Big Andy's Blog

Bad Mood Monday

This incredibly accurate image shows what I am feeling like this Monday morning. Tired achy, grumpy. (cheers to my Bro for the link)

In other news I bought a new road bike, a Bianchi Via Nirone 7 Sora, 2011, and went cycling with Marion in the countryside to the North of Reading. Now I ache a lot due to my lack of fitness and the uncomfortableness of a road bike compared to the mountain bike I usually ride. I spent the rest of the weekend watching the final two stages of this years Tour de France.

Speed!!!

Lately I seem to be totally obsessed with speed and tonight I have made two fantastic advances in my quest for online speed:

1. I installed a wireless N network card on my computer which finally grants me access to super-fast speeds of 30 meg broadband. The old wireless usb stick could only handle wireless g and maxed out at 5-10 meg. I disabled the option on the router to broadcast in wireless n and wireless g/b because I was only getting the same as if I had wireless g i.e. slow slow slow.
2. I have finished optimising my blog (hopefully soon I will turn my whole website into a wordpress driven website) using the W3 Total Cache plugin, and some excellent online tutorials because it’s not very easy to get the plugin working properly. I had big problems with the minification of css and javascript files and this fantastic tutorial. I am now getting scores (with the Firefox addon PageSpeed) 97-99% ratings.

Future

Now I have achieved success in the optimisation of my blog, what is next on the list of things that I want to do? First of all I have started to learn how to use Git. If you don’t know what it is then here’s a quick explanation. For a group of developers to work on the same code at the same time, to track what they have done, we need a version control system and git is one of the excellent alternatives out there, as well as Mercurial and SVN (both of which I use at work). I had a basic introduction earlier this month when I was doing the Chiron Transformation Website but beyond that I knew very little how to do more than the most basic of functions, so I want to learn more!

Otherwise I want to turn my website big-andy.co.uk fully into a wordpress website, improve this blog and add some more features (e.g. HTML5 to the form), and write more often on this blog about what I am doing. I also want to add a portfolio section where I document which websites I have made and how I did them.

Weekend

This weekend I am going to Buxton in Derbyshire walking with the entire Pidgeon (my mum’s side of the family) clan. I really can’t wait!

Wedding and Website

Yeah it’s been really hectic lately, life that is! I’ve been working on a wordpress website for a designer called Kat, Marion and I have found a venue for our wedding and a date.

Wedding

Over Easter we visited Marion’s parents in La Rochelle and went to see six different wedding reception venues to the south of La Rochelle and after much decision making chose Domaine du Seudre – between La Rochelle and Bordeaux – and picked a date too. It feels great to have these two key things sorted out and now we really can set about planning the wedding in earnest!

Website

This is what I have been upto for the last 3 weeks solidly every evening and weekend day. I am really pleased with the outcome, chirontransformation.com, which went live earlier this week. I found out today that the customer has started putting content in the site and it’s interesting to see what’s happening! I learnt a hell of a lot about how to make a website in wordpress – utilising wordpress’ new content-management abilities, custom-fields, custom loops, cross-browser testing. I built it using HTML5 and CSS3 with fallbacks for less capable browsers using the excellent Modernizr Javascript library.

Coffee and Photos

Marion (my fianceé) has posted a couple of new posts with photos from our skiing holiday in Courchevel and walking in the Peak District in January.

Plugin Development (part one) [wordpress]

This is the first time that I have started to make a plugin and here I shall write about the process of making it. To begin with I will explain why you might want to make a plugin, then I will go into the process behind creating one.

Why plugin?

A plugin is a way to extend the powers of wordpress in a particular direction without having the hastle of going into the back-end and getting your hands dirty.

The process

To start with you have to have an idea of what you want to do. In my case I have an external application that requires a key that is specific to the owner of the blog. They enter the code in the admin area of the plugin, it stores the code in the site’s database and calls this code when required.

Puzzle pieces

For the plugin to be able to work you need a few different components (pieces):

1. Admin area—place to enter the “key” (code);
2. Way to store write code to database;
3. Way to access code from DB;
4. Way to write code to required place in wordpress (e.g. in the footer.php or loop.php);

In the next post I will outline how I have done this.