It may have recently closed on London’s West End, but I’ve just caught up with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s newest musical, Stephen Ward The Musical. At least the music. Having been to see the closing throws of Tim Rice’s version of From Here to Eternity recently, and having been quite impressed, I was hoping for much more from the Stephen Ward soundtrack.
I’ve listened through the musical a few times now on my daily cycle and just can’t get past how it sounds very much much like Lloyd Webber’s 1979 musical Tell Me on a Sunday. While this in itself is not necessarily a bad thing it does make what should be a fresh new piece feel tired and, at least as a stand-alone soundtrack, remarkably dated. While I appreciate that the subject of the show — the Profumo affair — happened at the start of the 1960s, and that the writers may well have been trying to reflect that in the sound of the musical numbers, at a time when musicals such as The Book of Mormon are commanding upwards of £150 for premium West End seats and selling out months in advance, Lloyd Webber’s score sounds as if it is aimed at audiences from another time. [read more]
It is with great (and slightly delayed) pleasure that I am able to announce the availability of Syndicate Out 0.8.3.
There are a number of changes and improvements in this version which are outlined below. This revision is pretty feature-heavy and should cover off a number of requests I’ve had over the past few years as well as bringing some performance enhancements. There’s a full list of changes below.
One major improvement with this version of the plugin is full i18n capability (and a Spanish translation, thanks to WebHostingHub). If you’d like to translate the plugin into any other languages then I would gratefully accept and roll the translation into the next release. You can find the required translation files in the plugin’s GitHub repo.
As always you can download the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory or via the WordPress auto updater. I love to hear feedback, comments, questions and suggestions. Just drop something into the comments below. [read more]
I’m pleased to announce the availability of version 0.8.2 of the Syndicate Out WordPress plugin in the WordPress plugin repository. Versions 0.8.2 and 0.8.2.1 are functionally the same, the latter is just a revision number bump.
Following a night of debugging, and with assistance of all the users who gave clues along the way, I believe I have finally tracked down and eliminated the bug introduced in the 0.8 release which was preventing the plugin from cross posting in some cases. Today’s release should fix the problem.
If you were experiencing problems with the 0.8 version I would encourage you to upgrade to 0.8.2(.1) and give it a try. If you’re one of the users who had reverted to 0.7 because of the 0.8 problems I’d also suggest you give the new version a spin and see if it works for you. I’m keen to know if the bug is now gone!
The immediate plan for 2014 is to prepare the plugin for localisation by adding i18n functions to output text before adding some of the most requested features including: syndicating old posts, syndicating media and attachments and post-by-post syndication. I’ll keep you updated on the progress of that functionality.
[read more]
It seems like everyone uses GitHub these days so I thought I should probably jump on the bandwagon. Therefore I’ve created a couple of repos for my current WordPress plugin projects: Syndicate Out and a new plugin which I have yet to publish Folksy Shop (a plugin which helps Folksy sellers display their items on their own site using the Folksy system as a master management system).
My hope is that by having them in GitHub I’ll be able to more effectively manage the development process of the projects, as well as my own time, and allow people to more easily submit patches and bugs relating to the plugins.
Both projects are open source so I invite people to take a look and throw any comments my way. My GitHub profile is here: ConfuzzledDuck on GitHub.
About a year ago I wrote a blog post summing up the results of my experiment to claim a couple of prizes from a Purely Creative scratchcard — the type given away in newspapers and magazines — which I had found discarded on a train. The prizes I won were both ‘experiences’ to be provided through a company called WeWanna.
Over the last year this blog post has had quite a number of comments from other people who had gone through the claim process (either through the post or via the telephone or text route), and had also received experience prizes. Quite a number of these comments said how happy people were with the experiences; from the river cruise and hair makeover experience which I won, to the afternoon tea and balloon rides. However in the last month or so the comments have taken a turn for the worse.
