Thursday, January 19, 2012
It’s all go at the moment!
My little soccer team Darlington F.C. (The Mighty Darlo) DID actually go bust yesterday and I was about to head down to the Hangar Bar and turn my Darlington scarf upside down, but the fans gathered round the body and resuscitated it…
Darlington go bust and then revived after fans raise £200,000
The club have NO staff (not even players) - they were all made redundant by the Administrator but the backroom staff are all volunteering to help stage the two next home games, the coach is working for free, and what players are still around are going to play on a match-by-match basis. The fans are collecting money to pay their wages while our “Rescue Group” tries to thrash out some sort of community-led business plan. The coach, Crag Liddle, deserves an OBE or something - he’s really the Youth Team coach who’s been looking after the first team for the past few weeks, he’s Darlington through-and-through and a monument to all that is good and decent about the game. I think he’s been the glue which has kept us all together - even the players who had to leave (they had to earn a living) were gutted at abandoning ship and many ex-players have sent messages of support or even donated to the… [Read more...]
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Recipe for Rice Creamola
If you’re a big fan of sugar and/or generally eating things that do you no good whatsoever but which leave you with a self-satisfied buzz, then this recipe is for you.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Cure for Outlook 2007 running slow
I don’t use Outlook myself, for all it’s quirks I still much prefer to use Opera’s built-in mail client rather than have to run a separate program to check and send mail, but I know someone who does use it and they constantly complained about how slow it was: sending and receiving messages was taking far too long, and the occasional message would get stuck* in the Outbox with no apparent way to delete it, etc.
The two problems mentioned above are probably unrelated issues but the nub of his whinging was that Outlook 2007 was so problematic that he was considering removing the whole of Windows 7 from his computer and going back to XP as he was spending too much time sat looking at his screen waiting for it to do something. He was not alone.
A quick search on the web revealed that his grievance was shared by many other people around the planet, and it seemed that there was a quick fix for this widely shared problem, and it is this…
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Flatpress for Dummies
This article shows you how you can start your own blog in a matter of minutes using FlatPress.
Basic guide to getting started
What is FlatPress?
FlatPress is a great piece of software and I use it a lot to rapidly develop websites, just like this blog. Basically FlatPress is a content management system (you can either create and edit pages using the built-in web interface, or by using other methods) which doesn’t need a database so you can install it on most web servers which have PHP installed which covers the vast majority of web servers out there in internetland and some of them are completely free to use (as is FlatPress) so getting your own “home” on the web has never been easier.
How does it work
The name “FlatPress” is derived from the fact that it uses “flat files” (i.e. ordinary text files) in order to operate, in contrast to WordPress (one of the most popular blogging platforms in use today) which is powered by a database. Nothing wrong in either case - but flat files are easier for the layman to comprehend so it’s little wonder that a regular flow of new users… [Read more...]
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Using Windows Live Writer can screw up your blog’s news feed validation - here’s how to avoid it happening
Really, it can.
I posted this on the FlatPress forum, as that is the blogging software I use - but it most likely applies if you use Windows Live Writer to post to other blogging platforms too (e.g. Wordpress).
If you use Live Writer and the Remote Posting plugin to maintain your blog then (in Live Writer) you need to go into “Tools… Options… Editing” and UN-check all those boxes which say “Replace hyphens…”, “Replace straight quotes…” & “Replace other special characters” otherwise if you use any special characters in your post titles (e.g. three dots “…”) that will get converted to a special character and trip up your feed.
It just happened to me.
