WordPress AJAX Store Finder

I’m pleased to announce that my first WordPress plugin is now available, exclusively on CodeCanyon.

It takes minutes to install, add your first stores and create your own store finder page, and users, anywhere in the world can instantly find their nearest store from a postcode or address.

The whole plugin, which is powered by the Google Maps API, is available for just $20USD (About £13), and once purchased, is ready to download, install and use instantly.

• Have a try with the live demo here
• See the complete features list, buy and download the plugin here

And finally, here is a screen cast I prepared, demonstrating exactly how it works!

Create Your Own WordPress Theme from an HTML Template

My WordPress theme article, which I started writing as part of my resolution, has been published by Sitepoint.com this morning!

It details how to start with your HTML template, and finish up with a fully working WordPress theme!

Click here to take a look!

Downtime

Ok, time for a confession from me now.

I broke my blog a week or so ago. Without going into lots of detail about my server setup, I messed up my WHM settings, suspended all of my sites, and locked my account out.

Everything’s back now, I just need to catch up on a few little bits, including my latest resolution review, which I completed two days ago!

Resolution Review 04/04

A whole month on from my last review day, and in 15 words;

Academic stuff is pretty good, my new camera boosts the creativity and fitness, just, no!

It took a lot of work to get that within 15 words!

My School Work

Last month, I said that I would finish my notes, and publish my bookmark library.

Well, the notes are pretty much complete! There are a few little bits to fix, and I want to get them checked, but the rest of it is looking good! In each folder, I’ve got;

• A section for each main area of the syllabus, containing my nice notes, a few pages of Collins Revision Notes, the WJEC notes in the case of Chemistry, and another teacher’s notes (he doesn’t teach me, but his notes are fantastic) in the case of Maths
• Resource material, like the Physics formula sheet, and the Chemistry periodic table. I’m trying to get used to the material which gets used in the exams
• Homework, in it’s own section. Teachers seem to prefer homework filed with the topic that it is related to, but for me, it’s no good. I want to see my notes about the topic and a nice worked example, not thirty questions I was set and worked through. It’s there if I want any marked worked answers, or any questions with answers that I can work towards without lots of working.
• Past Papers, which I want to do more of. I’m filing my past papers in plastic wallets, with a sticker on showing the date, stapling the paper, and then, as I practice them on lined paper, I can file the attempt away with the paper, and look back at the answers later.

The other main aim I set was to release my link library. While most of the code is finished, it’s very thin in some areas, and there are code alterations left to make! There’s another post on the way, which introduces the link library, and explains what I’m hoping to achieve.

Studious Creativity

Quantitatively, compared to my original aims, I’m failing massively in terms of the studious creativity, where I’ve done some development on my revision aids, but not actually finished them. These are going on my list to do this week. I’ve done some other things, making myself some easy to read revision notes, but it’s not what I’d originally planned!

Pure Creativity

I’m doing rather well in my attempts at the pure creativity. My new blog design is all published, and there are only a few tiny changes left to make, I’ve got two commercial sites nearing completion, and I’m going through the final phases before my WordPress article is published.

I’ve also got myself a brand new digital SLR, and I’ve started uploading my pictures to DeviantArt. I’m just moving accounts, so I’ve got a fresh new one containing all my new stuff, and nothing that’s three or four years old, once this is done, I’ll get another post on here, and maybe a link on the right.

Fitness

Well, as I suggested earlier, I’m not doing well at the fitness at all, but I’m still cycling a lot, at least twice each week.

This Week

So, it’s time to break it down even further, I’m clearly not managing to make progress when I set targets over a whole month, so maybe, I need to do them over a shorter period. I’m setting myself five aims for the period between now and the end of the week;

• Completely organise my folders ready for school – not much left to do here
• Setup the WordPress post template for the revision aids that I’ll be publishing, with a focus on making them easy to navigate to and download
• Formally announce the link library, although I’m not quite ready to publish it just yet due to technical constraints
• Publish some of my revision notes, which I’ve played with on The Student Room’s Wiki. I wrote a long page outlining WJEC Ph2.4; Matter, Forces and the Universe. I’m going to do one in each subject for now
• Get my “productivity whiteboard” up on the wall and start using it for things like this, or I’ll just end up forgetting them!

I would list something fitness-related, but thanks to the weather, I’ll leave it and see how it goes. I’m not a gym sort of person (yet), or a very strong swimmer, so I’ll wait and see what the weather does.

I’ll have a very quick review of these on Monday, and see how they’re going, and depending on how well it works, I may set myself some more for next week.

Finally, I did write this on the fourth, I just absent-mindedly left it as a draft and forgot to proof-read and publish it until the sixth. Silly me.

New Website Design

This evening, I’m launching the latest set of updates to my website.

