On Friday night we had a lovely meal at the Rufford Arms restaurant which is located between Tarleton and Burscough on the A59.  I started off with a delicious black pudding and bacon dish that was served with a peppercorn sauce and then I had roast pork with sweet apples and jus for main course.  I managed (just - as I was very full) some vanilla ice cream for desert, all washed down with a couple of pints of the black stuff.  It was a nice evening and a time for family to catch up with what was going on in each others lives, which is this day and age is rare.

Then onto Saturday night and it was off to the Liverpool Marina for the wedding party.  The Liverpool Marina has been extensively redeveloped over the last 5 - 6 years or so and is now, one has to say, a millionaires playground.  I recall standing in the entrance of the Liverpool Marina Bar and Grill (the venue for the evening) looking at all the boats for sale, each averaging around £150,000.  The party was great with perhaps the stand out feature being the chocolate fountain.  I have never actually seen one in the flesh as to speak but it looked great.  Being a bloke I spent around 20 fruitless minutes trying to work out how it worked.  I am still none the wiser.

So the weekend draws to a close and it is back to work on Monday morning after getting over the disappointment of Lewis Hamiltons fantastic win in F1 being taken away from him and me having to iron some shirts for work!

P.S. Appologies from the photo - it was a long way away and I couldn’t keep the camera still at 12x zoom in the busy dance hall!

Laptops are notorious for being great gadgets, but poor on battery efficency.  The MacBook is a little different in that it probably has one of the best battery packs around in terms of the amount of battery life that it can provide in terms of no. of hours in my experience.  That said the longest I have out of it is about 2.5 hours, still not enough for a long journey here and there.  So how can we get more power and a longer run time out of our MacBook batteries?

Over time I have learnt a little bit about this in order to firstly extend the amount of time you get from your MacBook battery and secondly the life of the battery itself.  In order to extend your MacBook’s battery for as long as possible it is crucial that you never use it plugged into the mains, unless it needs charging.  Batteries work best charged fully when empty, used to they are almost dead and then charged fully again.  Charging your battery constantly will your MacBook is being used will reduce the lifespan of the battery.  Other top tips for saving battery power are:

• Most modern MacBooks (Intel ones) have an Airport (or wireless) card built in, for connecting to Wireless networks.  When this wireless card is not being used then make sure that it is switched off.  To do this right click on the wireless icon in the upper right corner of your MacBook and then select “Turn Airport Off”
• Your MacBook will probably also have bluetooth card inside and therefore do that same as for your Airport card. Turn your bluetooth off whenever you are not using it as it is draining power.
• Your MacBook will use significantly less power when you dim the display.  To do this select the display option from the System Preferences which can found by clikcing on the Apple menu in the top left of the screen and lower the brightness
• Only have programs open that you are using as additional programs take up memory, which in turn takes up power

Following the above will help reduce the power consumption of your MacBook and therefore make your battery last longer in the short, and in the long term.

The first thing that you need to be aware of when using Firefox is knowing when a website has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.  In Firefox 3 this is simple.  In the main address bar at the top of the screen, to the right hand side in the address bar you will notice a small RSS icon.  Click this icon to view the pages feed.  Sometimes a site will have more than one type of feed (for example atom and RSS), so here you can choose which to use.

The feed for that page is displayed on the page, which in Firefox will be a list of page titles and a small excerpt of what each pages content is.  At the top of the screen you have the option to choose which program you want to use in order to subscribe to that feed.  Make sure that the selection box says “Live Bookmarks” and you can then press the subscribe button.  Firefox 3 will then ask you where you want to store the feed.  You can either store this in your bookmarks toolbar or in the bookmarks menu.  Select where it is to be stored and press OK.

Thats it.  Go to that feeds bookmark that you have just created and then you will see a list of all the articles or updates from that feed, which keeps you up to date when there has been a new article written.  Really easy and very very handy.

