Philip Norton

I’ve been neglecting this site recently. The last thing I did to it was to enable automatic Twitter updates, which is a bit pointless, especially if you follow me on Twitter. I don’t really know what I want to do with this site, but I might just make it a gateway to my social media profiles.

So I have deleted the Twitter posts and some of the older posts that I don’t like too much.

What I might do is to rarely update this blog and create a front page that links through to my social media profiles and other sites. I may even change the site over to Drupal, which I have been doing a lot of work with recently and quite like how it’s put together.

I thought it was about time for a little change, so I have spent the last few weeks plugging away at a new design for the blog. I really just wanted to move away from the very dark theme and create a white background, with three columns and a blue header. I’m not a designer, but I’m quite happy with the way things have turned out. I have also added in Gravatars for comments to make it a little more social friendly.

Update On Version 2.0

I currently have a working copy of Version 2.0 of this plugin, which is one of the reasons as to why there have been so few updates of this plugin recently. The new version has virtually every feature that people have asked for, including multiple accounts, multiple versions of the same link and a new easy update feature.

Lots of people have asked for larger images or the ability to change the given images. As all of the images for this plugin are directly taken from favicon images I don’t have larger images to supply. There are a few icon sets available on the internet, but these are usually only a subset of the sites I have included in this plugin.

I hope to roll out the new version of the plugin within the next couple of weeks. The initial release of 2.0 will contain the default icon set, but if someone would like to create some icons I will gladly include them in later versions.

The Social Media Page Wordpress plugin will add a list of links to your social media profiles on a page or post of your choice. This plugin also creates a widget that will display your social media profiles in the side bar of your site.

Rather than getting you to enter all of your social media profiles as URLs the plugin gets you to enter your username, and works out the rest. Some exceptions (like Facebook) require some extra information, which has been accounted for. There are over 100 different social media sites to select from so it should cover anything you happen to be a member of.

When the links are displayed on the page it will use a keyword of your choice as the text for the link.

With this plugin you can create a central base for any social media strategy.

Download

Download the Social Media Page Plugin at Wordpress.org.

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Visit Think Atheist

I just found this rather nice social networking site called Think Atheist. Definitely worth a look if you are in any way interested.

Or even if you are not!

Every year (sometimes twice a year) my parents go to a small camp site just outside Rhyader, usually for a bank holiday weekend. This time we went with them. Some friends of the family who were already there and the plan was to meet up with them.

Phoneing up the camp site before hand we heard that it was very water-logged and that they had even shut down some of the site due to it being so wet. The weather forcast said that it would rain on the Thursday, but that it should be better on the Friday, and Saturday should be much better.

When we got there it was wet, and due to the activity of people walking about it was also very muddy. We booked until Sunday just in case the rain didn’t stop. Not being perturbed we set up our tents and hoped that there would be no more rain for a couple of days. It was muddy enough that some people went into town and bought wellington boots just so that they didn’t have to stand ankle deep in mud. I stayed in my trusty walking boots, which now need a good wash!

No such luck on hoping it wasn’t going to rain! It was sunny for just long enough on Friday night and Saturday to lull us into a false sense of security. By dinner time on Saturday it was raining quite steadily and any drying out that had been done was basically wasted. The ground just got wetter and wetter until everything we did or owned was just caked in mud.

Anyway, I had the plan that we would go Hay-on-Wye at some point during the weekend, so we went there on Saturday. We eventually decided that Mandy and I should go and Matthew would stay behind and go to the Rhyader “fun day”. Apparently the fun day wasn’t all that fun, and consisted of a few giant games (like a large connect four) and was very “small town” if you know what I mean.

For those of you who don’t know Hay-on-Wye is a town that has more book shops (mainly second hand) per mile than just about anywhere else on the face of the Earth. Just walking around it for a while you are hit by the amount of books that are present in the town. There are millions! Mandy and I went there with a certain number of authors in mind, but unfortunately found nothing. I was a little disapointed, but I realised that there are a few reasons why I didn’t find what I was looking for.

1. There are a lot of books. So therefore asking if anything is there just gets you blank looks. Most shop owners don’t know what they have in their stock, just due to the numbers of books there, but also due to the fact that lots of books also come in.
2. Looking through each bookstore takes a while and different stores have different ways of stocking and categorising books. I didn’t have all week to look through every store, but you could easily do that.
3. I assume that, although there are books coming in to the shops, there are a lot of people walking around and buying them. So the good and popular books go quite quickly and so finding them can be a little tricky.

I am back home now, and drying off. Everything in and around the tent is wet and muddy and I will probably spend tomorrow cleaning everything 50 times over as it is all caked with mud. Joy…

It would be nice to go camping and it not rain and spoil things. I’m thinking that we should just book ourselves into a hotel next time.