This site, in it’s current form is very new, and I’m really experimenting with how different things work, so, I’m going to be making some changes, but making them very slowly!

Firstly, tonight, the first few little changes arrive, these can be summarised as follows;

• New Stylesheet – I’ve spent a while on some new colours, a clearer logo and a some more nice little alterations to the existing CSS, although in the near future, I may decide to go down a different route again
• Simpler Homepage – A number of the widgets on the left are gone! This should make everything a bit simpler to use and a bit easier on the eye. Again, there might need to be more alterations to this, but we’ll see.
• Bookmarking Tools - When I launched the original design, I was very aware of the not very nice strip of 12 little squared with horrible little icons on, some services weren’t listed, and some that were a bit irrelevant were, so I was a bit stuck! I’ve decided to replace this with the new AddThis button, which should hopefully be much more user friendly. It includes bookmark and print buttons, and five more social options, including Delicious and Twitter, and the ‘More’ button, which opens a panel listing other services

In the Pipeline

The next few major plans for the site are;

• Blog Categories and Tags – I’m redeveloping the categories and tags, as sometimes they don’t get used at all, and others, maybe too much. Better, more relevant category pages should hopefully make this a bit more effective. Until then, the ‘Blog’ link is gone from the top, as it feels like a bit of a waste of space hen the same content is on the home page.
• About Me – The ‘About’ section needs lots of work. Hopefully, a few high quality pages of rich information will help sort this out. Now all I need is something to include
• Buzzwords – My own little annoyance now, but I want to start linking from within site content more, as I feel these are often the most useful. I’m looking at writing a wordpress plugin to look at the context of references, and link them automatically. It’s a possibility, and something to experiment with.
• Delicious – I’m hoping to deepen the links to my Delicious link library, which is pretty much all academic stuff at the moment
• Print Stylesheet – I’m adding a printer-friendly CSS file, as I like things printed! There’s no major rush on this one, I’d like to get it right!
• Contact Me – Really basic, the LinkedIn and Facebook links are here to stay for the moment (I’m wondering if they’d be better placed at the top though…), but I feel like a contact form would be good too!

This is an, agile-style, work in progress. I’m going to start working on the next couple of features now, and  as soon as one is stable and bug-free (as the new style finally is!), I’ll push it out, and add a note on the blog to say so.

I’d be interested to hear any comments about what works and what doesn’t…

Dropbox

I have to confess, I have a new favourite toy, and I’m being really quick to tell all of my colleagues about this in school!

It’s called Dropbox, it’s powered by Amazon S3 for all the geeky types like me, and it is the ultimate tool to have exact copies of your work (for school or otherwise) at home, on your laptop, on your iPhone (with a brilliant browser), and on the computer in school. And it’s free.

I absolutely love it. I’m sitting at my desk right now, next to my bookcase, with all my folders , textbooks and past papers next to me, and with my MacBook in front of me. With everything at my disposal, if I create a nice new revision aid on my Mac, I save it normally, just to my Dropbox folder, which shows up in my personal folder.

Next, in the background, the Dropbox application running silently uploads it to my Dropbox, which is automatically synced on other computers. So, when I go downstairs, on my old Mac Mini, by the time I can open up the folder, the new version of the document will have been synced.

The next day, in school, I go to the Dropbox website, and as soon as I log in, all my folders and files are there, ready to work on, exactly as they were on both the previous computers, a couple of clicks will let me open any, then I can upload a new one from the website too, without any problems with clashing filenames.

There is a Windows application available too, which should suit most people out there, as well as a Mac app, and Linux version available. The only platform I haven’t mentioned is the iPhone OS, the app works on iPhone and iPod Touch, and when it’s connected syncs the folder structure and filenames, then, any files which you ‘favourite’ get saved locally, so you can access them offline.

By default, all new users with free accounts get 2GB, which isn’t much in computing terms, but is ample for school work. You get a nice folder, which you can access from wherever you like over the web, from any iPhone OS device, and use it exactly the same as a normal folder, on as many computers as you like.

One final feature, that really sealed the deal for me, is the sharing options. I’ve been testing this with a couple of other students in Biology, and it has been quite simply brilliant so far. I created a folder in my own biology folder, called ‘Biology Shared’, and then invited the other users to the folder using their e-mail address. Once they accept the invitation, the folder shows up in their Dropbox too, and they have the same access to it as you! We’re currently sharing notes and revision material, which is proving really useful!

Overall, I am as much in love with Dropbox as I ever can be (and there’s talk of an API, which will only sweeten the deal) and it looks like it could really boost my own organisation, and in turn my school work in general, my resolutions will love it! If you sign up using my link, you can have 250MB of bonus space too!

I have no need to know where my USB pen is at all any more!

Resolution Review 03/03

So, it’s here already, my first review of the resolutions I set myself last month.

