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XDIORG – Infrastructure for accountable networks
“XDI.ORG is an international non-profit public trust organization governing open public XRI and XDI infrastructure. XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier) and XDI (XRI Data Interchange) are open standards for digital identity addressing and trusted data sharing developed at OASIS, the leading XML e-business standards body. XRI and XDI infrastructure enables individuals and organizations to establish persistent, privacy-protected Internet identities and form long-term, trusted peer-to-peer data sharing relationships.”
WordPress tweak to manage posts admin, filter and show custom field
This tweak will change the “All Posts” page in the administration section of a WordPress site.
It adds the ability to filter the post list based on a custom field that has been used in any of the posts at any time. Continue reading
Low-cost Information Management, Communications and Collaberation Tools
Although much of the work I do is for very large organisations and extremely costly projects, being an adopted Yorkshire-man, I’ve always an eye open for a bargain! More seriously, there are many small to medium sized businesses and charities that cannot afford big IT budgets but that still are crying out for good information management, communications and collaboration tools. In this article, I’ve tried to highlight a few tools that I think are worth looking at.
I’ve not included anything in this article that requires a monthly or annual cost. All the tools here are available for free at least with limited features. The feature lists given are for the free versions with paid-for key features noted where appropriate. I also note if any of the web sites are blocked by typical enterprise firewalls.
There is a lot more than what I’ve shared here, I’ll try to update this article from time-to-time. Continue reading
Make the WordPress visual editor content look more like the finished output
Content in the visual post editor (TinyMCE) in WordPress doesn’t look that much like the finished article by default. Thankfully WordPress includes a style sheet that we can use to make things better.
The editor style sheet is called “editor-styles.css” and can be found in the root folder of the active theme along side the main style sheet “styles.css”.
There is a really simple way to make the editor content look more like the live and to include all of the styles from the main style sheet. Simply include the main style sheet at the top of the editor style sheet:
/* Start with the the theme styles */
@import url("style.css");
Then add an override for the content width to match your theme and force the background to be white (or to match your theme):
html .mceContentBody {
max-width: 640px;
background-color: white;
}
And there you have it. You might note that the editor style sheet for the twentyeleven theme is vastly more complex than this but I suspect that nearly all of the settings are already in the main style sheet and so are no longer required. You may of course find that you need to add a few more tweaks to cater for “edge cases”.
You might also note a number of articles on the web that suggest that you need to do this by an addition to your functions.php file like this:
// @since 1.2.0 IT, add theme styles to TinyMCE visual editor
add_action(‘after_theme_setup’,‘jk_theme_setup’);
function jk_theme_setup(){
add_editor_style('style.css');
}
But in fact, this isn’t required if we simply change the editor style sheet as suggested which I think is much easier to manage and maintain.
Microsoft Word Wildcard and Regular Expression Search and Replace
One often missed aspect of the Find dialog in Microsoft Word is the ability to use wild cards.
In fact, Word not only has the simple wild cards (* and ?) but uses simplified Regular Expression (REGEX) searching.
In this article, I’ve put together a number of examples of advanced finds and replaces that I’ve found useful. I’ll update it from time to time. Continue reading
New page added to blog: Privacy & Disclosure
Finally got round to properly publishing this page that declares the site’s privacy policies and disclosure of intent. This is also linked to from every page as per EU ”Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003″ and Google requirements.
Also added an HTML 5 logo.
Enterprise System Design and Accessibility
Most web designers are well aware of the need to design with accessibility in mind and that this is a legal requirement in many countries.
Not so many IT architects and designers who deal with internal, enterprise systems are aware, though, that these laws and requirements also apply to internal systems.
Recently I’ve yet again seen a number of dreadfully designed user interfaces (UI) for enterprise systems that most certainly don’t meet usability standards let alone accessibility standards! Continue reading
Coping With Google Reader Changes
If you are a Google Reader user, you will have noticed the latest design change and probably been amazed at how poor the new layout is. What you may not have immediately noticed is just what you’ve lost.
In this article I look at what has been lost and what you might be able to do about it, at least in the short term. Continue reading
New Blog Design Page
I’ve added a new page to this blog explaining the design of the site.
Apple iOS 5 and iCloud, The verdict
So I’ve been using iOS 5 on both iPad 1 and iPhone 4 for a couple of days now and I thought I’d follow up on my previous post about what I thought would impact me. Continue reading