Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

Minimum viable product?

31st October 2022

While I have done my styling for websites that I have, this one has used third-party themes since its inception. This approach does have its advantages because you can benefit from the efforts of others; it can be a way to get added functionality and gain an appearance that is more contemporary in feel.

Naturally, there also are drawbacks. Getting the desired appearance can be challenging without paying for it, and your tastes may not match current fashions. Then, there are restrictions on customisation. Where user interfaces are available, these cannot be limitless. A fallback is to tweak code but ever-increasing complexity hampers that and an automated update can erase a modification, even if child themes are a possibility on at least one content management system.

For me, the drawbacks now outweigh the advantages so I have created my own design and that is what you now see. Behind the scenes, there is a back-to-basics approach and everything should look brighter. As the title of this post suggests, this is a start with further tweaks coming in time. For now, I hope that what you find will be sufficient to please.

Yet another useful Windows shortcut

11th December 2011

During the week, I needed to go to a client to upgrade the laptop that they’d given me for doing work for them. The cause was their migration from Windows XP to Windows 7. Office 2010 also came with the now set up and they replace the machines with new ones too. As part of doing this, they carried out upgrade training and this is when I got to learn a thing or two.

While I may have been using Windows 7 since the beta releases first were made available, I am under no illusions that I know all there is to be known about the operating system. Included among the things of which I wasn’t aware was a shortcut key combination for controlling display output from the HP laptop that I’d been given. This is the Windows key + P. This brings up a dialogue screen from which you can select the combination that you need and that includes extending the display across two different screens, such as that of the laptop and an external monitor. Going into the display properties will fine tune things such as what is the main display and the placement of the desktops; there’s no point in having Windows thinking that the external screen is to your left when in fact it is at the right.

Another interesting shortcut is the Windows key + TAB. This affects the Aero application view and repeating the combination cycles through the open applications or you can use a mouse wheel to achieve the same end. With ALT + TAB and the taskbar still about, this might appear more of a curiosity but some may still find it handy so I’ve shared it here too.

All in all, it’s best never to think that you know enough about something because there’s always something new to be learned and it’s always the smallest of things that proves to be the most helpful. With every release of Windows, that always seems to be the case and Windows 8 should not be any different, even if all the talk is about its Metro interface. A beta release is due in the spring of 2012 so we’ll have a chance to find out then. You never can stop learning about this computing business.

Starting a fifth…

17th January 2011

It is hard to believe the passage of time sometimes but there are events that provide the occasional reminder. The fourth birthday of this outpost on the web is a but small representative of the genre. An initially frenetic posting rate slowed over time and new entries appear on here when there is something to share rather than trying to work to a schedule. That went by the wayside a good while ago…

Over the years, appearances have changed but the raison d’être remains: to share useful snippets regarding the digital technology that pervades this age. Sometimes, these are things that I need to store for my own future reference but there are others that I scarcely have seen elsewhere. Even with the power of Google or Bing, it can be hard to track down the knowledge that you need these days so that’s why I keep on adding to the collection of material that you find on here.

All in all, we seem to be in a time of major upheaval. During the past year, I had one of my own and the result was a change of job and place of work. However, there many more momentous ones than that with plenty to be seen in the world of technology. Digital photography is taken for granted nowadays and the next battle seems to be between DSLR’s and compact system cameras. Then, there’s the increasing mobility of computing and the increasingly clever packaging of diminutive yet powerful devices. It seems that everything is all change so that may bring me more things about which to write on here. 2011 may become an interesting if very challenging year ahead.

Unfinished business

16th June 2010

If you’ve been here before, you’ll notice that the first rendition of the new look for this place has been introduced. It is based upon the intention WordPress theme but more work is needed before it looks as tidy as I’d like it. That’ll take a little while and improvements will come gradually but I hope that the new design is pleasing even at this point in time. At the very least, it looks natty to my eyes though there are little bits and pieces that I have ended up leaving behind for now. Even so, it gives me a modern menu at the top of every page so I’m far from disappointed. In any case, I don’t mind doing some extra tinkering.

Pondering a change in appearance

15th June 2010

This little outpost on the web has had the same site design for around two years now and I am beginning to wonder about making a change to it in the spirit of keeping things feeling fresh. Experimentation is in progress on the offline copy of what you see here but that could reveal roadblocks yet. So far, things are looking hopeful and you shouldn’t be too surprised if it all looks different some day.