Since last month, when I announced the resolutions, I’ve released a copy of the Standard Model, designed to work well on projectors, meaning everything can be zoomed into and out of, while it’s still one big spider-diagram, I’ve published a lovely sheet to help me remember what my resolutions are, and how I’m going to achieve them, and I’ve started work on a new design for the blog and an extended article about creating themes for WordPress.

So, with it being 03/03 today, I met with my resolution partner to review how the first month had gone, the general feeling was that, unlike a lot of people who start resolutions, we hadn’t totally given up within this first month, but, at the same time, we weren’t really able to show any significant improvement, or quantify our achievement at all.

While I’m not falling behind at all, I’m finding that the fun and creative side of my studies is sometimes not taking priority over the more fun tasks of creating revision aids and similar, which I did try to promise myself it would.

Before our next review on 04/04, I’m going to;

Studies

• Completely organise all of my folders, and get them all checked
• Make some substantial progress on, and publish my academic bookmark library

Studious Creativity

• Publish two of my new revision aids, although both will still be in beta
• Following from the reorganisation of my notes, publish my findings regarding how it goes, and the most appropriate and effective way to organise work like that

Pure Creativity

• Re-work my blog design. I started this last month, but never got very far, so I’m going to finish it, and publish it within the next fortnight
• Publish my extended article on creating WordPress themes, aimed at complete beginners with a bit of HTML and CSS knowledge, like I was once

Fitness

• Have a serious review of my lifestyle, especially my diet and the amount of sleep I get, and put something in  place to fix this
• To fit my fitness activities around my normal activities, I’m going to try going to the pool before school, aiming to be in the changing rooms at around 7AM, when a lot of my peers are in bed

I’m still aiming to do something in each of these categories every week, each is an aspect of the main goals on my cheat sheet.

I’ve got a bit of commercial web design to get done too, not too much, but enough for it to eat into my pure creativity time, so I’ve gone for tasks that I’ve already started, where I can put as much work as I choose into them, without compromising on quality.

The next key revelation, is that this morning, on my resolution review day, I also received my annual report from school. Overall, very positive, and I’ve been able to identify specific points I need to fix. Over the next few days, I’m going to be reviewing the specifics of these, and I’ll follow this up with a summary on the blog.

So, I’m still not going after any numerically-based scheme as I was so tempted, but I’m aiming to complete, all ten big tasks listed here, and four little tasks (one per strand of the goals), per week, hopefully, if this works, by my next review day (04/04 of course!), I’ll be able to quantify my performance pretty well!

WJEC By3 Biology Practical Exam Folding Prompts

Following on from the (exclusively personal) success of my resolution cheatsheet, (although I must admit the mistake of not printing enough, I’ll sort that out over the weekend), I’m starting to get a bit of a thing for these simple, portable designs which are there solely to serve as a reminder of something.

With my AS Biology Practical exam coming up, I’ve been going over some old write-ups from class, what I did well with, and what I failed miserably at. There aren’t any patterns, so I need something short and snappy to remind me.

I’ve looked at lots of mnemonics, but for the shear quantity of information, there’s no way I can momorise it all like little facts. I needed a new idea.

While I was preparing for my Ph1 Physics exam, I created an 8-page booklet out of a single A4 sheet, and wrote out the derivation of a SUVAT equation on each, then, whenever I had a spare few minutes, I could get it out and start flicking through it. I did this a bit late, and couldn’t learn anything, and relied solely on common sense in the exam, but the idea seemed to work pretty well.

So, while I’m trying to learn my By3 points; what gets marks and how to generally succeed, I’ve put together a new one, which lists through the key areas of the By3 mark scheme, and what needs doing for each. While it’s not allowed into the exam, it’s something that needs learning, but in theory, it should be relatively easy to learn in this format.

I’m releasing a PDF version, which is all ready to print onto A4 paper, then fold neatly into a booklet shape, the booklet is small enough to slip into a pocket. It isn’t cheating, and doesn’t break any rules (although it shouldn’t go into the actual exam). This is only the same information as is available from WJEC directly.

Download WJEC By3 Biology Prompts (PDF, 100KB)

I’m rather interested to get any feedback on this!

The Blog Themes

I’m currently working on the following, simultaneously, which may seem a touch ironic!

First, in line with all of my new branding, I’ve got a delicious new WordPress theme! It’s similar to this one, however makes better use of my brand colours and I think it’s generally a bit cleaner and nicer.

Secondly, I’m planning on releasing a new WordPress theme tutorial soon, which will be my first proper tutorial, which I would really appreciate feedback on. As you may have  guessed, part of the reason for leaving the new theme for my blog is so that I can do work on the tutorial around it.

So, expect the theme some time next week, hopefully around about Tuesday, but I can never be sure with this sort of thing, I’ll probably have a last minute urge to change everything, which pushes it all back several months.