Having reinstalled Wordpress and the K2 theme after last week’s outage, I wanted to tweak the list of pages which are presented as tabs at the top of the page since there is at least one page who’s long title I didn’t want cluttering up the header.
I knew that the function call I was looking for was wp_list_pages but the only place I could initially find it to change was in the K2 themes sidebar.php which made no difference to the tabs at all. After a little searching I found the file which needed changing. What’s needed is to modify the function call to exclude the specific pages you don’t want listed.
In the K2 theme directory, modify app/includes/display.php and change
wp_list_pages( apply_filters(‘k2_menu_list_pages’, ’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=’) );
to
wp_list_pages( apply_filters(‘k2_menu_list_pages’, ’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=&exclude=36′));
where the parameters of the exclude is a comma-delimited list of page IDs to exclude from the page list.
I almost always use the BBC News website for my news source. Sky news has always put me off by the number of popup flash adverts they insist on pushing in users faces. I noticed at the weekend that they have a new web site in beta stage. You can take a look at it here. I have also taken a snapshot of it below:
My first impression isn’t good. There’s too many blocks of content, none of which seem to blend together. This is a snapshot from this morning and when I looked yesterday there was a lot more black and red on the page so maybe they’ve toned it down a little based on feedback from the site but I think there’s too many visual distractions which hide the content. As soon as you open the site, a video starts running of the latest story and there are pictures and panels everywhere. It’s hard to see the news and that’s not good for a news site!
If that’s the best they can do, the BBC have nothing to worry about. What do you guys think?
According to an article on the BBC yesterday, Local councils in the UK are launching a charm offensive because, apparently, we council tax payers don’t appreciate what they do with our money and think that all they do is empty the bins.
The core of this charm offensive is a poster campaign informing us of the wide range of services we should be grateful that our council carries out for us. The poster used as an example is this one:
Well, I for one feel much happier with my council now. I now appreciate how my hard earned council tax is being usefully spent cleaning up behind p***ed up slappers on a weekend bender! Of all the services they could have chosen to promote! I’m sure the next poster will be be proudly broadcasting how my council tax also pays to raise and educate the child(ren) resulting from one one night stand(s) this wonderful specimen of society rushes into when she’s p***ed!
Cheers to my local council! Put the council tax up! I’m so happy to pay!
A Mind Lost was off line for a couple of days last week due to a large section of the hard drive corrupting. When I found the time to fix it, I took the opportunity to upgrade the hardware and bring all software up to the latest versions. I had a few problems with the wordpress backup and had to re-locate the images files from the posts manually but all is well now!
A while ago, security Guards at one of our factories caught two men stealing metal items and stock. They caused around £2000 worth of damage and were stealing steel tooling worth about £500 as scrap metal but with a replacement cost of around £6000. I estimate that this was probably the 14th of 15th robbery we’ve suffered this year, despite alarms and random security patrols. We had to convince the police to prosecute as they wanted to let them off with a caution. One of the men was considered too high on drugs to be charged until the following day, although strangely he was clear headed enough to break in, avoid tripping our alarm off and giving the security guards and police a good chase!
When the case came to court it turned out one had a huge list of previous offenses (and the police were only going to give him a caution) and was sentenced to 12 weeks which in the current climate means he will be out in 5-6 weeks. The other apparently had a better solicitor who leaned heavily on his clients drug addiction and got him an eight week suspended sentence so he just walked free. He could have at least been tagged or given some kind of deterrent from just going straight back to crime!
We are forced to spend a ridiculous amount on security, insurance premiums, repairs and replacements and whenever we catch someone in the act of stealing from us, we have to argue for a prosecution and the result is pointless. These repeat offenders are making more money than people earning an honest wage and when they do occasionally get caught they have nothing to fear.
The UK is rapidly losing the plot!
I had a problem installing Windows Live Messenger on an Acer Laptop running Windows Vista yesterday. Installation went fine but as soon as I tried to sign in, Vista’s Data Execution Protection (DEP) kicked in with an error and shut Messenger down.
A little digging traced the fault to one of Acer’s applications installed by default, namely Acer eDataSecurity Management, although the error message did not mention the program whatsoever. Apparently there is a patch available but I opted instead to uninstall it. Whenever we get a new business laptop or desktop, I always uninstall most of the default application suite because they are all bloated unnecessary tools and utilities and once removed the system runs quicker, particularly at startup.
Once Acer’s rubbish was uninstalled, Live Messenger ran perfectly.
I came up against a strange network fault this week. Just as the offices were closing for the day I had a call from the shop floor reporting that none of the systems could connect to the database. When I investigated I couldn’t get any traffic across the network at all, not even a ping. I checked a couple of PCs in the offices, one was the same and my own PC was connecting but extremely slowly. We had almost no connectivity whatsoever.
Rebooting all network switches and routers had no effect and I was started to run out of ideas. I suddenly noticed that one port, number 4, on the primary network switch was flashing considerably faster that it should. Tracking down socket number 1/4 on the network took a couple of minutes and when checked it out, there was an Acer PC connected which although it was shut down had its hard drive activity light flickering rapidly.
I started the system up and shut it down again and the activity stopped and the network was working again. I can only assume that the onboard network of the Acer has somehow shorted and was either completely flooding the network with traffic or noise or was locking up the primary network switch. The PC hasn’t done this again since but at least I’ll know where to look next time and it won’t take me an hour to diagnose and investigate.
Recent Comments