Suffering from neglect?

6th March 2009

There have been several recorded instances of Google acquiring something and then not developing it to its full potential. FeedBurner is yet another acquisition where this sort of thing has been suspected. Changeovers by monolithic edict and lack of responsiveness from support fora are the sorts of things that breed resentment in some that share opinions on the web. Within the last month, I found that my FeedBurner feeds were not being updated as they should have been and it would not accept a new blog feed when I tried adding it. The result of both these was that I got to deactivating the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin to take FeedBurner out of the way for my feed subscribers; those regulars on my hillwalking blog were greeted by a splurge of activity following something of a hiatus. There are alternatives such as RapidFeed and Pheedo but I will stay away from the likes of these for a little while and take advantage of the newly added FeedStats plugin to keep tabs on how many come to see the feeds. The downside to this is that IE6 users will see the pure XML rather than a version with a more friendly formatting.

Episodes of poor performance

15th January 2009

Over the last few days, I have been noticing from various that this blog isn’t performing as I would want it. The first hint was a comment on a tuxmachines.org mention for a recent entry (thanks for the support, by the way) that the link wasn’t working as it should have been. Add to this various emails from Are My Sites Up? saying that the site seemed to be down. By all accounts, this free service that I found through Lifehacker would appear to be doing its job and without the annoying advertising emails that Internetseer used to send me in addition to its weekly report when I used its free service. In fact, that you get alert emails several times a day is a factor in favour of the newcomer.

With one exception, these problems would appear to be intermittent. The exception was when I went using the WP Super Cache WordPress plugin and it seemed to result in breakage of the site so it got disabled even if it is meant to be helpful during episodes of heavy load. Otherwise, the outages would seem to be general flakiness of the service provided by my hosting provider. I have a site with them on an older server and that seems to fare far better than the one playing host to this blog. This sort of thing does make me wonder if we are getting real progress or whether it’s a case of one step forward and two steps back. Nevertheless, I’ll continue keeping an eye on things and, if there is too much deterioration, a move might be in order but that’s a good bit away yet.

Oops!

30th August 2008

It’s amazing what a misplaced wp-config.php file can cause. Today, one ended up travelling in here while I was setting up a test blog for seeing how WordPress 2.7 was coming along. The result was that content more appropriate to my hillwalking blog turned up on web browsers and in feeds instead of what should have made its appearance. I’ll have to be more careful in future…

P.S. I realise that I have been quiet over the last few weeks but that’s down to my being away in Scotland hiking on some of its islands and catching up with some friends in Edinburgh. I have some ideas for new posts so they should manifest themselves sooner rather than later.

A bumpy ride

19th June 2008

Yesterday, this blog got a bumpy ride from its hosting provider, Fasthosts. For several hours, it was down and there have been occasional errors returned since then. I’ll be keeping an eye on this but I hope that things stabilise sooner rather than later. There’s no question of moving things lock, stock and barrel at this time; patience is a very important virtue when it comes to these things…

A change in appearance

7th May 2008

Over the course of it’s short history, this blog has had four different themes, the latest of which being my own customised variant of Dezzain’s Zoxengen. It’s predecessor’s have included Andreas04, Andreas09 and Prosumer. I have tinkered with all of these to varying degrees but each has offered me a certain something before I set about my tweaks. Zoxengen is no different and its clean lines and Web 2.0 feel attracted my attention. Other little features like seeing related posts listing on a post’s comments page or listing the tags associated with a post under its title line are, I hope, useful little extras. Correcting English (I may be digging a hole for myself here) and removing advertising slots (for me, this blogging business is a hobby so you’ll find no ads on any of my blogs) both seem to be a necessary tasks when implementing themes these times but the really major change was to make the design more flexible when it comes to different screen sizes, something that I hope to have achieved by allowing it to fill more of the browser window. There may be more changes, hopefully small, but I hope that you find the result as pleasing on the eye as I do.

Update: The blog’s current theme came with a lot of text that was written in poor English. While I should have got rid of all of it from the theme by now, there may be some still lurking here somewhere. If I find any more, it’ll get sorted. If something has escaped my notice for whatever reason, please let me know.

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