Alex June 23rd, 2009
The JustGiving website has a had a bit of a redesign, which meant that my sidebar widget showing how much money I’d raised stopped working. I’ve now updated to use their new widget, which, by coincidence, happens to match the colour scheme of my blog.
The only downside I’ve found so far is the new widget only goes up to 100%. I’d raised 106% of my target, which the old widget displayed, but the new one doesn’t.
If you feel like proving it to yourself that it won’t got over 100%, then please feel free to make a donation 
Alex June 20th, 2009
Over the last few days I’ve added a few features to my blog which other blogs have had for ages…
- Comments subscription. Get email updates to post’s comments. I’ve never quite understood why this isn’t a standard feature of Wordpress. Does anyone ever subscribe to an RSS feed of comments? I don’t think I ever have.
-
Gravatar. Updated my theme to include comment author’s gravatars
-
Tag cloud. Seemed an obvious thing to add to the side bar, given the time I’d spent tagging old posts.
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Clustr maps. A little sidebar widget to show where the site visitors are coming from.
As, I assume, most people will be reading this through a feed reader, all of my tinkering will be irrelevant/invisible. Which means you won’t see the long (pointless?) sidebar of widgets now on display.
Does anyone ever look at these sidebar widgets? I’m sure when I view others’ blogs/sites I tend to block out anything down either side of the page assuming it’s peripheral, unless it looks like a menu for navigation. So why should I expect anyone to look at the ones on my site?
On the OpenLearn project the number of Moodle blocks (down either side of the page) grew to an unmanageable number. Deciding which (or rather whose!) block should be removed or put at the top was a tricky task. Though, this problem has now been solved by moving all the tools into one block.
[The photo above, which I took yesterday, has nothing to do with this posting, other than to show I have done something else over the last few days apart from tinkering with my blog.]
Alex June 17th, 2009
Whilst I have the time I’ve been fixing a few little things on my blog, as well as doing some tidying up. One thing I wanted to do, but wasn’t really sure whether or not it was worthwhile, was look at adding tags to my blog postings. Plenty has already been written (start here) about the difference and where and when you should use each.
When I’d started the blog only categories were available, so I’ve just continued with this, almost ignoring the tag facility, despite the fact that tags seemed a more flexible approach. Using the categories, with their hierarchical nature, felt as though you ought to come up with some big taxonomy for organising blog categories.
I’ve now severely trimmed the number of categories, whilst created umpteen tags – so is that an improvement for my blog? will it help people (including) find what they want? I’m not sure!
An interesting side effect of tagging (nearly) all my blog postings, was that I got to look back through what I’d written years ago and remember some of the projects and problems encountered – fixing many of the numerous typos on the way.
I also noticed how tweet like some of my early blog postings were, e.g. here and here – OK, maybe not 140 characters, but close.
Alex June 15th, 2009
I’ve finally got around to allowing you to post a comment using an OpenID, by installing one of the Wordpress OpenID plugins.
I had tried to do this over a year ago, but couldn’t quite get it working correctly. I had a number of problems before, notably that my hosting server only ran PHP4, whereas (at the time) most OpenID plugins seemed designed for PHP5, or a specific version of PHP4 that I wasn’t running. The other main factor was that most of the OpenID plugins at the time were very early (beta or earlier) versions, so may have been a little buggy still, whereas the plugin I installed today was very easy to get set up and running.
Anyone using a verified OpenID to post a comment on this site will find that their name and email is not required, plus your comments skip moderation.
Please let me know if you find any problems in using your OpenID on this site.
Alex May 25th, 2009
As it was in August 2004
5 years ago today I wrote my first blog posting and have been looking back through some of my early postings. My blog has changed dramatically in this time, in terms of software used, graphic design and subject matter.
Originally using a blogging application I had written myself using ColdFusion and a MS SQL Server database, the application didn’t even offer RSS feeds or a way for readers to comment. Adding a commenting system (in January 2006) was my first stab at using Ajax. Once these ‘advanced’ features were added the site remained (technically speaking) much the same, only minor changes to the design, until I moved from IET to KMi in August 2006.
I took this change of department as an opportunity to move my blog from running on my custom application to the more sustainable and feature rich Wordpress platform, athough I hadn’t yet made the final step of running the blog from my own domain. The move to alexlittle.net didn’t take place until March 2008.
As the site is today (May 2008)
The subject matter of my blog has changed dramatically too over the last 5 years. Originally the blog was just a simple diary for my own benefit whilst working on a JISC project – I knew we’d have to report back on the project, problems, successes etc and recording these in a diary (or blog) made sense at the time. The diary style of the first few months of blog entries is really highlighted by the fact that the titles for each posting are just the days and dates.
Nowadays my blog is a way for me to record and share my experience of living, working and attempting to implement elearning at a university in Ethiopia, a long way, both physically and mentally, from the first blog postings sat in an office in Milton Keynes!
(Image of site from 2004 from the Wayback Machine Internet Archive project)
Alex March 6th, 2009
Well, seems I might have been a bit premature last week in stating that Blogger had been unblocked. Seems as if it’s been blocked again – maybe just a technical hitch had made it available for a short time?
However, seems some other sites have now been opened up. According to Nazret.com:
Mohamed Keita of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) writes, Ethiopia has lifted ban of websites that the government find them to be critical. CPJ’s own website has been blocked in Ethiopia since August of last year and it is now once again accessible in Ethiopia, Mr Keita writes.
