Posts categorised: Computing

0Wordpress LogoFixing Rich Snippets Testing Tool for Microdata

Published on by in Wordpress. Updated 15th March 2013.

Over 2 years ago I pub­lished an art­icle on how to fix prob­lems with Word­Press themes which didn’t pass the Google Rich Snip­pets Test­ing Tool. Since then lots has changed — Word­Press and most themes have bet­ter sup­port, HTML5 and CSS3 have arrived, and Google, Yahoo and Bing got together and decided to focus on… Read more »

2Wordpress LogoAdsense ads above the last paragraph of a post

Published on by in Wordpress. Updated 7th March 2013.

You may have noticed that we’ve tweaked how we dis­play our adsense ads.  We wanted some small text-only ads near the bot­tom of each art­icle, which would be added auto­mat­ic­ally.  This took a little bit of tinker­ing, but even­tu­ally we developed a solu­tion which works well and doesn’t seem to knock page pro­cessing times much. … Read more »

0Comment bubbleEasily set the parent of a WordPress comment

Published on by in Wordpress. Updated 7th March 2013.

As is doc­u­mented in the site update log, for a while we had a prob­lem with our theme where it wasn’t pos­sible to reply to a com­ment so that the reply would appear cor­rectly in a threaded way.  We have no fixed this prob­lem, but have been left with a sig­ni­fic­ant num­ber of com­ments which… Read more »

0MS Office LogoBatch convert old MS Office documents

Published on by in Misc Software.

I’ve been try­ing to sort out an enorm­ous (100+GB) or teach­ing resources that I’ve built-up over the years.  After the obvi­ous steps (delet­ing empty, temp and duplic­ated files) and sort­ing the big files (e.g. videos, applic­a­tion installers) I was left with a large num­ber of office doc­u­ments.  I am slowly work­ing through these, but many… Read more »

0Spell Checker - Spelling PoliceInstall a spellchecker for your browser

Published on by in Web Technologies.

Let me start with an admis­sion: I’m one of those ped­ants on Face­book who likes to cor­rect your spelling, punc­tu­ation and gram­mar.  Some of you will think this is per­fectly reas­on­able, whilst oth­ers will prob­ably want an explan­a­tion.  If you are one of the lat­ter read on. The simple fact is that as a social spe­cies… Read more »

0Comment bubbleJetpack-style comments without Jetpack

Published on by in Wordpress. Updated 7th March 2013.

One of the best things about word­press is the built-in social aspect provided by com­ments.  Get­ting your com­ment sec­tion right can be very import­ant to any web­site, includ­ing ours.  Over the years we’ve exper­i­mented with vari­ous com­ment plu­gins includ­ing Dis­qus and more recently Jet­pack.  How­ever, we’ve always ended up bring things back in house for… Read more »

0HTML5 LogoHTML5 spec finished and published!

Published on by in Web Technologies.

At long last, the W3C has pub­lished the final HTML5 spe­cific­a­tion.  DIY Media Home is already writ­ten coded in HTML5, but the final­isa­tion of the spe­cific­a­tion means that HTML5 com­pli­ance is no longer a mov­ing tar­get for either us, or the browser makers.  Hope­fully all the main play­ers will provide fully HTML5 com­pli­ant browsers soon. … Read more »

0Tin full of spamHow to reduce spam with SPF, DKIM & DMARC

Published on by in Web Technologies. Updated 5th November 2012.

Since I set up con­tact forms on vari­ous web­sites I’ve had a slowly increas­ing volume of spam.  Not dir­ect spam sent to me, but bounces from non-existent addresses that were being spamme, appar­ently from my address.  Unfor­tu­nately the spam wasn’t ori­gin­at­ing from my address, but my address was some­how picked up (prob­ably from before I… Read more »

6Microsoft Office Excel 2010Conditional formatting for grades v targets

Published on by in Misc Software. Updated 6th March 2013.

So, in my other life I’m actu­ally a sci­ence teacher, and as it usu­ally gets round that I’m “good with com­puters” I usu­ally get asked to have a look at a few things.  Twice in the last few months I’ve been asked if I’d set up con­di­tional format­ting in excel to col­our code stu­dent test… Read more »