Monica and I have recently been looking to buy a house. We got a mortgage agreement in principal, set our budget and set about looking for houses.
Living in the south east of England house prices are notoriously high, so I thought I’d take a look at some areas I have a connection to and see what the same budget — £300,000 — would buy there. For reference, let’s see the kind of property £300k will buy in Surrey and Hampshire.
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]
Development of this plugin began this evening with some exploratory posts to the Twitter API. I’m going to work on putting together a roadmap for the project over the next couple of days, pulling together all the suggestions posted previously, and prioritizing the tasks. It’s likely I’ll concentrate on posting to Twitter in the first instance before moving on to pulling into WordPress from Twitter feeds after that. In the mean time do feel free to add your thoughts on what you’d like to see in what I hope will be one of the most complete WordPress Twitter plugins available.
As you would expect with a project of this kind, you can follow the progress of the plugin via my Twitter feed: @CzDuck.
There are a whole load of different Twitter plugins out there, each doing their own thing. Some are designed to fetch data from Twitter, some designed to post data to Twitter. Many blog owners have to use combination of 4 or 5 of these plugins to be able to do eveything they want to do.
After talking with a colleague over the Christmas break we decided it would be great to have one complete, ultimate Twitter plugin for WordPress which offers a whole range of functionality in a much more flexible way when compared to some of the existing solutions.
We have our own ideas and bugbears which we will be addressing, but I’d also like some input into the features and functionality the community would like to see. So, please, add your ideas in the comments below and we can start to build up a feature list to start working on.
I said I would update again soon, and I have got bored with what I was doing, so I thought I would do this now.
I have finished all my exams for this week, the last one was Physics practical this morning from 9 until 11. I have tomorrow off exams, but there is a Physics revision session that I think I will go to – other wise I will have nothing to do all day, and wont know what to do with myself, like I have done today.
Actually, it seems a lot later than it is now – I had this exam this morning, so that meant getting up at the normal time for college (actually, a bit early), and going into college for about quarter to 9. That was over by 11.10, so I came back home again (I thought about going into Halifax, but I didn’t have much money on me, and I only wanted an ice cream, and I don’t think there would have been an ice cream van about on a Thursday. So I came straight home, and was back for 11.40. Since then I have been trying to find things to do. So far I have cut the grass in the field, messed about on my computer for a bit, and looked on the internet to find out how much it would cost to convert a double decker bus to a holiday home thing (you see, I want to buy one and get it converted, I thought about this the other day on the way home, just thought it would be fun, lol. I will never be able to afford it I don’t imagine, but I can have it planned out and then if I do get enough money… 😉
Actually, I am, for only the second time in my life, going to get a lottery ticket this weekend. I thought I might as well as it is only one pound for 4 draws this week (they renamed it ‘Lotto’, so are having a big prize giveaway thing making you entered into 4 draws for one ticket). So, you never know, I might be able to afford it after Saturday night. Then again…
I went off to Ben and Tim’s AS drama exam on Monday night and filmed it, I was really impressed with the result (the camera work was exceptional), and being able to see people from my old school again was nice. The play was good too, but if it was better than the last year production of the same thing (which I lit), I don’t know, but it was very good, and I think Tim was by far the best person in it (heh, its good not telling people about this diary, because then I can say things like that and not upset them), and Ben was good, but he cant seem to do ‘normal’ acting – weird things, yeah, he is great, but not for normal things, he just doesn’t seem to be able to do normal…I suppose he has an excuse – he isn’t normal 😛
The weather has been really nice today, its supposed to be the start of a mini-heatwave, but it just now seems to have turned a bit, and the sun has gone in, and the wind picked up, but we will see, it might still be a nice weekend, and might be the start of that heatwave, we will see.
Natalie and I are getting on fine. That’s about all there is to say about that. We haven’t got to see each other as much as we would like in the last week or so because of the exams. Still, just have to think – give it a few weeks and we will be able to be with each other loads more, and I can’t wait, but I have to get though my exams first. Her brother is bringing his girlfriend back to their house today, but its not fair – I wont get to meet her (I wanted to meet her, lol), and her mum isn’t much looking forward to that (she is worried about what she will be like, but as I said – I don’t think she has to worry too much, they are only 12, so if she doesn’t like him, then there is plenty of time for him to change his mind. Hmm, should I be saying things like that to my girlfriend’s mum? Seems a little odd to say that I am going out with her daughter…but she likes me a lot, or so I am told, and I suppose I can see it). I bought some love hearts as well on Wednesday – I was going into the shop at the bus stop to get some chocolate and they were just in front of me, and only 26p for a big pack, so I bought them. I was looking for nice ones to give to Nat (childish, yeah, I know, lol), but the best I could find were ‘my all’ and ‘forever’. I gave those to her when I came out of the shop. Actually, when I asked her, she said she hadn’t eaten them yet because it spoils the idea, but, well, I don’t know, I just thought I would give them to her just for fun, and she can eat them if she fancies 🙂
When I was on the phone to Natalie last night she told me about this guy who came into her work (blah, evil word…no, mustn’t think that, I do need a job), he had a yellow cardigan round his neck, and was bout 50. He asked her where the tins of fruit were. To cut a long story short, he asked if they had any smaller tins because he was a bachelor, and so wouldn’t eat a whole big tin, and she suggested that he could buy a big one, and cover it with clingfilm and put it in the fridge to use later, he said that was a good idea and went off to the checkout. She said it made her think (actually, she said that the thought had been wandering about in her head for a while, but this made her think about it more) – she said that she had decided that she can’t let me end up like that. This comes from a girl who for as long as I have known her has said that the ‘only thing I [she] would take up the isle would be a cleaning trolley’ (get us together and you get a string of either sick and twisted innuendo, or really bad jokes, its great). She is the last person I would think would say something like that…not that I think it’s a bad thing, but that is a bit odd…that and the other day when I, jokingly, said that I might get her an engagement ring for her birthday, she said that although it would probably be a silly thing to do, she would agree. Should I be worried? Well, no, I’m not. Even though she has said all that, I don’t think that if it came to it she would agree, and I don’t have any plans of propositioning her just yet. I can’t think of anyone in the world that I would rather, and I don’t think I ever will, but not just yet, thank you.