The Annual Human Rights Report by the US State Department has expressed concerns about Internet freedom in Ethiopia. The report said, “The government restricted access to the Internet and blocked opposition Web sites, including the sites of the OLF, ONLF, Ginbot 7, and several news blogs and sites run by opposition diaspora groups, such as the Ethiopian Review, CyberEthiopia.com, Quatero Amharic Magazine, Tensae Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian Media Forum”.
Reports from Addis Ababa have also confirmed that nazret.com is now accessible in Ethiopia. nazret has been blocked in Ethiopia since 2005 and we have seen a spike in traffic from Ethiopia since the beginning of 2009.
For info: OLF = Oromo Liberation Front and ONLF = Ogaden National Liberation Front
Alex February 26th, 2009
Ever since I arrived in Ethiopia, access to Blogger has been completely blocked across the country. This was quite a pain for anyone wanting follow Blogger blogs – they could be accessed via online RSS readers – but then you still missed out on any images. It was also a problem for those VSO volunteers who had set up blogs before they came to Ethiopia then found they couldn’t update them easily (or at all!).
The good news is that today I’ve found I can now access Blogger directly! So for some reason ETC (telecoms co) or Ethiopian government must have decided it was no longer a threat.
The bad news (from Bloomberg) is that it seems unlikely the ETC monopoly on telecoms will be relaxed – meaning ongoing outrageous costs for mobile SIMs and broadband internet connections. To quote from their article (note that is the correct number of zeros in the 1Mb broadband monthly cost):
Girma Birru, Ethiopia’s trade minister, said Ethiopia has no plans to liberalize the telecommunications and financial-services industries to gain access to World Trade Organization (WTO), Bloomberg news reported.
“Primarily we will join the WTO not to make others happy, but to make our economy work,” Birru said. “So to the extent it helps our economy we will liberalize things, but if it’s not going to assist our goals in trade and development we will not liberalize. Why do we have to?”
“I don’t see any plan” to break up or sell Ethiopian Telecommunications Corp. to private investors, Birru said. “If there are some problems it has nothing to do with ownership. It has only to do with management. Management and ownership don’t necessarily go together.”
According to Bloomberg news, Ethiopian Telecommunication charges $35 for a mobile-phone SIM card, where in neighboring Somalia and Kenya it costs less than $5. A 1-megabyte per second Internet connection costs more than $2,000 a month in Ethiopia. In South Africa, the continent’s biggest economy, a similar service costs between 600 rand ($59) and 760 rand, according to the http://www.mybroadband.co.za Web site.
Newai Gebre-Ab, chief economic advisor to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, said “the company [ETC] is “generating a lot of money and that money is being put to good use for development of infrastructure,”.
Alex August 8th, 2008
The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed that I’ve added a ‘VSO feeds’ section to the side bar. I wanted to be able to aggregate feeds from other VSO volunteers to show on my site, unfortunately the RSS widget built into Wordpress won’t aggregate feeds for you – you’d need to create a new wdiget for each feed – not really what I wanted.
However, I did find the SimplePie Plugin for Wordpress which has done exactly what I needed and was very straightforward to get up and running. The display is all done via templates and is very configurable. The only (very small) niggle that I have is that you need to specify the feed urls in the code, rather than in the Wordpress admin pages, e.g.
<?php
echo @SimplePieWP(array(
'http://markvso.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default',
'http://siddypen.wordpress.com/feed',
http://nonoincambodia.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default'
), array(
'items' => 10,
'date_format' => 'j M Y',
'truncate_item_description' => 100
));
?>
At the moment I’m only showing feeds from 3 blogs, but if you have a feed that you’d like me to add then please send it on.
Rather unfortunately the blogging system that VSO uses (http://www.vso-stories.net/) doesn’t provide RSS feeds of the postings (!) – though it does provide an email subscription service. So there are several other blogs I’d like to include in my aggregator which would be very relevant, e.g. Julian Bass’s blog, but I can’t until vso-stories provides an RSS feed factility 
Alex April 22nd, 2008
Whilst writing my previous post and trying to upload the relevant screenshot using the ‘add media’, I kept getting the (rather unspecific) error message: “HTTP Error, An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later.”
There’s a Wordpress forum thread which mentions this error (plus other problems people are having with the Media Library), but the easiest solution I found was just to edit the .htaccess file.
Alex April 3rd, 2008
Have just updated this site to the most recent version of WordPress, which was as easy as ever I do like the new admin interface too!
However on upgrading I noticed quite a large PHP error_log file which seems to consist mainly of messages like this:
[03-Apr-2008 08:46:31] -------------------wpopenid-------------------
[03-Apr-2008 08:46:31] WPOpenID Status: file:error_log [info]: Logging errors via PHP's
error_log faculty to: error_log
[03-Apr-2008 08:46:31] WPOpenID Status: userinterface hooks: Enabled (finished including
and instantiating, passing control back to wordpress)
Turns out that debugging for WPOpenID is on by default, and you can only change the setting by changing the code – rather than through the admin pages
Anyway, all I needed to do to stop the constant entries into the log was change the \wpopenid\openid-registration.php file so that WORDPRESSOPENIDREGISTRATION_DEBUG was set to false (line 20).
The JustGiving website has a had a bit of a redesign, which meant that my sidebar widget showing how much money I’d raised stopped working. I’ve now updated to use their new widget, which, by coincidence, happens to match the colour scheme of my blog.
Alex Little. Licensed under