www.stevemorgan.me.uk

Alternative Sports Day!

September 18, 2008 – 8:02 pm
In conjunction with our Softball and Korfball playing friends we're hosting an alternative sports day! It's a chance for new comers and club members to try new sports and to increase exposure of our sports to the wider community. It's being held on 4th October 2008 at Platt Fields Park, Fallowfield with a social (venue tbc). Full details can be found here and on Facebook

Posted in DUFFA, Ultimate | No Comments »

Zend PHP 5 Certified Engineer

September 17, 2008 – 12:12 pm
Just before I went on holiday I become a Zend PHP 5 Certified Engineer. This involved taking a PHP 5 exam and quite a bit of revision.  I found it really useful as it made me cover areas of PHP that I hadn't yet used and re-enforced a lot of OO concepts that I've used in other languages but never quite got around to looking at in PHP.  I'm sold now that PHP is equal as a web development language to .NET, though my experience is that, in the UK at least, it's still not utilised in industry. My next plan is to take some .NET qualifications as it's more in line with what my current employer uses (and of course useful in any future career move) but I think for personal projects (such as DUFFA.org and a dating site I'm writing) PHP is my first choice. To anybody revising for the exam, ensure you have a fair amount ...

Posted in PHP | No Comments »

Umbraco Setup Documentation

August 8, 2008 – 9:35 am
At work I've been looking at CMS solutions.  I've found Umbraco to be an excellent little CMS which seems to have some excellent features, is built on ASP.NET and is also is open source. What it does seem to have suffered from is a lack of documentation on taking an existing website and importing in and providing a non-technical user with the content panels so that they can update their site.  As part of my exercise at work I created this document which aims to address some of this.  I'm going to publish it as an Umbraco book when it's been reviewed so it's here now as a Word doc for those interested. http://www.stevemorgan.me.uk/umbraco_setup.zip - please let me know of any errors, typos etc you find.  

Posted in ASP.NET, Umbraco | 4 Comments »

SQL Server SP2 Windows Update fails KB948109

July 23, 2008 – 8:09 am
It might just be because of my botched SQL Server installation, Vista or the fact I just can seem to rid the laptop I use at work of the evils of SQL Express but if like me you have this update stuck try the following;   1)      Open your Services (CONTROL PANEL | Administrative Tools | Services) 2)      Scroll down and START any services that start SQL Services 3)      If any fail try changing the logon details (right click PROPERTIES | LOG ON) – check the domain, mine was set to the old domain after a recent domain name change in my organisation - I'd changed just enough services to get SQL server working 4)      Rerun the update installation   This thread has some further tips if hte above doesn't do it for you.   http://www.technologyquestions.com/technology/windows-vista/241211-problems-installing-kb948109.html   Hope that helps

Posted in Windows | No Comments »

Welsh – Anglo Border Reader Offer

April 18, 2008 – 12:26 pm
I'm simultaneously upset and excited by Walkers latest offer. If you look closely at the image, the Brit Trip Highlights allows you to visit Wales, with 2 for 1 entry! I wasn't aware our Welsh neighbours where charging us for the pleasure of visting their valleys and hills. No word yet back from Walkers on the cost of leaving the place after.

Posted in Humour | No Comments »

Temporary / Backup Files In Ubuntu

March 30, 2008 – 11:57 am
As part of the redesign of this site I have a lot of legacy files which required some tweaking.  I'm still not happy with my menu on the old portion of the site but it's good enough. I found Ubuntu's Bluefish allowed me to perform Advanced search and replaces with regular expressions.  This was useful in removing some javascript I had at the top of each html page to check that the user had the side menu (which was done using frames - oh the horror).  Unfortunatly it created a billion temporary? backup? files that are copies with a tilda (~) suffixed on the file extension. The friendly people at Ubuntu Forums helped me here and I found a command to delete all files in all directories of my site. Here's my thread The command is here, from here find . -name "*~" -exec rm {} \;

Posted in Ubuntu | No Comments »

Adding Legacy, static web pages to your Word Press Site

March 29, 2008 – 8:13 pm
I've just spent an hour or two removing some rubbish javascript from my old website and hacking together a php menu at the top of each page. I wanted these old pages to be displayed in my WordPress powered site - I knew it must be easy to add these links to the theme but it wasn't obvious in the FAQ's or from Googling. Here's how I did it: 1) Edit your Theme in the WordPress Theme Editor 2) Select header.php 3) Look for <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">Home</a> </li> <?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?> Now, if you copy the first line, remove the dynamic <?php ?> code and put in your static links... e.g. <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">Home</a></li> <li><a href="/cv.php">CV</a></li> <li><a href="/travel/travel.php">Travel</a></li> <li><a href="/pic_content.php">Pictures</a></li> <?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?> and viola, your WordPress site now has your old pages linked, of course you will have to add a link to your old menu to take you back to your WordPress site.

Posted in WordPress | No Comments »

Hello world!

March 29, 2008 – 7:21 pm
I've totally rethought my site. I've moved to Word Press to allow me to upload content more easily (why re-invent the wheel!). As a result a lot of my older pages are in a rubbish format - I'll slowly convert them over but I don't see the motivation for that materialising anytime soon!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »