So I’ve been bought golf lessons for 4 people at a charity auction and I need to find 3 other people from in and around Leeds to join me in taking them. It will just be one lesson, on some weekend in the not too distant future although obviously a date wouldn’t be set without either having the right number of people or ensuring that all of said people could make it.

Back in St. Albans there are a number of people who I would have asked directly, but here in Leeds things are a little different and I’m not so aware of the golfing landscape amongst friends so I figured posting here was easiest.

Essentially all that is required is an interest. Having played before would help significantly, but you certainly don’t have to be any good. Nor do you need your own clubs although you would be welcome to use them. If you know me (no random blog readers please) and are interested then please get in touch. If you need a clincher, remember, its FREE

Its about time I offered my users an update given its a while since I last discussed the plugin.

I have been very busy on other things recently which means progress has been rather slow and bitty. That being said most of the requested and accepted features from my last consultation have now been implemented and have been seen to work on my development machine.

The following features have been added since there was last an update

• Changeable styles. Inline styles are no more and there is now a dedicated area on the new Calendar options page to edit the stylesheet directly.
• Users other than Administrator can edit events if the Administrator changes a setting on the Calendar options page.
• There is now an option to show the event author on the pop up for each event. This is set on the Calendar options page. This also means that for budding developers there is now a user ID by each event in the database allowing interesting things to be done with the plugin data.
• There is a set of drop down boxes to jump straight to a given year and month. This can be shown or hidden based on a setting on the Calendar options page.
• The description can now be any length. There is a text box to show this fact on the manage events screen instead of the small box that was there before.
• The dates can be selected from pop up mini-calendars meaning you don’t have to check somewhere else if you are choosing the right date. This system also prevents you from selecting a finishing date which is before the starting one which caused some problems when done accidentally in the past.
• The 30 character limit for the event title is now visibly enforced so that users are not surprised by their title appearing truncated.
• HTML errors have been fixed by ensuring that all styling is placed in the header of the page and not in the body.
• Seeing as WordPress 2.5 has recently been released, compatibility with this was coded in. This brings the range of WordPress branches the plugin is compatble with to 5; 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.5. It is of course worth noting that the only versions you should be running are the 2.0 legacy branch and the latest 2.5 branch.

Two main features do remain to be implemented. These are

• Event Categories
• Upcoming Events

All this means that a release does draw ever closer. I have been spurred on in particular by the release of 2.5 as I note that the current Calendar version doesn’t support 2.5. I have also been getting increasing support requests concerning things that don’t work on Calendar 1.1. I ask that you all hold off on these requests; you can be sure your issue will be fixed in Calendar 1.2.

Most importantly thanks for your patience and for deciding to use my plugin.

It has come to my attention that a number of people have been posting comments on blog articles of mine asking for support for calendar when the subject of the post wasn’t even anything technical. Please don’t do this, it clutters things up for readers and confuses search engines. I have a contact page with an e-mail address which you can use to ask me for support. Please help me to keep things nice and ordered on the blog.

For those who frequent RouterTech it can’t have escaped your attention that we have recently released our v2.5 firmware. This was an important release for many reasons and marks an impressive milestone as we approach our 2 year birthday.

We now have over 4,000 community members, have had nearly 10,000 downloads of our firmware and have recently welcomed a new member to the RouterTech team. My impending graduation will give me a lot more time to work on the website and other aspects of the group so I hope things will get that little bit better in a few months time, if that is possible!

Easter came early this year, more so in fact than in the 90 odd years easter that preceded it. Still it was the end of term and for that a short break was called for.

At the start of the vacation period I spent a few days in Middlesbrough with Heather where we spent time chilling out, going on day visits to local areas, practicing our cooking skills in the evening and solving a murder mystery puzzle (its amazing how engrossing they can be once you get started!). It was nice to really chill out for once and also properly enjoy days out and relaxed evenings which although we very much enjoy we hadn’t been able to do for quite a while due to work commitments.

Another thing that occupied some of our time while away was Heather’s Victorian dolls house that she is building from scratch. I spent a few hours with her helping to get the painting right, fix some of the hinges and ensure the house all fitted together. This is a really special project as it isn’t just a normal dolls house but one of considerable size. It has 10 rooms with an attic, basement and traditional frontage. It’s going to be fantastic when its finished. I don’t have a picture of it but I found one on the web to give you an idea of the kind of thing I’m talking about.

During the holiday I also got a chance to get my camera out and take a few shots of the places we visited. Most of these involved boats of some description but there were a few others, in particular some spectacular shots of stormy weather at Whitby. We climbed a lighthouse to get a better view and were nearly blown off. It was one of our best days out for a while.

