Well, time moves on, and WordPress with it. Version 2.8 of WordPress introduced a new squeaky clean object-oriented  method for writing widgets, and while the widgets written the old way will continue to work, there’s always a chance that old functions will cease to work with some future update, which would make my poor little widget crash, burst into flames, kick the cat (should you have one) or at the very least, stop working, which would be moderately annoying.

So, I did some digging, and read some tutorials, and borrowed some bits from other sites, and turned List Drafts Widget into a shiny new version that uses the new API and doesn’t appear to break anything, or nothing that I’ve noticed, anyway.

I’ll be uploading it to the WordPress Plugins Repository later, and you’ll be able to find it in the same place as the old one:

List Drafts Widget

Comments, suggestions, etc are welcome.

©2010 Losing it[1]. All Rights Reserved.

Today’s bit of stuff is this little screenshot:

This may take some time

This was the result of copying a large folder of images from my MacBook to the iMac. I think it may have been lying about the time estimate, as it seems to have finished already rather than keeping me waiting until some time in the year 10765 or thereabouts. Not sure if this is a peculiarity of Forklift or random weirdness, but it amused me slightly. And I’d rather have an insane over-estimate of time than the Microsoft-style guesswork, which once told me that it would take 20 minutes to move a very large file. And kept telling me that for the two hours or so it actually took…

Weight:  226 pounds (16 stone 2 pounds, 102.5 kg)

©2010 Losing it[1]. All Rights Reserved.

The first thing was inserting the weight report thingy in those essential daily posts. I had been doing this by using Scott Reilly’s Get Custom Field Values plugin. That’s fine, but it needs some actual code inserted in the template files – several of them for most themes, though this would be cut down to the very handy loop.php in the Twenty Ten theme, which isn’t too hard, but it means that if the theme gets updated, I have to remember to edit it again.

So, I did a bit of tweaking, a bit of reading, and borrowed bits from Get Custom Field Values and another plugin to create a very basic plugin that drops the weight thingy in automatically without actually having to change of the theme files. It also means that if I decide to change to a different theme, I won’t need to edit that one either.

The next thing was the appearance of the site. While I’m generally happy with the look of Twenty Ten, I will want to change a few things, such as the base font. Now I could just edit the style.css file, but this could also cause problems when the theme is updated.

But fortunately, there is another way. WordPress has a very nifty feature called Child Themes – basically, you can have your own theme based on an existing one. All you have to create is a style.css file in which you defined only the styles that you want to change.

I found this really useful article on creating child themes which pointed me in the right direction. My test site is now working with that, and it all seems to be behaving itself nicely.

I’ll be playing with the test site some more over the next few weeks.

©2010 Losing it[1]. All Rights Reserved.

It’s a collection of documentary images of life in Britain between 1967 and 1987, together with a moderate amount of text talking about the photographers, the Arts Council’s support for photography, and the events in the country. Worth getting hold of if you saw the exhibition and would like to see the pictures again, or indeed if you missed it.

Getting a copy might be tricky now – there are just a few copies on Amazon.co.uk Marketplace, and some on abebooks.co.uk, with prices starting at around £30 and rising to over £300. But if you can find it at a non-exotic price, it’s well worth adding to your library.

[1] That’s the second, more polite version of that sentence

©2010 Losing it[1]. All Rights Reserved.

But never mind that, here’s a picture of something you’ll never see unless you look up:

You’ll find that on Gallowgate in Newcastle.

Weight:  227 pounds (16 stone 3 pounds, 103 kg)

©2010 Losing it[1]. All Rights Reserved.

Your photographic treat for Friday is another sign where a little dose of spellchecking might have been a good idea:

There seems to be a pattern here – this is at the same place as the chalk board I I mocked recently.

Weight:  226.6 pounds (16 stone 2.6 pounds, 102.8 kg)

©2010 Losing it[1]. All Rights Reserved.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Younger (or older non-Brit) readers might like to know that in the distant past, when I was a lad[1] and so on, the few TV channels that we had did not run 24 hours a day, shocking as that may sound, and actually closed down for the night. Closedown time used to be quite early by current standards – 11pm or even earlier, except at weekends where showings of old horror movies might drag things on to midnight or even later.

Originally, they used to close down completely, leaving a white dot to burn itself into your CRT TV while playing a high pitched beeeeeeeep to try and alert viewers who’d fallen asleep in front of Play for Today or whatever it was. But in later years, they ran looped pages from the Teletext service. Teletext is what people used to turn to for breaking news and cheap holidays in those distant days BEFORE THE INTERNET. It was all a bit slow and a bit crap (rather like the internet in dial-up days), but it was good for quick news updates.

And that’s a lot of words to explain the quite sublime joke in the video. If you’re as old as me, you won’t have needed to read any of  this, and probably didn’t..

©2010 Losing it[1]. All Rights Reserved.

Today’s picture is a bit of abstract wossnameness:

In case you’re wondering, it’s a glass block forming part of the outer wall of Newcastle’s Centre for Life

Weight:  227 pounds (16 stone 3 pounds, 103 kg)

©2010 Losing it[1]. All Rights Reserved.

Take photography, for instance. Before I got my Canon 30D, I bought piles of camera magazines, and subscribed to a few for a year or two. But over time, it became apparent that there was an awful lot of repetition. The same old Photoshop tutorials kept coming around, and just how many reviews of things you’re unlikely to buy do you really need?  I still get the quite remarkably useful weekly Amateur Photographer for the news, detailed reviews of new toys and other nice stuff, but the rest have ceased to be really useful to me.

One magazine that I’d never quite got round to was The British Journal of Photography. This was a weekly magazine dating back to 1854, and aimed at the professional photographer. Somehow, it never looked that appealing, so I hadn’t got round to buying a copy. Until now.

The publishers have decided to take a bold step. Given that news is available on the internet, and updated much faster than any print magazine can even dream of, they reasoned that there’s not really a necessity to publish weekly. And looking at the market, they saw a honking great gap: there was no magazine showing off quality photography in high quality reproduction, no magazine that’s simply good to look at.

And so, from this month, the BJP is a monthly, printed on heavy paper, featuring lots of high quality professional photography, in depth interviews with photographers (and not the usual “I use a Canon/Nikon Dxxx and a wotsit lens” – we’re talking proper interviews). I picked up the first monthly copy in WH Smith out of curiosity, and it took me a few seconds to realise that I had to buy it.

It’s one of the best magazines I’ve ever seen – lots of great pictures to appreciate, lots to read, some good reviews of cameras, and in general a Good Thing. I’ve subscribed already.

Details of the magazine, and more stuff to read on the BJP website and the inevitable (but interesting) 1854 blog.

[1] Seriously – if I could get the magazines that I currently read once and recycle in a digital format for much the same price as I pay now, with the added point that I’d like unrestricted access to previous issues so long as I keep paying the subscription, then I would happily pay a moderately large chunk of actual money for an iPad[2] or similar.
[2] Potentially a lovely toy, but I’ll want some content to justify having one

©2010 Losing it[1]. All Rights Reserved.