It involves changing a small piece of code in your themes header.php file.  In there, more often than not there will be a div tag with an ID called ‘header’.  If will probably look like something like this:

<div id="header"><h1><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></h1></div>

What you need to do is to change this piece of code to include a small piece of Javascript to makes the entire header div tag clickable to a link that you specifiy.  For example if I wanted to make the header tag clickable a go to the google homepage I would replace it with this code:

<div id="header onclick="location.href='http://www.google.com/';" style="cursor: pointer;"><h1><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></h1></div>

This will make the entire header section of your site clickable and link to the google homepage.  Basically it is the following code that is important:

onclick="location.href='http://www.google.com/';" style="cursor: pointer;"

It is this code that needs to be added inside the header div tag, changing the URL to they location where you want the click to go to.  Many want this to be the homepage of their blog, so simply replace www.google.com with the URL of your blog.

And that’s it, an easy way to make the header div of your blog clickable to any site or link that you want.

The image above was created by merging together 8 photographs from the garden.  We have been working in the garden for the last 6 months or so and wanted to find a way in which I could showcase the whole job in one photograph, which is what got me looking at panoramic photography.

The process is simple.  You basically take all your photos, panning around your subject.  It is best to take them in portrait format because your image will end up capturing a lot more of the subject.  You then take your photographs panning around, making sure that you give them plenty of overlap.  The more overlap the easy it is for the software to get a good match.

Upload the photos to your computer and then in Photoshop CS3 you simple select the Automate from the file menu and choose the Photomerge.  Then select all of the photos that you have taken and simply press go.  Photoshop goes to work importing your photos together and produces the finishing touches.  Somethimes to tops and bottoms of the photo are not level as Photoshop has had to move them up and down to get things aligned up correctly so I usualy just crop the photograph down slightly so that the top and bottom edges are straight.

That is all there is to it.  Export your file in a suitable format and size and you have a lovely professional looking Panoramic photograph of whatever you want.

Therefore here is a section of the photos below as well as a link to the slideshow of all the photos on Flickr.

Flickr Slideshow of all Photos

Akismet

This comes with your WordPress download but is really essential in stopping SPAM appearing on your site through your comments.  On the old version of Penny4Them I think that Akismet had stopped about 14,000 comments in about 6 months!

All in One SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is important if you want to get your blog appearing in the search engine ranking near the top.  This plugin handles a lot of the behind the scenes stuff for you.  For example it adds the meta tags at the top of the page and makes your post/page titles and little more search engine friendly.

Google XML Sitemaps

Linked to the above really.  This produces an XML sitemap of your website and the Google can quickly see all the pages and posts on your site in one file.  Really easy to use and setup to.

Dagon Design Form Mailer

This is a really simple plugin that allows you put a very simple but effective contact form on your site.  There are lots of contact form plugins out there but this is by far the easiest to use if you just want a simple form for people to get in touch.

Subscribe to Comment

This plugin allows readers of comments to subscribe through email to a particular posts comments.  That way when someone else comments on the post the reader is informed that there has been another response so they can keep up to date with the conversation.

Breadcrumb Navigation XT

Fewer and fewer sites these days are choosing to use a breadcrumb to aid navigation but I have to say that I am a fan of them and included one on this site.  This plugin takes care of it all for you.  Really easy to use and very effective.

Limit Posts

There have been many times when I have been designing that I want an area of the site that displays posts but I don’t want them to get to long.  Therefore instead of having to insert the more tag (which I found myself forgetting to do) this plugin automatically cuts your posts at a length you specify and that way keeps your design looking good.  I use it on Equal Design and Education Themes.

Flickr RSS

This plugins uses the RSS Feed of your photos on Flickr in order to show your latest photos on your blog.  You have control of which user account the photos come from as well as the size and number of photos to display.

As I have said there are hundreds of plugins for WordPress and there is a good probability that there is a plugin for the function that you want to add to your blog.  Take a look at the plugins available on the Wordpress Website or do a Google search for what you are looking for.