After my break with Heather I spent some time with my family over the Easter weekend. I got to see my sister which, now she is at university, is a rare occurrence. We all went out for a meal together on Easter day which was a very nice affair. During the rest of my stay with my family I spent time fixing things around the house, relaxing, having the odd drink, and meeting up with James to catch up. When I wasn’t doing all that I chilled out on the computer throwing radiators at people.

Sadly all good things must come to an end and I had to return to Leeds to continue work on my project which is pretty much all I have been doing since. Still as I keep reassuring myself it will all be over soon and hopefully the standard will be good enough to clinch the mark I want.

Heather and I were awoken in the early hours of the morning last night by a violent shaking of the house and a loud rumbling sound. It would appear that we, like many others in the region and in fact across the country, were witnesses to the strongest earthquake the UK has had since the quake felt in North Wales back in 1984.

Measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale the quake caused minor damage to a few buildings and caused objects to rattle across surfaces and furniture to move around on the floor. Considering how infrequently we have eatrhquakes here it was quite a bizare experience, and many of the reports in the news speak of surprise and concern.

A fair few articles are now present on the BBC website detailing the event.

On Tuesday morning I awoke early in the morning to find the ground, trees and cars ouside totally covered with rime. Given that this is not a common weather phenomenon and created a beautiful spectacle I decided to take some pictures. Some of them came out quite nicely. I carried my camera with me to campus later in the day and took a few more pictures.

If you are wondering what “Rime” is then I found a Wikipedia page offering a good explanation with some pictures bearing a resemblance to my own!

Over the weekend I stayed with Heather and her family at their house in Middlesbrough. It was a special occasion for two reasons. Mainly because Heather’s sister Claire is soon to travel to Australia for the year and so was having a farewell party, but an added bonus of the weekend was that I got to meet the rest of Heather’s family who I had not yet had the fortune to meet.

All in all it was a very enjoyable weekend and while I now have a huge quantity of work to catch up on I had a great time and look forward to staying with Heather’s family again soon (hopefully during the Easter vacation).

This weekend has meant that I’ve now met all of Heather’s immediate family and she has met all of mine. Considering we’ve been going out for well over a year now, its taken quite a while!

I had a quick hack around today with Calendar for WordPress and I have fixed some of the long standing bugs that while weren’t serious, were causing some people issues. I’ve also tightened up some of areas I considered sightly weaker than they should be on the security front and also introduced a few new features.

One of the most notable changes is in the way the links work on the new version. Personally I much prefer the clean URL structure that currently ships with Calendar, however this requires a modification to the .htaccess file which many users were having issues with. This was due to the vastly differing ways in which people had chosen to setup their blogs and permalink structures already chosen.

The new version will provide standard arguments-in-a-url style operation and nothing else. It will install and work on any blog configuration out of the box (even MU as I’ve had requests for it to work on that too) and without edits to the .htaccess file. Clean URLs however will only be possible with a code edit to the plugin file and the addition of lines in the .htaccess file. Because of the support time that .htaccess issues have consumed in the past, users making such changes on their own will have to choose to do so unsupported.

Below I have listed all the modifications made so far, but this is not an exhaustive list of everything that will make it into the next release.

• Security audit resulting in increased code injection protection of argument strings
• Removed the need to edit the .htaccess file
• Removed clean URLs by default as these were causing issues for novices
• Placed the whole plugin into one file; install is now just a case of dropping this file into your plugins directory and activating it
• Enabled compatibility with WordPress MU
• Fixed the bug in the admin screen that would cause IE users to not see the dates, times etc. in add/edit event the form.
• Allowed the week to start on a Sunday. Users who have their WordPress options set to Sunday as the starting day of the week will see the calendar obeying the setting.

A release will be made in the next few days both here and on the WordPress plugins repository. If anyone has anything in particular they would like to see in the next version then shout in comments.

I got my semester 1 exam results today and I was pleased with the outcome. I continue to do well in Leeds School of Computing and obtained a 1st average in the latest round of exams. Its suddenly become very plain to me how close I am to graduation and how very close I am to obtaining a first overall. It motivates me very much to think that I could be standing in the degree ceremony at the end of the year with a first grade piece of paper with my name on it.

While this is a great result, it was slightly tinged by a particularly poor grade in one of my modules. While this didn’t affect the average too much it did leave me the closest to the 1st grade boundary I have ever been and it woke me up to the idea that one single bad module grade in the next round of exams could tip the balance. While I don’t feel I could have done any better in the module it makes me more resolved than ever to work extra hard so I don’t risk letting slip what is nearly in my grasp.