Ben Shephard

I’ve not really done much at all this weekend because I’ve been feeling pretty rough still but I’m a lot better than I was Friday. I think the main reason is because I went out and bought a load of hay fever medicine. As soon as I started talking it I felt 80% better. Usually when I’m suffering with hay fever it’s my eyes and nose it affects most. I’ve not really been all that itchy this year so I decided to try and go without the usual bag full of medicines I end up taking.  Now I’ve got two boxes of tablets and a bottle of Beconase I should be OK for a while. A few years ago my hay fever caused me to become asthmatic I’ve never had problems like that before so I didn’t really understand why it happened then. Thankfully that went away as quickly as it started s and didn’t do any permanent damage. I think at that time I was on seven different kinds of medication. Hopefully I’ll pick myself up over the week and be fit enough to finish my decorating next weekend. I managed to wash the car today but that’s about it really.

Ben

= 6.2

I’ve been playing around with a few new WordPress plug ins tonight. I said yesterday that I’d like better integration with the other web 2.0 services I use so I decided to have a look what tools are available to do that. I found a nice Twitter toolbox plug in which should publish my posts to Twitter which should then also push them to Facebook as well. This is a very powerful tool it can even pull my tweets from Twitter and publish them as a blog post but I’m not too fussed about this so I’ve turned it off. I’ve also been playing with Google maps and KML files over the last few days so I decided to have a look see how I can integrate Google maps into my blog posts. I had to get a Google maps API key but this was pretty easy and I found a plug in called Geotag which lets me display Google maps on my page and even allows me to overlay KML files with tracks and way points etc in them. Again it’s a very powerful plug in but I’ve not had much time to experiment. I’ve added a map below centered on the Pub we went to for dinner after work tonight and I overlaid way points from some open WiFI hot spots I found with my G1 and my new WiFi Tracker app. I noticed when I click on the way points the text in the speech bubble is the wrong color for the background so I will need to tinker with this a bit but it’s getting a bit late and I need some sleep so I’ll look at it over the weekend.

[gmap file="http://bshephard.com/kml/open.kml" zoom="15" lat="53.07930382242058" lon=-1.2433862686157227"]

Hopefully all being well this should also cross post to Twitter and Facebook but there is only one way to find out …. FIGHT!

Ben

= 6.6

I’ve been a Facebook user for a while now and I’ve tried Twitter before but couldn’t get into it. I’ve decided it’s time I looked at it again and I’m liking what I see so far. I’ve found a nice open source  Twitter client for my G1 which makes updating much nicer than having to use a web browser. I can also follow others tweets on that too. Next I want to be able to integrate twitter and perhaps even Facebook into my blog in some way or an other. I’d definitely like WordPress to be able to cross post to Facebook and post a link to my latest posts in my status updates. There is no doubt about it Facebook is where everyone hangs out these days Even if I don’t like Facebook it can’t be ignored. I’d like to use it as a way to get across what I’m doing on WordPress and Twitter. I’d like to link to my Facebook profile from WordPress but I don’t want to use the Facebook buttons as they don’t go with my WordPress theme. Perhaps I can hack something together that looks half decent.

The reason I want to do this is I was having a conversation with someone at work about WordPress and they called it “WYSIWYG pre made shit and said why don’t I build my own blog from scratch using PHP and MySQL. The real reason I don’t do that it because I don’t care too much for programming myself. I tinker here and there but I can think of better things to be doing than sitting in front of a text editor writing code. I’d sooner start out with  a framework I like and build off that which is what I do with WordPress. I make small changes to the code here and there but nothing major. I said this morning that one of my little niggles with WordPress is that when you log in it says “Howdy, Ben” in the top right hand corner of the admin pages. I heard somewhere this is a reference to the lead developer of WordPress who happens to be a Texan. I’m not a Texan and I’m a bit particular about how I greet people. I never use Hi for example. I find it lazy and too informal. I prefer  to use Hello. So anyway when I was talking to the guy at work he said well if WordPress is open why don’t I change it. As it happened I’d just ssh’d into my server to test something for work so I found the right PHP file and found the howdy and changed it to hello. It took seconds to do but I could just never be bothered digging around to make the change until I was pushed. Now I want to do some more with WordPress so I can find good reasons for using WordPress rather than writing someting from scratch.

Let the battle of the blogs commence bshephard.com Vs gingastream.co.uk

This reminds me of Moby’s DJ battle from Glasto 03 I couldn’t find any Youtube footage of it but I found this from just after. He went straight from the battle into this.

Ben

= 6.8

I went to work today and managed to survive. I took some lemons and honey but it wasn’t until I was half way to work I realised I’d need a knife and my lemon squeezer if i was going to make a drink. DOH! never mind I’ve found black tea with honey in it is almost as good so I made do with that.

I’ve been playing around with some software on my G1 that scans for WiFI access points and logs them along with GPS coordinates etc in a KML file. It works reasonably well but I ran into a few bugs which I’ve been talking to the developer about. It’s called Wifi Tracker and It’s written by a guy called Ian Hawkins. I emailed him the other day with the problems I’d had and he promised to look at it for me. This morning my phone took an update for Wifi Tracker so hopefully He managed to fix it. I’ve got to do some more testing first but I’ve been looking at what I can do with the file it generates. The most common way it seems to open a KML file is in Google Earth. This is a bit of over kill for my needs as all I really want is a map. I found a way to open KML files with Google Maps. This is pretty nice because I don’t have to install anything and it works on any machine I can access Google Maps from. You have to upload the KML file to a web server and then enter the URL of the file into the search box in Google Maps and Google Maps will then load all the way points from that KML file. For example if you go to http://maps.google.co.uk and paste http://bshephard.com/kml/master.kml into the search box you should see all of the access points I found on my travels. This file has both protected and open AP’s because I was more interested in testing the app than finding an open AP to use but it’s nice to know where there is a BT Openzone etc incase I ever needed to use it. This could come in very handy when traveling as it would mean I could find Internet access without having to look for notices etc. I know most McDonalds do it and Starbucks tend to have wifi too but sometimes you can find then where you least expect. There turns out to be a BT access point just down the road from me. All in all it’s a great app. I’ll try and map as much open wifi in Kirkby in Ashfield as I can soon that way I’ll get plenty of exercise walking around doing it and have something useful to show for it. While I do this I want to take my Etrex with me so I can add my tracks to open street map at the same time.

Ben

= 6.1

I phoned in sick today because I could hardly speak this morning and my whole body ached so much it hurt just to stand up. I didn’t manage to drag myself out of bed until 2pm. Once I was up I decided it was time to go buy some lemons to make hot honey and lemon drinks. I picked up some cough syrup stuff that was cheap. It tastes like crap but for 85p if it helps I can’t complain, the name brand stuff was all well over £4 a bottle. I bought 9 Lemons and 6 Limes so that should keep me going for a couple of days. I feel a bit better now than I did this morning so hopefully back to work tomorrow…… And now my UPS has faulted out what a way to round off a crap day.

Ben

= 5.2