Just thought I’d share with you the results of Leeds University’s centenery photographic competition. In the interests of fair play it looks like they barred arts and photographics students from entering, narrowing the field to those more familiar with academic subjects, like myself.
It’s a shame nothing like this ever ran at Loughborough uni, if it had perhaps I wouldn’t be seen resorting to desperate fund raising tactics.
I seem to have spent today chasing details. Insignificant little things that for some reason have consumed more time than I’d prefer. Todays major end result, the one I can show to you easily, is the “favicon”. Lo, the munky is in the address bar and in your bookmarks. If you still haven’t taken my advice then you may have to delete your old bookmark and make a new one for it to show up. People using decent browsers won’t have a problem.
I think he’s kinda cute.
If any of you out there want to do this to your site, it’s really quite simple. First up, make yourself a 16×16 pixel image in the editor of your choice and save it as a BMP or a GIF. Then go to Chami.com where they’ll kindly turn your BMP or GIF, online, into the required .ICO format for you, for free. Cool eh?
Then you simply upload the favicon.ico file to the same place as your main HTML file and add the following code in the <HEAD> section of your HTML:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" />
Simple!
I thought I’d share my buttons with the world. There will come a time when these will warrant a separate page, but for now, a humdrum post shall do.
Firstly the two which I’d actually prefer everyone to use, though I don’t mind if you use the others.
http://www.denyerec.co.uk/buttons/munkybutton.gif
http://www.denyerec.co.uk/buttons/munkysmall.gif
Yes, he does wink. It’s not just your eyes/tireness/refresh rate/juju men.
Also, the old buttons, included for completeness.
http://www.denyerec.co.uk/buttons/buttbutton.gif
Shameless, I know. Next up, the original orange one.
http://www.denyerec.co.uk/buttons/munkybutton2.gif
Hotlink from my site, or copy them to your own space, it’s up to you, personally I’d just like them to get a little airtime!
Edit:
If you want to add these buttons to your site and you’re not sure how, here’s what to do. Add the following code to your site:
<a href="http://www.denyerec.co.uk"><img src="LINKHERE" /></a>
Then copy the link for the image you want to use and replace the text LINKHERE with the link you just copied. Job done!
The BBC once again provide the source of this morning’s rage with THIS article and no, the BBC isn’t the party at fault here (Just in case you were wondering…)
The story relates to a Dr Terence Hope, at Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham, UK. He earns in the region of £80k per annum working as a neuro surgeon, a very complex, demanding and difficult job. The work they do is often life saving, my own mum was brought back from the brink after a double brain aneurism a few years ago by a specialist brain surgeon, so my respect goes out to these people. Great dollops of respect.
So it is, with horror, I see that Dr Hope has been suspended from work for almost a week now, for helping himself to an extra portion of croutons that he failed to pay for.
Ok, a weeks worth of this gents time is roughly worth £1,500 assuming that he works 52 weeks a year. The croutons, even if they were bought from Harrods or hand crafted by Henri Charpentier himself , would not be worth more than a couple of quid.
This means, as Dr Hope is out on full pay, that over a matter of some 20p croutons the hospital is so far down around £1499.80
Way to go guys!
Not to mention the fact that whilst he’s suspended, brain-trauma waiting lists start to mount up and emergency cases are going to come through that will have to wait even though they can’t. Bearing in mind my beloved mum (Left. No, neither of those in the photo are me, I was holding the camera.) may have been forced into an early departure if her emergency surgeon had been on suspension for nicking a packet of crisps, things like this rile me up.
They should dock his pay for the 20p and suspend the little Hitler in the canteen, for putting peoples’ lives at risk. Bureaucracy. GAH!
I’ve been meddling today with a “websize” button, the kind you commonly see linking blogs and sites all over the place. Why? Well, for a little bit of cross-linking promotion of course. If you host a site and would like to link me with my button (Which I’ll always appreciate), you can simply right click below and link from my server if you wish, or copy it off to your own space and link it there.
It’s been passed on to sigring, which was brought to my attention by a chap called Phunky in the Quakenet #webdev channel. Hopefully get some feedback from them soon…
Today I ‘installed’ a stats utility for my website called BBClone and it’s really rather good! I say ‘installed’ because truly, it was the most painless thing I’ve ever done to this website. Couple of clicks, a couple of pre-defined lines of code to add to the pages I wanted tracking and bingo, full stats. I’m not sure if I want to publicise the URL for the stats page or not but I have to say I’ve been surprised by the results. So far I’ve had unique hits from places as far afield as Japan and Hungary, way to go me! 
Sadly Internet Explorer is capping out the most used browser stats, which is a crying, crying shame. Please, people, do something good today. I may consider killing a kitten for every hit via Internet Explorer, but I don’t think I could find that many cats at short notice.
Shadow, a friend of mine from quakenet channel #Webdev, was asking about the themes (As well as pointing out something on the comments page, which I’ve updated so thanks for that.) and why is my site now sporting a fixed theme with some bright orange bits (That incidentally he doesn’t like, but loads of people seem to prefer… C’est la vie.).
Well, the answer is that WordPress 1.0.1 did something queer with their configuration script which means my old method for setting the theme in a cookie no longer worked. People have told me to fix it using ob_start() buffers but so far this has only served to utterly confuse matters. This is further complicated by the abomination which is my CSS file. CSS is great, but thanks to the “learning experience” approach of my website, it’s out of control. Way, way out.
Why don’t I fix it? I need to. I also need to re-write my gallery admin code because people are asking me about whether they can use it too which, right now, they can’t because it was, again, a learn-as-you-go site. Thing is, no-one is going to pay me to fix it up and the infernal beast known only as “The Landlord” demands that I spend my time on more profitable endeavours. I think I’ll set aside an hour a day to devote to redevelopment and get things done, else it’s going to be this way forever. Nuts.
I wonder sometimes whether people overlook the gallery. I hope they don’t because that’s really the only reason I’m here! In an effort to help people keep up with the latest photos, photo’s younger than 10 days will appear with a natty little 
thing by them in the “Latest Photo’s” list just to the right there…
Before now, uploading more than one photo meant that the first up would disappear without acknowledgement into the “5 most recent” list, and not get the attention it should. I hope this helps fix the problem. I may even make it cookie based, so all new photos will shout at you the first time, and not afterward, but that would take a lot of effort and my time is better spent elsewhere. I may consider putting different colours up for photos of my GF, but they mysteriously attract more attention than anything anyway…
