some time last year we heard that the National Trust for Scotland were looking for families to live on Fair Isle, one of the islands owned and managed by NTS. We thought about it long and hard but in the end decided Fair Isle was perhaps a little too remote, even for us. Since then we have often talked about moving to the western isles, possibly Skye and have looked at many properties. Then last Sunday I bought the Sunday Times, which I havn’t done for ages and there was an article about the people who had moved to Fair Isle last year. In addition there was information that NTS were going to be looking for two families to live on another of their properties, the Isle of Canna in the inner Hebrides, a small island to the south west of Skye. We are not fooling ourselves that this will be easy or in fact we will get selected as we know there will be a lot of applicants but we are hopefull and have sent for the information pack and application forms, so keeeping fingers crossed.