Ben Shephard

I’ve not really caught much of the Glastonbury highlights on the BBC so far. The BBC’s coverage gets better every year. I used to record all the BBC2 highlights but then along came BBC3 and BBC4 and loads of digital radio channels and now also a choice of bands on the red button. I’m recording what I can with my MythTV box but it’s just impossible to get everything. I think you would probably see more of Glastonbury on the BBC than you could if you were actually there. Still it doesn’t beat the faint smell of pot smoke in the air. The BBQ’s and smell of wax flares. There are the smells and sounds that come from the eating establishments dotted all over the place. The one smell I won’t miss is the smell of the toilets. By this time they start to get a bit whiffy. Sometimes the wind changes direction and you get a sudden lung full of raw sewage smell when your least expecting it. On the plus side the BBC provide those of us sat at our computer with some nice embeddable content so I’ll leave you with one of the bands I’d have been watching had I have been there. The Doves.

Ben

= 5.5

Glastonbury 2009 got under way today. Usually I’d be there swimming in mud with my friends but I decided to keep clean this year. I had a flick through the line up earlier and I didn’t have a clue who most of the bands are. Perhaps this is because of the direction the festival is going in but perhaps it’s also to do with the state of the music industry in general. There haven’t been a lot of acts I’ve gotten really excited about in the last few years but that could also just be because I’m getting old. The record labels will no doubt blame it on lost revenue due to peer to peer file sharing. I still miss being there but I think times have changed. Perhaps I’ll go back one day who knows. It’s not gotten off to the best start this year. They had thunderstorms today and last night Michael Jackson died which will no doubt leave everyone is a somber mood. I’d usually be the first person to say that he was a bit of a freak but that said he was an immensely talented performer and will be greatly missed. I seem to remember my older sister telling me that my first words where “Michael Jackson” I think she had one of his albums on cassette which I quiet liked to listen to. I used to listen to a lot of music as a kid. Good luck to all those at Glasto this year anyway. Hopefully this year we wont have a repeat of the floods of 2005. Lucky for me I couldn’t get tickets that year so I just watched all of the madness on TV. I’ll be able to do that again this year as I believe Madness are on at some point.

Ben

= 4.8

Today things at work didn’t get any better in fact they got worse if anything. I’m currently sat at the end of the runway at east midlands airport. I went to my parents for dinner but I didn’t want to spend the sat in front of the TV with them thinking about things. I decided the best thing I could do was get out and get some fresh air. I spent an hour at the west end of the runway but it started to get a bit soggy and I was in need of a drink so I went for a Dr pepper and a ginsters at the services then came and found a nice spot at the eastern end near the motor way. It’s a nice little secluded corner but there are quiet a few plane spotters knocking about and even a trucker having a kip there is a little park area with some picnic tables and great views in every direction. It’s starting to fall dark now but watching the planes take off into the sunset is rather relaxing. The sky is a dark shade of grey off to the east but that would be the rain cloud that just got me wet. I’ve always wanted to come up here to chill out but never had the guts to do it. I didn’t want to be seen as a plane spotter because I’m not. I like trying to take pics of them because its a challenge but they don’t tend to come out very well when all you have is a camera phone. There is one coming in now and another getting ready to take off. Its nice just watching the world go by really. I’ll tag my pics to this post later.

Rain on the horizon. I got a bit damp a few minutes later

Shot this nice sunset just as it started to rain

A DHL plane landing (I don’t know my planes I just like looking at them)

Landing into the sunset

It’s a shame I’ve not got a fancy camera that takes really nice sharp pictures of stuff like this. It’s harder than you think to get a decent picture with a camera phone when it comes to planes. They might be big but it’s hard to get close enough and they move faster than you think they are doing so sharp shots are hard to get especially in low light at dusk.

Ben

= 3.4

I’ve had a lot on my mind recently. Hopefully tomorrow it will all be over and I’ll be able to relax a bit. When I’ve got things playing on my mind like that I like to do something that takes a lot of thinking. It keeps me sane because I don’t have chance to think about the things I can do nothing about. This afternoon I decided to have a tinker with WordPress and the rest of my site.

