I have re-launched two websites this week, the first being Emily’s Portraits, which belongs to my friend Emily. She is a great portrait artist, and works to an unbelievably low fee, hand-drawing portraits from a photograph that you provide her with.

The other website I have re-launched is Wud Records, which is my Dad’s. That website went from being an archive of information about Wud Records to becoming a project that required a more professional design and an online store.

Both of the re-designs are live right now, so check them out.

You’ll notice that all of my old blog posts have been moved to a category labeled “Archive”. I may sort through them at some point and categorise them better, but for now they are marking a cut off point, as this is the new me! I plan to continue blogging in much the same manner as I was before. I have nothing to hide from anybody. However, the main outlet for this website is now going to be my website development work, which as you can see, since November, I have been doing a fair amount of.

I’m very busy at the moment managing Monkey Lord, and managing Rob Chappers himself, but once things have calmed down a bit, I’m hoping to do a regular blog post, as well as a regular YouTube video.

Anyway – I hope you are all very well, and have been taking care of yourselves. If you know anybody who wants a website, you know where to send them, right?

A popular feature of a typical website that allows you to login, is to have a “you are logged in as:” box, that displays your avatar, username, and often a link to edit your profile. Naturally I’ve been trying to replicate this functionality on one of the websites I am building. It came as a surprise that there is very little native avatar support in WordPress, which I think is a bit silly considering it is essentially a blogging platform that has escaped and run wild. Never the less, as is usually the case with WordPress, a bit of careful prodding reveals that there are ways around such things.

Now, I’ve not bothered to look into using a third party avatar plugin for this – I’m just going to stick with using the default Gravatar or get over it option.

So, to begin with, to get a user’s avatar outside of The_Loop, we need to refer to a global variable. Global variables are used for a number of reasons – backwards compatibility being one of the main ones, and these variables shouldn’t be over-used. They are, however, essential for this. The global variable we use will allow us to get information from the set_current_user function. Obviously if a user isn’t logged in, then the avatar will have to fall back on a default image, or you could write your code in such a way that the avatar is only displayed if a user is logged in.

So, with no wrapping code, this is how you display a user’s avatar, if a user is logged in:


< ?php global $user_email ?>
< ?php echo get_avatar($user_email, '50'); ?>


I was going to post a whole thing about writing a “logged in as” box, but I was having a problem with code being parsed, despite me asking the WYSIWYG not to parse code… Oh well.

The design of the website is very true to the genre, which is quite aesthetically pleasing. It’s nice and quick, too, and easy to navigate. Whether the prices are direct from Amazon’s catalogue, or if they’re at a slightly discounted price because they’re on a website using Amazon web services, I don’t know – but they seem very fair either way. There’s an abundance of books available (as one would hope), too – which are browse-able by author, alongside literature being featured on the homepage.

The website has only just launched, so a review is to be had of the functionality, and no doubt several features will be integrated as time passes. For now though – go and check out Science-Fictions for all of your science fiction books, make some suggestions and maybe even sit down with a book. You know, like you used to…

There was a brief delay, in which time I bought another hard drive to give to my Granddad in replacement (which was delivered within 48h), as I needed another hard drive anyway, so would just have the repaired/replaced one when it was returned. After a couple of weeks, Overclockers identified that the drive was indeed faulty and sent me a replacement, which arrived and worked fine – and I’m now using it.

I got home on Friday to find a slip from DHL, stating that I had missed a parcel, and that I had to go and collect it from them on the other side of the city. I had no idea what this parcel was, as everything I had ordered recently had already been delivered. So, today I went across town to DHL and collected my parcel, and discovered it was another 500GB hard drive from Seagate. What I thought had happened was confirmed by the e-mail I had received by the time I got home to check. It was an e-mail from Seagate stating that DHL were unable to deliver my 500GB hard drive and that they wanted to confirm my address. I replied to the e-mail saying that I had been to collect the drive already, but the reseller had already replaced my hard drive for me. Seagate came back to me and said that the reseller must have returned the faulty drive to them, hence me getting an RMA replacement. They didn’t say anything about me getting a free drive, so I left it at that.

Clearly one doesn’t have to follow the RMA guidelines at all – and one should open an RMA request with the manufacturer before they return something to their reseller, so that they can get free stuff!

So, thank you Seagate/Overclockers!

I’m not going to go into details about why I’m stressed, because this isn’t a diary, but a fair few things have contributed in the past few days – the last being a piece of work which was supposed to be a 10 minute job taking a ridiculous amount of time because of the way the piece of work had to be finished, and my computer then going absolutely crazy for no understandable reason. This caused me to leave the piece of work that I was working on before I took on the 10 minute piece of work unfinished, storming out of the office at 7pm (I was 30 minutes late this morning so expected to be leaving at 6) with a nosebleed – whether that’s related to how angry I felt, I don’t know.

I’ve had issues with my shoulders for 5 years or so now. They ache and hurt, lots. The issue used to be intermittent, and used to disappear when I applied pressure to my shoulders, but now it is almost constant agony – and despite my constant exercises and stretches that I do as directed by my physiotherapist, the issue doesn’t seem to be going away. This evening they’re hurting more than they normally do. I’ve never understood how an emotion could cause a muscle to hurt more, but the stress certainly seems to have made my shoulders worse. How one stores stress in their shoulders, I don’t know.

How does one relieve stress? I don’t really fancy getting into an aggressive sport or anything. And I’m somewhat unable to liberate myself from the 9-5 that dominates my every weekday. I rather wish I could just play this song, very loudly, in a thunderstorm.

I love that song. I’m not sure why I love it. The lyrics don’t really hold any relevance to how I’m feeling. I suppose the combination of (reasonably) light and heavy music works for me a lot in this track. I appreciate it’s probably not the best song to listen to when you are angry though – which is why I’m listening to Massive Attack, which, ironically, sounds much worse. I did have to listen to Drowning Pool on the way home, though…

On a completely different note, I have recently resubscribed to World of Warcraft. One reason for doing this was because one of Amy’s friends plays, and I fancied helping her out a bit. Another reason is because they’re releasing a new expansion pack for it soon, which is going to completely change how all of the old content looks. I suppose it’s an odd concept to appreciate unless you’ve had first-hand experience, and I suppose it sounds a bit like something that would invoke an “Oh dear…” from a reader – but I wanted to go back and appreciate all of the stuff I appreciated 3/4 years ago when I did devote a lot of my time to it, before it is changed for good. I have too many other things going on with my life to spend any considerable amount of time playing it – but it was very nice when I logged in to one of my old characters and got a whole bunch of “OH MY GOD IT’S YOU!” messages, from people I’ve not spoken to in a long time.

I have a lot of aspirations and irritations right now, and I think I need to find a way of devoting myself to some more rewarding short-term goals so that I feel like I’m progressing towards something better than what ever I’m doing now. My dreams of being self-sufficient and thus having a sleeping pattern that works for me are never going to come true unless I work for them. It’s just hard to know where to go.

I still feel like I’m going to explode.

min-height: 500px;
height: auto !important;
height: 500px;

What?

Playing with IE7 and a drop-down navigation which had a bit of a crisis when it tried to overlay the image slideshow underneath it. Giving the drop-down a high z-index, and the slideshow a z-index of -1 in my IE7.css seemed to fix the issue.

On another note, the default theme rocks (in opposite land) – so back to it, for now.