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WordPress gallery – Pagination plugin

For a while now I’ve been wondering what to do with my motorsport photography. I upload 3 or 4 images to my flickr account but I don’t want to flood it with dozens of photos as people will get bored. So I need somewhere to host all the rest of the images.

The standard wordpress gallery works pretty well BUT it doesn’t paginate. So if I have 150 photos to put in a post the page becomes huge!
I decided to have a go at fixing this with a custom wordpress plugin. It’s the first one I’ve written but it works really well.
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Vbulletin Spam WIN

I got an email tonight from google, a bit of a worrying email, warning me that I was displaying google adsense adverts on pages with pornographic content.

A little bit concerning until I noticed the link they sent me was to a domain I bought 2 years ago. I bought it to set another car club up on, installed vbulletin and then lost interest. The main site had a “coming soon” page on – but if you visited /forums/ you got the vbulletin forum.

The site had over 15,000 spam bots registered, posting mostly russian porn. Over 160,000 pornographic posts to be more accurate.

The site was using 2.2gb on my server and transferring 28gb per month in bandwidth. EEK!

So quick pro-tip to all you web devs and server admins out there, don’t leave vbulletin running unmonitored! Haha

Web development.. the wrong way

For most of my career as a web developer, I have been re-writing web systems that already exist for various companies.
Most of those web systems have some sort of in-company processes assigned to them, such as order processing, despatching, etc…

I like to view re-developing existing systems as a point of change for the better, where existing processes within a company can be analysed and optimised. That way the company can save some money, and everyone can be a little bit happier in there job.

However I always find that other staff within companies are reluctant to change, they know how they currently work and they want to stick to that, even when the current processes within the company are slow, laborious and in places just plain wrong.

I don’t understand why other people find it so hard to step back, look at what they’re doing, and see where they can save time and stress with just a few changes!
This is the most frustrating part of my life, I find it very hard to motivate myself to model web applications around company processes that I can see are wrong.

In order to save myself from a heart-attack mid way through my 30′s I’m not sure if I need to find a way to stop caring about improving the companies I work at, or whether I should try to migrate my job away from writing apps into some kind of business processes analyst?

For now I’ll stick to drinking JD every night until I stop caring :(

Creating a wordpress theme from scratch

I’ve been meaning to get around to making a wordpress theme from scratch for ages.. but I never seem to have the time and always just find one thats near enough so just bastardise that for my own blog :(

But one thing I did notice is that the documentation around wordpress isn’t brilliant and there is a serious lack of guides for creating your own themes

Today I stumbled upon this guide which I’ve had a read through and it’s brilliant

Goes right through from designing a layout, slicing it up and eventually coding the individual pages
If you are half decent at html/css you should be able to make a theme from scratch using this guide, big thumbs up from me to the original author!