WordPress 4.2 “Powell” (and 4.1.3)

wordpressOvernight I got an auto-upgrade to WordPress 4.1.3 maintenance release and a notice telling me WordPress 4.2 “Powell” was released. The downloads are in the usual places, and of course available from the update screen in your blog.

The announcement page has a video explaining the new features, which seem to make it easier to repost other people’s content, where you would normally expect to just tweet a link. Not sure what I feel about this yet!

Happy upgrading.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: WordPress 4.2.1 came out today.

When bad form design attacks!

Take a look at these two items from a form I was using today.

confirmation-text

If, like me, you thought that checking those boxes meant you agreed with the statements, you would be wrong. It turns out what they mean is you’ve remembered to copy that text into the main body of your request. WTF?

I suggested to the company in question, they either make the check boxes work as they should, or at least change the text to explain what they are there for! It amazes how people can turf out pages like this and not see how blatantly bad they are!

As it turned out, the person who this DMCA takedown notice was directed at has already taken down the offending pages, so I don’t need to “correct” the notice and resend it.

Cheers

Tim…

All Change : Responsive and mobile and all that jazz

If you’ve been near oracle-base.com recently you will see things have changed a bit…

The Main Website

For a couple of weeks I’ve been playing with Bootstrap and Font Awesome to make the main body of the website mobile friendly. Last night I got a bit bored so I decided to shift the whole site to the responsive mobile template so it’s a single look and feel regardless of the device.

Less than 5% of my traffic is from mobiles and tablets, so that wasn’t really the motivation for doing this. Over the years I’ve accumulated a whole bunch of crappy code to deal with specific situations and it was getting a little hard to manage the basic framework of the website. The switch to using Bootstrap meant I could effectively throw a whole bunch of my code away, making my life much easier. The main goal has been to keep everything plain and clean and minimize the amount of time I spend on maintenance. That leaves me more time to work on content, which is the important thing. The whole responsive thing was an added bonus.

It’s a work-in-progress. There are still some things to neaten up a little.

  • There are some pages that are “less responsive” than they should be. 🙂
  • I keep tweaking font sizes and colours.
  • I’ve got to sort out the main image in the navigation bar.

Overall, I’m relatively happy with it and it seems to work fine in the browsers I’ve tried (IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari) and the mobiles and tablets I’ve tried it on.

The Blog

I switched the blog to the “Twenty Fifteen” theme a few days ago. The old theme was getting a bit long in the tooth and required an ugly plugin to be make it mobile enabled.

I’m not totally happy with the “Twenty Fifteen” theme, but it will do until I find something I prefer. My main criteria is it has to be really plain. 🙂

Comments?

If anyone has any comments or suggestions I would be happy to hear them.

Cheers

Tim…

Updates:

  • Praveen : Mentioned the lack of direct links to the version-specific article pages. I missed them too, so I put them back in for larger browsers. On smaller devices they don’t show as they make the page look messy.
  • Frankly : Noticed the copy/paste was not working correctly. It turned formatted text into a single line and added a site URL on to it. This was down to an incorrect ShareThis.com setting for my sharing buttons. I flipped the switch and copy/paste is working again now.

UltraEdit v22.0

UltraEdit v22.0 has been released. You can see the new features here. For such a mature editor, it’s surprising when something new comes out that makes you take a step back. I think they’ve done just that in this release. The document map shows a miniaturized version of the page, making scrolling through large files really simple.

ultraedit22

I’m not sure if this is an idea they kicked from another editor, but this is the first time I’ve seen this and it’s really handy! Hopefully it will get added to the Linux and Mac versions soon.

Cheers

Tim…

Partitioning Enhancements in Oracle Database 12c Release 1

I was planning to cover this subject in a single article, but it got a bit bulky, so I split it down into 6 little articles.

I’ve also created a links page to bring them all together.

I guess you could call it a list of nice-to-haves, rather than something revolutionary, but I’m sure someone will come back to me saying one of them has changed their life! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Interstellar

I watched Interstellar last night at a mates house.

Where to start with this film?

  • Visually it is fantastic. Lots of epic scenes. Definitely great eye candy.
  • The story is pretty basic. I won’t give anything away but there’s nothing new here.
  • According to all the stuff on the net, it is scientifically on point.

What’s my gut feel?

  • Way too long. Lots of “setting the scene” and comparatively much less of the stuff you really want out of this type of film.
  • Crazy ape-shit ending. You will be sitting there thinking WTF?

Final thoughts?

Cheers

Tim…