Jonathon Wardman

Text Obfuscator Version 1.3

After quite a lot of silence on this front, this morning I released version 1.3 of the Text Obfuscator plugin for WordPress. This version contains some new features and an overhaul to the user interface with the aim of making it a little easier to configure especially in light of the growing feature set.  If you’re using the plugin I’d love to hear your feedback.

The full changelog is below:

• Added the option to apply rules to either pages, posts, or both.
• Added the option to match or ignore case in matches.
• Added option to remove matched string, not replace it.
• Reworked the admin page to (hopefully) make it easier to use with new options.
• Added settings link to plugin page.

The plugin can be downloaded from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Scott’s Stag at The Bunkhouse (part 1)

Excuse me if this doesn’t read too well, I’ve had around 5 hours sleep since I woke up on Friday at 8am. It’s not like I didn’t expect it but it’s really on just catching up on me sitting here on the train. The past two days I’ve the pleasure of watching the sun make it’s early morning crawl across the sky over rural north Wales.

Judging by the posts on Facebook Scott’s stag weekend seems to have been a success. In all honesty I thought that perhaps this little review would be a little less positive after the first night but in my opinion things got better the second night even if I did end up falling into my (not uncommon) “responsible adult” role at three in the morning.

The weekend started off when the advanced party, Ben the best man, Neil Ben’s father, Alyx who we met in Chester because he lives there, and myself arrived at the Bunkhouse to the news that the other building had been let for the weekend to a Hen party.

[read more]

A Foreign Visitor

It’s kind of a tradition to write blog entries while I’m on the train it seems only now it’s gone a little more high-tech. Rather than writing offline on a rickety old laptop I’m writing online thanks to my Three dongle on my new Samsung nettop (courtesy of The Sun and Prince William).

Today my journey is to Chester to meet up with a group of friends to celebrate Scott’s impending marriage. The weekend will be spent in rural North Wales, the rest of the journey from Chester to the bunkhouse in which we’re staying will in Ben’s dad’s car.

I was thinking I might try to get this blog up-to-date while I was on the train, but it’s been so long since I last wrote I can’t think how I should start. In all honesty, from day to day, not an awful lot has changed. work is still the same, and I’m still living with Dana in our little flat. The biggest difference, I suppose, is there might be some romance on the horizon. [read more]

London Marathon 2011

Sunday 17th April saw the 2011 Virgin London Marathon. As in previous years I ventured out with my kit bag to shoot the event. This year’s plan took me from Charlton to Mudchute on the Isle of Dogs, then to Poplar High Street and Limehouse, and on Westminster bridge. [read more]

Going back through time

Over the years I have spent time blogging in a few different places with varying different levels of success.  My first (reasonably successful) attempt started way back in 2000 over at Open Diary. For about 3 years, as I went though college and into university, I wrote pretty regularly about my life and day-to-day activities in general. I seem to have run out of steam when I started to get involved more heavily with things at university. (Or perhaps I just became a lazy student.) Thankfully I had the foresight to take a backup of my diary when I stopped writing and have kept hold of that backup — passing it from one computer to the next — through the years.

Now I have settled on writing here, a site I have had since about the same time I stopped writing at the Open Diary, I have decided to go back through and add all those entries to this blog. There are a lot of entries over the years I was writing there so it’ll take some time to finish uploading (and proof-reading, and spell checking) them all, but I’m working backwards from 15th November 2003. The old posts start here.

[read more]

Text Obfuscator Version 1.2

I have just released an update to my simple WordPress string replacement plugin Text Obfuscator. This release contains a minor feature upgrade and a small change to the logic flow to make this and future new features easier to implement, it contains no bug fixes. It is tagged as version 1.2.

The full changelog is as follows:

• Added option to match partial words.
• Extracted regular expression building into it’s own function called by all replacement functions.

As always, the plugin is available from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Maritime Greenwich

On Wednesday my parents came to visit. My dad had wanted to surprise my mum for her birthday back in December and bring her on a day trip down to London, catching the early train from Halifax to London Kings Cross and then going back on the last one of the day. Unfortunately the snow we had at that time last year time played havoc with the trains that day, so the trip was postponed. [read more]

A word replacement plugin for WordPress

Text Obfuscator (formally known as Obfuscator) is a simple plugin for replacing words and phrases in your posts’ content with alternative words and phrases. Initially designed for protecting the innocent by removing names from personal blog posts, it can also be used to correct common spelling errors or automatically expand abbreviations. The plugin operates on output preserving the content in the database as entered in the post.

Versions up to and including 1.0 (0.1 and 0.2 released under the title Obfuscator) are very basic string replacement systems. Versions 1.1 and 1.2 are a little more advanced. [read more]

Anaesthesia

So I’m heading back from another Grim North production, ‘Anaesthesia’.  This year’s production was earlier than normal, sparking suspicion that there might be another before the end of the year.  I’ll wait and see.

The production came together really well this year for me, with the biggest bonus being the time we were able to get into the theatre.  It’s the third time we have used the Hebden Bridge Little Theatre and clearly they are starting to trust us more than previous years.  In the past we have had to arrange with them to be there to let us in each time we needed to be in the theatre, and to stay until we had finished so that they could lock up again afterwards.  This proved a real restriction on the time we had to do our get in.

For me this is of course a real problem – it takes time to rig and focus the lights, as well to work out a dimmer patch and do any programming I wanted to do.  In fact, in previous years, I haven’t had time to do much programming at all – I’d just run the show of some hastily put together scenes on submasters and busked through each night.  This year I was able to do much more and the difference was noticeable.

[read more]

ISTA High School Festival, Calderdale, 2010

So that’s it, it’s all over. It’s been hard work, but great fun. I’ve met a great bunch of people, and never seen such a dedicated group of young people working towards a common goal before. If anyone feels the need to do down young people I’d invite them to spend the week at one of the ISTA festivals and then re-evaluate their opinion.

I did discover one thing though – I’m no good at networking. This causes something of a problem in my industry.

[read more]