Simon Wheatley

Category: Work

  • Some good ideas from the government

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    Via Simon Dickson, I’ve come across Tom Watson’s1 post on Power of Information: New taskforce and speech. Some things quotes sprang out at me:

  • Simple Apache redirects

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    If you look around the web, you’ll see endless tutorials on how to configure Apache to do redirects using mod_rewrite. Undoubtedly mod_rewrite is a powerful way to control access and redirects on your Apache server, and it is enabled on many web hosts, but before you dive into the complexity and regular expressions of mod_rewrite,…

  • How about calling a spade a spade, eh, HMRC?

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    Rather shamefully for a web professional, January was the first time I used the online tax return provided by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. It’s great, a massive improvement on the pencil and eraser, abacus calculator and calculation sheet, of old. Today I went back into the My Account area, to check that some payments…

  • Great day at Barcamp Manchester

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    Barcamp Manchester, held yesterday at the MEN Media HQ, was great and made it clear to me once again that there’s a great web community up here in the North. A very exciting place to be at the moment, and I’m convinced things here will only get better. Barcamps are always an opportunity to meet…

  • Daniel Morris: UK Teens & the Web at Barcamp Manchester

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    Dan Morris’ session on UK Teens & the Web was one of my favourites of the day, which you can see from my frantically scribbled notes (below). Dan’s working for a semi-autonomous BBC unit which produces online content for teenagers, and had some really interesting insights to share from his experience and some research they’d…

  • Confluence link to the current page

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    For my current Confluence project, I’ve used Adaptavist Theme Builder to customise the View/Upload Attachments screen and I wanted to add an explicit link “back” to make it easier for users to return to the current page. I could have used Javascript, and so much of Confluence depends on client side scripting that it probably…

  • Confluence links to create pages from templates

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    I’m working with Confluence to create a wiki for travel agents can record their research holidays. It is hoped that their colleagues can use first hand experiences of the resorts to promote them. We wanted to have an easy and structured way for people to add pages, for which we’re using Confluence’s templates feature. Templates…

  • I’ve made a useless WordPress plugin…

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    …which you might find useful if you develop plugins with system requirements, like a particular version of PHP. This plugin is a simple proof of concept for a method of messaging the user when they activate a plugin.

  • Exclude Pages now hides child pages where appropriate

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    Exclude Pages (my WordPress plugin which allows you to remove pages from site navigation) now handles child pages more gracefully. Previously, when you excluded a page any child page would drop down a level, taking it’s place… not what I wanted, and not something I’d noticed because I was only dealing with single level navigation…