Paul Joyce - Swindon Web Developer

Broken WP dashboard and stats panel

Paul Joyce — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 09:54:28 +0000

Another week has gone by and another post needs to be written to explain why some people are probably seeing errors on their WordPress dashboard. Having trouble seeing your site stats from Jetpack, or being asked “Are you human?” … likelihood is your suffering the same Heart Internet ‘problems’ I am. Have you recently started seeing this [...]

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Securing WordPress: 4 tips to help lock it down

Paul Joyce — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:38:36 +0000

With the recent spate of brute force attacks hitting WordPress installations around the world, its not surprising that hosting companies such as Heart Internet have taken some steps in protecting its users, even if it does raise a few eyeborws. But what can we, as users of WordPress, do to help protect our own blogs or [...]

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Suspicious www.webhostingstatus.com popup for WordPress Admins

Paul Joyce — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 13:24:40 +0000

Like me you’ve probably seen a lot of activity in the media recently about WordPress being targeted by hackers for weaknesses. Well today I looked at my WP installs dotted around the virtual world and saw that some of them had a suspicious popup appear before I could log in to the admin section. The [...]

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How to order and group custom WordPress posts by their custom taxonomies

Paul Joyce — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 13:56:39 +0000

Working on a project for a client, I needed to group an archive of custom post types by their categories. To complicate things further the categories were implemented as a custom taxonomy. On top of this the taxonomies had to be ordered alphabetically. After a lot of experimenting with loops and different configurations of arguments, [...]

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Updating Chromium on Debian 6 (Squeeze)

Paul Joyce — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 11:50:37 +0000

Switching between Ubuntu and Debian machines, you notice the benefits of both system OS’ quite quickly. The first major thing you’ll probably have noticed with Debian 6 (Squeeze) is that its bundled with Chromium. After a bit of use though, you’ll also notice how unstable Chromium is. Lots of web pages freezing up, tabs not [...]

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Clarification of Instagram’s T&C’s

Paul Joyce — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:27:27 +0000

Earlier this week I’m sure most people heard about Instagram’s new terms and conditions document being released. The short of its legal rambling nature, it sounded like they’re legally preparing themselves to be able to sell your photos, without your consent or a penny of compensation. Well at 10pm on the 18th of December, they [...]

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Whats new in WordPress 3.5

Paul Joyce — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 13:41:26 +0000

This week we finally got our hands on version 3.5 of the WordPress CMS. It was way back in the middle of June that we saw the previous release, ‘Green’ version 3.4, boasting new Twitter integration etc. So what new features does ‘Elvin’ version 3.5 give us? Here’s a quick review of some of the [...]

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Font Rendering Explained

Paul Joyce — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 14:23:09 +0000

One aspect of web design that still limits everyday, is the horrendously poor choice of fonts we have at our finger tips. With only a handful of truly system universal fonts at our disposal, its not a surprise that font delivery systems such as Font Squirrel or TypeKit have appeared to fill in the holes. But [...]

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Learning LESS: Nesting Rules

Paul Joyce — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 10:07:57 +0000

So you’ve managed to complete the simple LESS setup, written a few variable declarations, even used some of the built in functions to calculate new stylesheet colours… but you’re still writing line after line of code. Is there something in LESS to simplify the amount you’re writing? Yes… thanks to nested rules! Ever seen something [...]

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Learning LESS: Maths + Colour Functions

Paul Joyce — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:45:03 +0000

Continuing from my previous article on setting up LESS to improve your stylesheet efficiency and control, this week I’ll be covering the use of operators and pre-built functions within LESS. If you remember correctly we can declare variables like: If you read the previous tutorial on variables, that shouldn’t be anything new. Mathmetical operators in [...]

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How to upgrade Ubuntu to 12.10 – Quetzal

Paul Joyce — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 10:28:28 +0000

The Quantal Quetzal release date, 18th October 2012, has been and gone, which means we can all upgrade Ubuntu to version 12.10, whoop! Sadly being super busy with work I’ve only just got round to doing it. Quetzal is largely an update to tackle graphical user interface changes, such as iconography, typography and the menu [...]

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TBBT Flash Mob & Les Miserables Vid

Paul Joyce — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 10:00:21 +0000

On this day, the 16th of November 2012, is the sun shining? Are the birds tweeting and the children playing in the streets? Unlikely, its cold and dull outside! Alas though the weekend is nearly here and I’ve put together a few more videos and pictures to cheer away those last few working hours of the [...]

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Salting passwords – how & why?

Paul Joyce — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:59:34 +0000

Our lives are now run by passwords. We’re forced to remember more passwords everyday it seems. How can developers secure passwords more securely? Why is salting passwords important and how does using salts improve the strength of stored passwords? Consider this; what happens if the online store you run is hacked and all your customers details lifted? Hopefully all [...]

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Facebook’s confirmation code too long? [Fix]

Paul Joyce — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 12:15:24 +0000

In the ever continuing saga of people not being able to use their SMS confirmation code from Facebook, a user of mine has submitted a solution on one specific bug; how to get the 8 digit SMS confirmation code to fit into the 6 character field. The code they send you is normally 6 digits long, which is [...]

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FWD: Movie Medley, Puppies & WWZ Trailer

Paul Joyce — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 11:23:05 +0000

As quite a few people seemed to like last weeks Friday Wind Down post, which had babies fighting dragons and Disney Vader, here’s another selection to beckon in the weekend with. Today we have more good movies than you’ll probably watch in your life, this little puppy melting hearts around the world (awwww) and something [...]

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Learning LESS: Setup + Variables

Paul Joyce — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 10:37:34 +0000

LESS is a programmable CSS language which combines the mechanics of variables, functions and operators all into a fully compliant and accessible stylesheet. If you’ve built a site from scratch, or just modified templates on platforms such as WordPress, Drupal or Magento, you’ll have come into contact with CSS files. The problem with these files is that common [...]

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FWD: Babies & Disney Vader

Paul Joyce — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 16:38:47 +0000

In what turns out to be quite a spontaneous and random blog post for the day, I thought I’d post a few light hearted things I found on the web pipes today: In what I’ve decided to dub… Friday Wind Down! First off, from a very brilliant and patient mind, one of my favourite animators and [...]

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Ubuntu won’t boot without USB stick

Paul Joyce — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 12:47:38 +0000

As some of you may remember, a few weeka ago I posted an article about installing Ubuntu from USB (If you can’t remember, check it out!), which explained how to get an ISO running on a machine without an optical device. Well it turns out that wasn’t entirely the end of the situation for some… [...]

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Trouble verifying your Facebook account (Page 2)

Paul Joyce — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 09:42:20 +0000

Back in 2011 I wrote an article about how to obtain your mobile confirmation code for Facebook’s API, if you haven’t read it before this article I’d recommend you do so. Needless to say there are still lots of people out there over a year later struggling to get their mobiles confirmed, both for the [...]

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[Fixed] Dreamweaver FTP Error: Timeout ‘Waiting for Server’

Paul Joyce — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 12:20:06 +0000

I’m not a regular user of Dreamweaver, I’ll admit that from the offset. I usually use a combination of Text Editor and FileZilla, but sometimes I’m on a Windows box and Dreamweaver is there, so once you know the keyboard shortcuts its easier to use the built in FTP features… when they work. I [...]

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