Chris Miller

I’ve been playing around with various social media sites lately, trying to integrate them so my wealth of assorted knowledge gets to as many of the various places as possible. My Twitter feed now updates my Facebook and Linkedin statuses; Last.fm scrobbled tracks appear here in the sidebar and on Facebook; Flickr photos appear here as well as on Facebook.

This got me to thinking about the types of people I connect to on each of these social media networking sites. In my eyes this blog serves a different purpose and has a separate target audience to my Linkedin or Facebook profiles.

In light of this I’m giving a rundown of the groups and categories of people I connect to via each of these sites and their envisioned usage in my eyes.

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The Finder is brilliant. It does exactly what it says on the tin. You can zoom around your filesystem and find things with relative ease; copy, cut, paste and move files. It does it all, but it lacks any batch renaming to help any of us who have the laborious task of renaming dozens, or worse, hundreds of files.

That’s where NameChanger comes in. NameChanger is a piece of free software from MRR Software. Basically it allows you to rename large batches of files with some simple pattern matching.

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I’ve not posted in ages. Sorry.

Just a quick post to say that I’m very impressed with the Sainsbury’s delivery service and web store, much more than the Tesco equivalent.

I got over £100 worth of groceries delivered within the one hour slot I picked, not the 2-3 hour slots that Tesco use, and everything was there, good quality and undamaged.

Not only that but having purchased over £100 worth of shopping the delivery cost is waived. So I managed to get a month worth of food and drink without the hassle of going shopping and somehow carting everything back.

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I spend a lot of time writing bespoke content management systems, a lot! I’m always trying to add some small, lightweight additions to make the user experience a little bit better. One means of doing this is by providing some better custom controls which give good user feedback and emulate similar offline controls.

One such control is a linear range control, catchy I know, which allows the user to select a value within a particular range with a given default value. An example of this may be selecting an ordering value for a blog post, Figure 1, ranging from say -100 to 100 with a default value of 0. Posts in our imaginary blog would be ordered by this ordering field ascending with 0 being the default value, resulting in posts being ordered automatically by date. Rather than using a plain text box to allow the user to enter the ordering value directly, subsequently giving us little or no control over the contents of the field until the form is submitted and no means to convey the nature of the field itself, we can create controls to manipulate the value ourselves.

Creating a custom control allows us to do a number of things that we just cannot do with a normal HTML form element:

• Display relevant information instead of certain values, such as showing Automatic at 0 in Figure 1
• Show when the upper and lower bounds are reached, for example at -100 and 100 as per our example
• Allow the user to reset the value to the default or previous setting
• Give some inkling into how the control should be used

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I’ve not blogged in a while, although I have been playing with this site, testing various themes that’re out there on the web. I tried numerous dark and light varieties, some heavy on design others not so much, many of the image heavy themes looked nice initially but lacked that overall niceness. I had finally settled on iNove but I’ve since decided that it was too cluttered. Short of making my own theme up, which I never manage to get all the way through, I thought it best to find a nice clean one on the web.

After hours of painful searching this evening I managed to decided upon using the Plainscape theme. I may well configure it slightly for this blog, I may even go as far as to add a header image, but let’s not get too adventurous!

So for the foreseeable future this blog will look nice, plain and simple (it’ll probably change when I get bored but it gives me something to blog about!).
- Chris