Alex Little

You may have just been redirected here from the previous location of my blog (at http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/alex), if so then please update your links – though hopefully the redirectors will remain in place for a little while! I put a handcrafted rss and atom postings so those of you accessing via rss readers etc should also find out that I’ve moved the site.

Moving over to my own domain is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, but have never quite got around to doing it until now. It was relatively painless to move over from one wordpress install to the other, the main problems were references to images and other postings (where the full URL is embedded) – this was additionally complicated by the fact I changed the formatting of the URLs, so rather than use “/?p=123″ it’s now “/2008/03/26/mypost”, so much more user friendly!

Please let me know if you spot anything that isn’t working correctly (links going nowhere etc!), cheers

Hi, this is my personal blog site where I’ll be posting my photos etc – as an alternative to using my work site.

You may or may not have noticed (depending on whether you’re using an RSS reader to read this) that I’ve updated my site design. Apart from the new colour scheme, I’ve tried to trim down the sidebar by not showing quite so many links! Anyway, any feedback, especially if you find any quirks in the new design, is much appreciated

I’m currently at the OpenLearn conference and have helping with the live blogging effort on the Ochre website. However I’m finding this a little tricky – I’d be fine taking notes then writing up later, but my brain doesn’t work quickly enough to form sentences worth posting up as people are presenting. Think the best bet for me is to listen to the presentations then write up my overall thoughts at the end.

Think I may be making thing even harder for myself by writing to this blog and the Ochre blog at the same time…!

I’ve finally got round to fixing the issue I had with the character encoding on my photo pages. Whereever “München” was printed, what actually appeared on the page was a question mark on black diamond rather than the u umlaut.

After bit of messing around I fixed the problem – turned out to be to do with the connection between PHP and MySQL, all I needed to do was add the command:
mysql_query(“SET NAMES utf8″);
before I did the query to extract from the database.

Previously I was looking as issues with the character encoding in the header, meta tags etc and couldn’t find anything wrong with these. Though not entirely sure exactly what this SET NAMES command actually does – will need to go & ook it up ….

I’ve just moved my website over to the server here in KMi, so the url has changed – but redirects from the old site are all in place. Was fairly easy to get everything moved acrosss – though my old site was running ColdFusion and MS SQL and this new site is on WordPress (so it’s MySQL and PHP) so I’ve had to rewrite parts, eg the photo pages as I couldn’t find a WordPress photo plugin that did exactly what I wanted!

Have just added the commenting functionality I mentioned a couple of days ago, using a little AJAX application. Seems to work pretty much ok, but there are a couple of little things that I’d like to tidy up – for example, when you post a comment the comment listing doesn’t update with the new comment (could get the page to auto refresh, but that defeats the point of making it an ajax application!). Also not sure whether it would work very well (if at all) for people using screen readers etc. I’ve only tested it using IE6 and FireFox (both on Windows), so not sure whether it would work fine on a Mac, or with other browsers. If you find it doesn’t work or have any suggestions for improvement, please just let me know

Have just applied the new design to this website – so it now uses CSS instead of tables for the layout. There are still a few pages that I need to finish off and tidy up, but it’s pretty much done. I’ve tested the site with IE6 and Firefox and it seems to work fine with both of those, but if you see any ‘odd’ behaviour/layout using other browsers, then please just let me know

Been up to a few different things in the last week or so…. firstly, had news from JISC that we’ve received funding for our JoinIn project (working with the LAMS team to create a grouping tool to move groups between the LAMs and Moodle VLEs). We’ve also been looking at submitting a bid in the new JISC Design for Learning programme.

I’ve also been playing a bit with various bits and pieces, I’ve been trying to redesign my website (this one!) so that it uses CSS instead of tables for layout – that seems to be going ok so far, and I should be able to make it live soon. Just found it a bit fiddly, especially with the differences between IE and firefox, and there appears to be a lot of options to achieve the same result, so trying to figure out which is the ‘best’. I’ve also added an RSS feed for this blog and my learning design one, so you should see the link at the bottom of the page, or, if you are using firefox, you should get the ‘live bookmarks’ option.

Finally, also been having a go with del.icio.us (see http://del.icio.us/dextral ), which is interesting, but could end up spending way too much time looking at other links people have bookmarked!