I have had the previous design (which is still available in Old Penny4Them Archives) since January of 2007 and therefore I thought that it was about time that it took on a new look.  The original design was based on the Fasttrack theme by Sadish, and having learnt so much about Wordpress and CSS in the last few years I thought that I should have a custom design.  I have created many sites over the last 6 months working with Matt Shepherd as Equal Design, however I wanted something that was a little different from what we had created before.  I wanted something a little more ‘Grungy’.

After about 4 weeks of research and testing different designs in Fireworks and Photoshop, I give you Penny4Them version 2.  This will include all the usual stuff that I have been posting about over the last 18 months or so, however there is going to be more.  I am adding a specific WordPress section (available as a link at the top of the blog) where I intend to share some of the things that I have learnt about this great publishing platform over the years.  I often look at the Wordpress Forums in order to try and help others out and I find myself helping the same problems over and over again.  Therefore this should tackle some of those issues.

So there it is - Penny4Them version 2.  I am sure that it will evolve little bits and bobs over time, adding this and that and taking bits away to get it just right.  However I am pleased with it.  What do you think?  Your feedback and comments as always are welcome.

P.S. the old posts and comments are all still available and working on the old site in the Old Penny4Them archives, just in case you are wondering what has happened to them all!

It all started with cycling Nicole Cooke winning gold in the womens road race. In fact cycling was one of the sports that Team GB completely dominated. A total of seven gold medals in the Laoshan velodrome which was 6 better than any other country. We have complained for a long time now about how poor we can be at times in the Olympics (perhaps not recently) but I think that our cycling success is no fluke. You invest money in building quality facilities, such as the Manchester Velodrome and you reap the rewards in terms of sporting (or in this case Olympic) success.

Then it was the turn of the female swimmers. In particular Rebecca Adlington. The first gold was an extremely close race and she just manage to come home first with Britain also getting the bronze. But her next gold was something special. She smashed a long standing world record to demolish the rest of the field in style. That was special. Watching the race and following her progress with the world record ‘green’ line embedded on our TV screens (great idea that by the way!) constantly about 4 metres behind was great to see. Everyone in the living room was on their feet cheering her on to the victory.

We then turned to the water again, this time not it but on it. Rowing was the sport and we once again proved that team GB has still got what it takes to win gold medals. I think the part I enjoyed most about this was the BBC commentators. They are so enthusiastic and commented like you or I would, cheering on the rowers to the line. Maybe they were sat in their living room back in the UK - who knows, but it created a fantastic atmosphere. With sailing also topping the medal tables team GB did wonderfully well on the waters in and around Beijing.

Then came the athletics in week two. I suppose everyone really feels like it is getting going when the athletics start. The venue was a fantastic looking and rather well named ‘Birds Nest’ stadium, that really built up the adrenalin and exitement just by seeing the stadium, never mind watching the events. There were world records shattered everywhere, unfortunately this time not from Team GB although there were notable successes on the track.

So 4 years down the line and it is the turn of London to host all this. Can we do it any better than the Chinese? Well I am not sure, I think we have the potential but will we pull it off? We have a lot to learn but I am confident that whatever type of games we stage, they will be a success. We need them to be a success and show off Great Britain in all its best colours.

As for team GB their successes in Beijing 2008 were truley remarkable. Every athlete that competed in that team deserves recognition for the part they played. To finish 4th in the medal table (which was for a long time third), ahead of countries like Germany and Australia is a terrific acheivement and one that should be celebrated in whatever way we can. It seems as though it is not often that we get to say things like this, but well done Team GB - you did the nation proud.

At first he was not for showing his sex but after a few prods and pokes from the ultrasound women he soon moved around to show us that he was a boy. The thing is, is that we were fine with girls names, in fact we had about 3 we both liked and would choose from. Boys however is a different matter, we have yet to come up with some solid ideas. We will have to get our thinking caps on!