Month: October 2007

Today is a good day…

To stay at home.

There is an afternoon of racing on at Cheltenham Racecourse – its the first meeting of the National Hunt season. So going anywhere by car than involves going over that side of town is a totally stupid idea.

But what is there on TV – build up to the Rugby World Cup final and coverage of the qualifying for the Brazilian Grand Prix.

And its not going to be much better this evening either – the Rugby World Cup is on and all the pubs will be full, especially with the Racing finishing a couple of hours before the rugby starts, which could explain why the Royal Oak is tickets only tonight.

So staying in the house and doing odd jobs seems like a sensible thing to do.

I’ve fixed the front door lock (which had managed to get jammed in the deadlocked position) and I’ve fixed the door latch on the inner door in the front lobby which should help keep the draughts out as that front lobby can get remarkably cold at night.

Last.FM Widgets Plugin

Well I’ve got version 1.0 of my Last.FM Widgets Plugin working. I’ve trimmed some of the extra bits out that Last.FM include in their plugs (just to make things tidy) but retained about 95% of what was there.

It supports all the standard lists and the two standard “Quilts”. One of more of the Widgets can probably be found in the side bars on this blog.

The options page allows you to configure your Last.FM ID, Select the colour (from Last.FM’s limited list) of the plugin and the size of the quilt.

I’ve tweaked it so that the plugin has a transparent background and should always be the same width as your side bar.

Its a normal Plugin so if you are using WPMU you can put it in the plugins folder. I’ve not tested it against standard WP but I can’t believe there is anything odd in there that would stop it working.

Please feel free to try it and let me know if there is anything obviously wrong with it:

You can download the latest version here

Update: Its now V1.6 – I’ve tidied up some of the code and removed some stuff that was no longer used! I’ve also added two Radio Widgets (artist like and Genre) and put these two options onto the general configuration page. At V1.6 I added a playlist widget

Internet Explorer… what a pile of Crap

For a change of scene I’ve been working on a set of Last.FM widgets which will allow you to dispaly Last.FM widgets in the sidebars on the blogs… and you should be able to see one there right now.

It was only during testing this that I found that my blog (i.e. this one) no longer displayed on Internet Explorer. For some reason it was crapping out on the GoogleMaps code. Which was odd as I’ve not got any GoogleMaps embedded in this blog.

The blog displayed fine on Opera, FireFox and Safari but produced half a page on IE 6 and then if you refreshed the page then it went blank.

After much checking of code I found it… During Development of the embedded Google Maps I’d hard coded a javascript tag into the header for this blog. It was still there and for some completely perverse reason having it there screwed up IE 6.

So I’ve taken it out and things are now working.

Well sort of – IE really gets it’s knickers in a twist if you put something into a div that is slightly wider than it should be, Everyone else ignores this but not IE, oh no, not IE.. no it reformats your page and shoves the whole column at the bottom of the page.