I’ve finally finished migrating the gallery pages from my old bespoke gallery system into WordPress. Other than the time it took to re-upload all the images (more than 8,000 in total), the transfer went relatively painlessly. There are two pieces of work left to do: firstly I need to fix the category links so that they are pretty rather than using querystrings, and secondly I want to see if I can, in bulk, update the upload time of each image to match the (manually set) published time of the gallery. I’ll be taking a look at those little things over the next few days.
This finally puts to rest my old gallery system. I started developing the system way back in 2002 to make it easier for me to share the photos I had taken at events with my friends. Before that point I’d simply used a static HTML system. The old galleries have been through a number of re-writes and additions over that time, as well as seeing a couple of re-designs, but with less time to pay attention to them the code had fallen somewhat into dis-repair. By moving to a custom post type based gallery system within WordPress I hope to be able to spend the time I used to spend maintaining the old system to add functionality. [read more]
Rushmoor Borough Council recently put out a consultation on proposed improvements to Aldershot town centre. The proposals cover three phases of work to improve the environment of the main shopping areas and pedestrian approaches to the town’s main shopping areas. Further details of the proposals can be viewed on the Rushmoor website.
Having lived and worked in the Aldershot area for going on 9 years now (some of the work work having even been related to improving the image of Aldershot town centre), combined with my amateur interest in town planning, I have more than a passing interest in these proposals so decided to respond to the consultation. Below are my thoughts, recorded for posterity. I will be interested to see the further discussion of these plans amongst the elected members of the council in coming months. [read more]
Last week Monica and I went off for a short break to Rome. We stayed about a week, landing Tuesday and flying home again on Saturday. I wasn’t expecting much before we flew out there — I’m not really a great fan of travelling and visiting places — but I suppose I would be doing somewhat of an injustice to say that it was as bad as I expected.
Getting from Fiumicino airport south-west of Rome was surprisingly painless (if a little expensive) thanks to the direct train, the Leonardo Express, which takes you right into the city’s main terminus, Roma Termini. We opted to use the automatic ticket machines at the airport which quite happily gave us the option to complete the transaction in English (We did however end up paying for the tickets on a debit card because the machine refused to take our notes, despite promising it would.) From there it was a short hop on the city’s B Metro line to Colloseo and a short walk to the self-catering apartment which we had rented.
We chose to buy the Roma Pass for the week. [read more]
I’ve long been a supporter of independent local radio and listened to it in one form or another for as long as I’ve had my own tuner. I remember waking up listening to Mark Page and I think back fondly to keeping the radio on quietly at night, hoping my parents wouldn’t hear, to listen to Alex Hall both on The Pulse (I honestly think that Alex was a big part of my love of talk radio). When I was at university I would dip in and out of The Bay and was of course involved with the student radio station 87.7 Bailrigg FM. These days while I mostly get my music from BBC Radio 2 when I’m at home, I usually pick up an hour or so of LBC each evening depending on who is presenting.
The recent trend towards networked programming and heavily branded groups of stations is something which really saddens me. While I appreciate that there are (relatively high) costs involved with putting out a radio station and that, as commercial entities, each station has to make a profit [read more]
One final short AS-Level Politics essay again regarding voting behaviour. This essay talks at greater length about one factor: social class. From 2003 and running to only about 660 words. All of my school work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence.
How Important is class in influencing voting behaviour?
While the it cannot be said that class has no influence over the voting patterns of the electorate, the actual level of this influence is by no means certain. Political analysts do not agree on how much voting behaviours are influenced by class, and the lines of the affect of class and affect of other factors are by no means clear. In spite of this, there is no doubt in anyone’s view that class has, traditionally at least, had a role in voting patterns. [read more]
This field-work study was carried out in the year 2000 as part of my GCSE Geography coursework at Ryburn Valley High School. It is a study of the coastal erosion seen at Flamborough Head’s North Bay on Yorkshire’s east coast of the UK. The attached document is the final report in PDF format (converted a couple of years ago from a Microsoft Publisher document). I have reproduced it as best I can below. As always the content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence.