There have been a number of people who have commented recently on an apparent dispute between Purely Creative and WeWanna which has lead to them being told their experiences have been cancelled. Some say that they have been told by both companies that the other is at fault, which has left them feeling they have nowhere to turn. [read more]
I’ve just pushed version 0.8 of the Syndicate Out plugin to the WordPress plugin repository. This version’s major claim to fame is the switch from the Moveable Type API calls to the native WordPress API calls, although it addresses a few other issues too.
Hopefully this shift from the MT calls to the WP calls will be a good foundation for the plugin going forward — it should allow me to much more easily introduce the new functionality which people have been asking for, including syndication of media (including featured images) as well as opening up the possibility to greatly enhance functionality by having a receiving side plugin which extends the receiving blog.
Back in October last year a new Morrisons supermarket opened as part of the Westgate development in Aldershot about three minutes away from my house. Two minutes further down the road is the town’s big Tesco supermarket. With so little between the two shops, I wondered how I could best choose which one I should shop at. I decided that, because they both sell roughly the same things, the only deciding factor for normal shopping (ignoring things like Tesco being 24-hour while Morrisons is not) is price. So I decided to do a comparison.
I know there are plenty of places which do a standard shopping basket comparison and the supermarkets themselves even track each others prices, but given my shopping is generally pretty fixed (and probably slightly unusual) I decided to put together a shopping list which best reflected my own weekly shop. Most items are standard weekly items, while one or two are less frequent (but still regular) purchases. There are a few notes and places where the shops differ, and those are highlighted in the table below along with the prices. Where I have a preference based on factors other than price the favorite’s price is displayed in italics: [read more]
On Friday I released version 0.7 of the Syndicate Out plugin to the WordPress plugin repository. This is a pretty minor update to cover testing up to and including WordPress 3.5 and to give the settings pages an overhaul in preparation for the next round of development which will see some major changes to the API interaction functionality, requiring changes to the settings system. I’ll post with some additional information regarding the roadmap shortly.
As it’s been a few years since the last release of this plugin I’m hoping I’ve covered all the bases and this update will be painless. Let me know below if you encounter any problems. The plugin can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin directory. The following has been changed in this version: [read more]
As I mentioned previously I have a number of projects on the go. Some of them are for fun, some of them hopefully will lead to something, at least one of them is a long overdue favour for someone which will also free up some of my time. As part of my plan for 2013 I’d like to pick up these projects and make some progress. My plan is to have two projects on the go at any one time, alternating between them each time I work (hopefully most nights in the week), and to pick a long term project to work on for a while along side a number of shorter projects (or at least projects which have a shorter release cycle).
The first thing I have in mind is to finish off converting the Calderdale Theatre School website to WordPress. The people who I’m doing it for have asked if there is any way they can update it themselves, and I’d love to give them one. The complication so far has been integrating the production pages and callendar into WP in a suitable way. I have started this and made good progress on the main content pages at the end of last year, but haven’t given much thought to the other sections. My current thinking is that I will leave those pages running on the legacy code for now and publish the rest in the new WP format. [read more]
As I look out of the window and the clouds below us, and the mountains below that, I’m minded to think that saying goodbye to Romania and hello again to England bears a similarity to saying goodbye to the previous year and hello to the next. Alright, so we did that just under a week ago officially, and of course the flight is from one known to another, but you see what I’m getting at. I would like to say something poetic like how flying makes me reflect on my life — so far above the world, and so personally helpless, that my thoughts are free to turn to how I can improve the things I do have control over — but in honesty that’s not true (besides, with so many screaming kids on this flight, it’s hardly conducive to poetic thinking). It does, however, give me time to write.
I didn’t go into 2012 with big plans which I can reflect on at the end of the year. I thought, perhaps, I might have changed jobs, but in the end things didn’t pan out that way; I suppose, in honesty, I didn’t try all that hard so perhaps the whole situation wasn’t as bad as I thought it might have been at some points in the year. I didn’t think I’d come so close to being upgraded as part of the British Airways Executive club; although I didn’t make it, one economy to business class upgrade on my last flight of the year would have tipped the balance. [read more]