Wordpress

General

Scoil Bhúan do Ghaelscoil Philib Barún

September 15, 2009 by 0 Comments

Gaelscoil Philib Barún is the name of an Irish-language school in my home  town of Tramore, Ireland. The term Gaelscoil comes from the Irish word “Gaeilge”, meaning Irish and the word “Scoil”, meanin school. Philib Barún is the Irish translation of Philip Barron, after whom the school was name (see below).

Anyway, the school will be launching a new campaign over the coming weeks to highlight the fact that, since its creation in 1985, the school has been without a permanent home (that’s 24 years to you and me). The title of this article means, “A Permanent School for Gaelscoil Philib Barún”, and this is the official tag-line for the new building campaign.

Since my daughter is attending this school, I have volunteered some of my time to help out with the campaign. Thus far, my main contribution has been in the form of redesigning the school website – www.pilibbarun.com – in an effort to provide improved communications to both parents and the wider digital community. This has proved to be a rather interesting journey.

The website was built using WordPress which enables it to have its own blog and RSS feed, allowing readers to comment on the various articles on the site as well as enabling them to subscribe to the website from the likes of Google Reader (or any other feed reader). Also, thanks to a marvelous WordPress plugin called xLanguage, the site is available to view in either English or Irish (Gaeilge to be more precise). I’ve used a number of other WordPress plugins on the site and will be posting a separate article on my experiences with those at a later date.

As mentioned above, the school itself was named after a local man called Philip Barron, who was a pioneer of Irish nationalism from the 1800’s. His life story is documented on the school website and makes for fascinating reading if you have a few spare minutes.

Technology

WordPress (poor) support for indented code segments

September 29, 2008 by 0 Comments

I was trying to reply to a comment on one of my own posts this evening and wanted to include some indented code snippets in the reply. I duly surrounded said snippets with the code tag (which is fairly standard practice in most blogs/forums I contribute to), only to find that the indentation was not displayed when the published reply was viewed in a browser.

I found the answer here in the form of the <pre> tag. This isn’t one of the available tags in the WordPress authoring panel but does the trick very nicely, as you will see from the samples below.

Here is an example of some indented code that uses the code tag:

public void getString()
{
if (null == str)
return "";
else
return str;
}

Here is the same code with the <pre> tag:

public void getString()
{
  if (null == str)
    return "";
  else
    return str;
}
General

Upgrade to WordPress 2.6.2 completed

September 29, 2008 by 0 Comments

I haven’t been posting that much recently but hope to remedy that in the days and weeks ahead. Hopefully, now that I have (finally) completed by Masters Degree, I will have a little more time to post some new articles.

In the mean time, I took the time to update my blogging software to WordPress 2.6.2 this evening, so if you notice anything unusual, be sure to let me know.

Technology

Upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 completed

June 23, 2008 by 0 Comments

I’ve just upgraded this blog to use WordPress 2.5.1 and thankfully it was a pretty painless process. Whilst there should be very few obvious changes to most readers, there are quite a number of changes to the WordPress dashboard, mostly attempts to make it easier for me to manage the blog.

It will probably take a couple of days to get used to the new interface but I’ve already seen a number of things I do like and some others that I don’t. I like the improvements in the general menu system as it’s now a lot easier to find things.

However, they seem to have overdone it on the rearrangments they’ve made to some of the other screens. For instance, when posting a new article, the categories used to be neatly displayed down the right-hand side of the screen but now they are much lower down and I have to scroll down to configure them. Not only that but the categories themselves are now displayed in a fixed size scrollable area so I also have to scroll down within this area to find some of the categories. This is a real pain, especially as I have a decent sized widescreen monitor with plenty of screen realestate.

Technology

How to add a favicon to a WordPress Blog

March 18, 2008 by 0 Comments

I have a number of WordPress Blogs hosted from my domain and until recently hadn’t realised that I could have a different favicon for each one. In case you are unfamiliar with a favicon, it’s the little icon that appears beside the site name/address in your browser when you visit that site. For this site, that is a miniature picture of me!

Anyway, here is how to use a specific icon for any given blog (WordPress only):

  1. Place a copy of the icon file (favicon.ico) in the top level area where your WordPress blog has been installed.
  2. Edit the header.php file for the theme you are using. This is usually located in wp-content/themes/<themename> for WordPress blogs).
  3. Add the following line and save the file.

    4. <link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" />

  4. Refresh the site from your browser and you’re all done!

Source: Amos Wong

General

Bear With Me

February 15, 2008 by 0 Comments

I’m in the process of updating the software that drives this blog (moving to WordPress 2.3.3) and also going through the process of adding proper tags to each post (as well as re-categorising existing articles).

Due to this, you may receive some previously published posts again.

General

Martello Gets a Makeover

February 8, 2008 by 6 Comments

I finally got around to giving my site a new and more modern look and feel. As well as the new Glossy Blue theme, I’ve also added a few useful widgets to the sidebar, including a Tag Cloud which shows the more popular categories (or tags) from the site.

If you have any comments, good or bad, please don’t keep them to yourself.