First off I got rid of my index page by making http://bshephard.com redirect straight to my WordPress home page. I still wanted to have a link to my webmail on my blog page so I had a look through the PHP file to see if I could figure out how to do it. In my theme folder there is a file called header.php and a flick through this revealed the code behind the links in the top right. I removed some I didn’t want and replaced one with my webmail link. I edited a few bits in my footer.php file. I didn’t like the title of the links list. It said something along the line of “Visit my friends” which was a bit too specific for me as I don’t only link to my friends blogs so I changed to to just “Links” . After I’d made my changes I wanted to check that the code was still valid so I ran it through the W3C validation service. No errors were found in my code but there were some from other things I hadn’t noticed before. I’ve embedded a good few YouTube videos in the last few months. The code is just copied and pasted in from YouTube and I’ve never really questioned weather or not it was correct. I checked some of the first videos I posted and had no issues. It seems the more recent videos I’ve posted have different code. A quick Google found the answers. XHTML 1.0 doesn’t support the <embed> tags used by YouTube so I copied the code from a video I know validates and used it to rewrite the code to my more recent videos and this seemed to do the trick. I’ve also found a few bugs in my theme and with WordPress 2.8 or my plugins. My comment boxes don’t validate properly. I had a quick look into this but the fix looks pretty complicated. The error doesn’t appear to be serious so I’ve left that one for now. It might get fixed with the next point release of WordPress due out soon. The issues with my plugins are even more complex. They cause issues with my admin dashboard. It’s not really a big problem because the things it causes problems with are things I don’t use often. Half of the general settings page goes missing (including the save button) and the widgets on the dashboard screen don’t move anymore. I had a look into this and there seem to be a few people experiencing this kind of issue with lots of different plugins. It could be an issue with WordPress or it could be the the plugins need to be updated to be compatible with WordPress 2.8. I did think of trying a few alternative plugins but the ones that seem to be causing the problem are pretty important. I use the NextGen Gallery plugin for my pictures and gallery. It’s a very powerful plugin and I really like the end results even if it does make hard work of uploading pictures. I had quiet a few issues with it recently most of which I fixed last night. The flash slide shows didn’t work so I got them going again. I also had an issue where when I click on an album in the gallery the image list was being displayed twice. I managed to find some code to change to sort this out. This will be fixed in the next release from the looks of it. The other problem plugin is Geotag (for integrating Google maps into my posts) This hasn’t given me any specific errors as far as I can tell but it’s not something I use often. It was causing issues with my dashboard and general settings page but then NextGen gallery had exactly the same effect. If I disable both of them my dashboard works properly but with either of them enabled I can’t move my widgets around or expand my menus nor can I make any changes on the general settings page. The fact that this occurs with multiple plugins (and more than those two from the forum posts I’ve read) leads me to think that this is actually a WordPress issue. It could well be that WordPress have made a change to fix other issues that have lead to this and it’s the plugins that need to be updated. I don’t really know where to report the bugs to because I don’t know what’s at fault so I’ll wait for the next update and hope it fixes it.

It’s been good fun learning how things work and it’s certainly helped take my mind off things. Hopefully tomorrow I can get on with some other stuff

Ben

= 5.2

The events of the last week have really started to take their toll. Today I got home from work with loads of house work to do but I just didn’t have the energy. I watched the news for a bit but none of it sank in so I decided to get some sleep.

I was chatting to a friend who also has a blog today and we got on the the subject of registered users. You don’t have to register to comment on his wordpress.com blog but I’ve always been a bit wary of spam but he tells me the Askimet anti spam plugin works pretty well so I might give it a crack at the weekend and see if I can get that set up on mine. I’ve only ever had ten comments so easing up the restrictions a bit might help me get a few more. I’ve been looking at my stats today and they have been pretty good for the last couple of weeks but are starting to tail off a bit now. I’ve had a look at my referrals from google. It used to be that if you typed my name in to google I’d be in there somewhere but about 30 pages down the line and now a search for “ben shephard” brings up my blog as the fifth result on the first page. I think that’s pretty good given the fact that I have a celebrity namesake and I don’t get a great deal of traffic anyway. I’ll look at all that when I have a bit more time and energy but all I want to do now is roll over and go back to sleep.

Ben

= 4.9