Flamborough Head – North Bay
Flambrough Head’s North Bay lies on the east coast of England. It is made up of two chalk headlands and a sandy beach with chalk deposits.
Most of the visible landforms have been created in the chalk cliffs, although the site does also have deposits of Glacial Moraine, mainly to the inshore side of the beach. [read more]
Each month I eagerly await the thud of The Farnham Diary dropping onto the doormat. Not for the news and local information it contains but for the pedantic nit-picking and the no-holds-barred comment section “View Point.” (There is also the excellent “Bricks and mortar reporter” section which, as an amateur town planner and fully signed up, card-carrying, curtain twitching nosy neighbour, makes up for the fact I don’t have the time to stroll around town and take note of which shops have opened and which have closed recently.) This month’s edition proved not to be a let down.
In the View Point section (pages 10 and 11 of the digital version, above) under the heading “Spaying it around…” was printed a quotation from what seems to be a press update sent by the Farnham Neighbourhood Police Team to local newspapers. The quotation in question was asking editors to assist the police in raising awareness of the existence a of police office in the local fire station. The plea was casual and light-hearted, using a reference to the town’s old police station — the closure and ongoing physical state of which is a contentious issue in the town — to make a very valid point: there there is still a local police presence in Farnham. [read more]
I recently wrote a small PHP library for consuming ConvertAPI’s various online conversions (mostly document to PDF) via their RESTful API for a project I’m currently working on. Their service is something I had been looking for for quite some time. Given I didn’t find much in the way of coherent libraries for consuming their service with PHP, I thought it might be worthwhile making my work public. I’ll be finishing off adding all the conversion classes in the near future.
Therefore, I have released the source code over on my GitHub account. It’s licensed under the LGPL v3 allowing it to be integrated into software applications which do not release their own source code.
Feel free to use it how you wish and if you find any problems open up a ticket on GitHub and I’ll do my best to help.
Or, more specifically, does Romania need this cheerleader? Please don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a personal attack on the author. Ethan seems to be nice guy with a genuine love of the country and the girl who has opened his eyes to it. He appears to be humble and willing to accept when his personal knowledge is lacking (the comment and response on this post is a great example). Yet sometimes it feels like the blog strays from light pro-Romania reading, to full on propaganda.
I am in the same situation as Ethan: I’m a 30(ish) year old British guy in a relationship with a Romanian girl, I have been travelling backwards and forwards between Britain and Romania since 2011 and, despite what I was told I would think before I visited for the first time, I really like the country. I understand where he’s coming from. I also recognise that Romania has taken a bit of a beating at the hands of the right-wing media in the UK in recent years (fuelled no doubt by the recent popularity of UKIP), as well as suffering from a lack of high-profile official tourism publicity (when was the last time you saw an advert funded by the Romanian tourist board?). But despite Ethan’s best intentions, does a sickly sweet fansite really achieve anything? [read more]
Despite a swing to the Labour Party, if the pattern of voting seen when comparing the 2010 local election results (a poll taken at the same time as the last UK general election) to the 2014 local election results is applied to the general election results, the bellweather seat of Calder Valley would remain a Conservative seat.
There are of course a number of caveats when making a comparison of this type, but it seems that had the general election been held on 22nd May 2014 then the Conservative candidate would have been returned to parliament, albeit with a substantially reduced majority. Additionally, it appears that all of the indicators agree with this projected outcome. What follows is my long-form statistical analysis of the situation. The calculations from which I draw my conclusions are available for download at the end. If you do not want to read the full analysis then I suggest you jump straight to the conclusion.
Before I get into the numbers, a little background on the UK Parliament constituency of Calder Valley. Created in 1983 the constituency has historically been a bellweather seat, albeit only having seen three MPs in this time. [read more]