artiss.blog

Blog

  • WordPress goes widescreen

    Well, my blog has. Yes, I’ve added an extra column to it.

    I thought the information down the left hand side was getting a little long. The further down the screen it goes, the less chance of it being read. So I’ve split it into 2 and divided it onto both sides of the page. The left hand side is for information about me. The right hand side is for information about the blog.

    And it’s still XHTML compliant.

    But in doing so I found a problem with my Simple Wakoopa List plugin – when displaying “newly used” software the links don’t work properly. After having a bit of a fumble about, it would appear the problem is the feed from Wakoopa rather than my plugin – it doesn’t appear the supply them in certain circumstances. A quick fix would be to not display a link if one is not forthcoming from the XML feed. However, just after I wrote the plugin, Wakoopa launched a new API – my plan, therefore, is to move to this. The one downside, though, is that I can’t find an equivalent of “newly used” with the new system. So I’ve contacted Wakoopa. As soon as I get a response I’ll code a fix.

  • That was weird

    Apologies if you the previous post appeared to appear and disappear like a broken Tardis, but I suddenly have problems with WordPress.

    In particular, after finely crafting that last piece, I kept getting the error “Fatal error: Call to undefined function mb_substr()” when trying to edit the post. No others, just that one.

    As much as I’d loved to have spent all night trying to find the exact byte that was the cause, I didn’t. But, weirdly, I think it was to do with the original title – “Updating the BIOS on an Acer Aspire One”. A little bit of title changing and it appeared to be accepted. Of course, I could be way off the mark.

    But it took a lot of editing and chopping about to get it all to work.

    I have come across one item on Google Search that appears related to Search Unleashed. Coincidence?

    Update: I should have followed that link a little further – it’s a known bug in Search Unleashed.

  • Ikea Home Delivery

    With a lot of room changes to make (you know, moving the computer to the dining room, starting a nursery, etc) we visited our local Ikea last night. In total we spent… erm, quite a bit, and it’s seriously drained our savings.

    We’d visited a few weeks ago and planned what we would buy to make last nights trip as quick and easy as possible.

    It was always our intention to arrange a home delivery as many of the items were bulky and over-sized for my small car. However, after looking in their catalogue and on their website we weren’t much the wiser as to how you were supposed to arrange it. About the only thing we found out was that you pay for the items at the usual checkout and then take it to a special home delivery area. Ok. But do we pay for delivery at the checkout? We weren’t sure. I asked his particular question at the checkout and I was told we paid for it separately, when arranging the delivery. I was obviously not sure and by this time I had 3 unwieldy trolleys.

    Eventually we get to the home delivery area. They ask for our postcode. Then they tell us it will be delivered next day. Oh, ok, that’s not possible as no-one will be at home. Can we have it next week (I’m off work)? It’s at THIS point that we’re told that it costs £10 a night to store it. Excuse me? Yep, with no choice but to pay it, I stump up – delivery is on Saturday. We’d paid for the items so we could either pay up, take them home then (which wasn’t an option) or get them all refunded and come and do the whole thing again another day. I felt like I’d been mugged.

    Anyway, I contacted Ikea. I was very friendly and explained what happened and suggested that they should have better explanations of how the process works. Today I received a prompt reply.

    Hej Mr Artiss,

    Thank you for your e-mail enquiry.

    First let me offer my sincere apologies for your recent experience. It would appear that you have not received the level of service that both yourself and IKEA would expect.

    I can assure you that IKEA takes customer service very seriously and will continue to employ all possible methods to ensure that the highest standards are achieved and exceeded in the future.

    I would like to thank you for taking the time to write to IKEA and give us your comments. Objective feedback can only help us improve our customer service and your shopping experience.

    I sincerely hope that any future contact with IKEA better reflects our commitment to Customer Service.

    Assuring you of our best attention at all times.

    Sue on behalf of the IKEA Customer Services Team.

    How automated a response does that sound? I’m not impressed.

  • Acer Aspire One

    Acer Aspire One
    Acer Aspire One

    Well, I did it. I’ve made my mind up and purchased a Netbook. And as you can tell from the title, I plumped for an Acer Aspire One – Windows XP, 120GB hard drive, 1GB memory. It’s excellent and the battery and keyboard are better than I expected (in fact, I’m typing this blog entry on the Acer).

    Only downsides found so far – no disks are provided, so there’s no way of restoring Windows  in the case of a drive failure, and there’s an annoying occasional flicker when using it off batteries (it’s a known problem caused by the power drain). But these are minor issues.

    I bought it from Tesco – via Quidco and with my Clubcard to get maximum returns. And, like the picture, I bought the white one. I’ve also ordered a cheap mouse from Play.com and a nice leather case from Proporta.

  • Improving WordPress Search

    Improving WordPress Search

    WordPress search sucks. It’s well known.

    A friend has been looking for what he thinks is the solution and, let’s be honest, he’s got it pretty much right.

    He believes any half-decent search should…

    1. return posts by most relevant first
    2. do proper searches based on the phrase you submit
    3. indicate which words matched the post
    4. show how many posts matched
    5. list the posts by just title, or summary or full and allow you to switch
    6. show which page you’re on, if there are more than one page of results

    I’m not sure about point 5 – your average search engine, for instance, will give a summary and title and allow you to click it for the full details. I think a search should work like that.

    Unfortunately my friend hasn’t found a solution..

    I’ve looked at various plugins, but not really had any luck finding one which fixes all the problems.

    So, not knowing whether I would be able to solve this dilemma with existing plugins or if I’d end up writing my own, I set about finding an answer.

    And I did.

    Here’s what you need to do.

    Improving the Search Results

    Install Search Unleashed. This will add an improved search ability, will show post summaries, highlight searched text and display results in order of relevance.

    I also found I had to manually update my themes search.php file to change the rest of the summarised output – removing the calendar image, etc. You don’t have to do this, but it provided a nice compact result.

    Show the Number of Results

    Install Results Count. You will then need to add some code not only to your search.php theme file but (if you want) to archive.php. This will now display the number of results and which ones you are current viewing. For example, Showing results  1 - 16 of 32 for the search term:  wordpress.

    Install WP Page Numbers. Again, you will need to follow the instructions for inserting the appropriate code into search.php. The configuration options will also allow you to change the style of the output. What this plugin does, in a nutshell, is display the current page of results plus lists the other pages available, and let’s you move between them. For example…

    Line Numbers Example

    Increasing the number of Search Results Per Page

    The one problem with summarising your search results is that the blogs are a lot smaller on the page. WordPress only gives you one place to specify the number of posts per page and this applies to all forms of output – this means that the summarised results will take up a lot less of the page and, if there’s a lot of results, you may be aching to increase this number.

    In the case of my blog, I have the number of posts set to 5. I found that the number of summarised search results would look best at 16.

    Unfortunately, this is a bit of a manual fix. First of all, dig out your themes search.php file again. Hopefully you should be able to find the following line of code within it…

    <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

    When you have, insert the following just before it…

    <?php
$wp_query->query_vars["posts_per_page"] = 16;
$wp_query->get_posts();
?>

    This will override the number of posts just for the search results. This solution doesn’t work for the Results Count plugin though, so you will need to change this too. As it’s a change to the plugin code, be aware that you may need to make this change again if you ever update the plugin.

    In results-count.php, find the line…

    $numposts = $wp_query->found_posts;

    Now, insert after it…

    $posts_per_page=16;

    The Result

    I think that covers pretty much all of what Tony was after. Except point 5.

    If you’d like to try the results out then, well, do a search on this site. Feedback is always appreciated!