Category Archives: Website & Blog

Normal Service Will Be Resumed–Honest!

Posted on 2 February 2012 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
Flowers at the Botanical Gardens, near Chania, Crete
Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF-S17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | Date: 08-10-2010 09:20 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: 1 EV | Exp. Time: 1/80s | Aperture: 10.0 | Focal Length: 64.0mm (~103.7mm) | Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM

Apologies to regular readers of my blog for the delay since my last significant post. I’ve been very busy with a number of things: working overtime at National Grid, getting new consultancy contracts running, updating my Bibble plugin to work with the new version of the software, and generally battling the January blues… I started a post entitled “Reflections on 2011”, but it seems rather pointless now February’s arrived!

At least this morning I’ve managed to catch up slightly on my backlog of photo processing, and found this rather pretty shot from our trip to Crete in October 2010. I hope you enjoy it.

Normal service should be resumed in the near future. Here’s hoping! 🙂

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Website and Email Back

Posted on 26 July 2011 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Apologies to anyone who has had a problem with my website or sending me email over the last few days. I had a rogue backup process which was carefully filling the disk with old backups! Thanks to Webfusion Support for fixing things so efficiently.

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Book Review Restructuring

Posted on 20 April 2011 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

I’m in the process of restructuring my book reviews, integrating them better with my blog. Please bear with me if posts or old reviews appear to move or are replaced as I complete this process.

Update 13th May: the restructuring is complete, and you should see new reviews more fully integrated than previously. The process was non-trivial, and may spawn a blog post at some stage.
Thanks
Andrew

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Season’s Greetings

Posted on 24 December 2010 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
Coppertrees, Xmas 2010
Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF-S15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM | Date: 20-12-2010 08:34 | ISO: 100 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 2.5s | Aperture: 10.0 | Focal Length: 24.0mm (~38.9mm) | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM

A very warm “Merry Christmas” and best wishes for 2011, from all at Coppertrees to all the followers of my blog.

Andrew

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Integrating External Content with WordPress

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Posted on 12 August 2010 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

I’ve been developing andrewj.com for about 15 years, and although I’m not that prolific I’ve built up quite a lot of content.

I recently converted my blog from an old bespoke (= “custom”, for my American friends) solution to one based on WordPress. However, this created a problem, in that the WordPress model is to hold all content in the database, and that wasn’t the right model for me.

Firstly, I have a number of articles which are very long for a blog post, and I had no interest in restructuring them. I also didn’t want to break external links to the existing articles.

Next, I decided that I wanted the freedom to continue to write in that style. Some of my writing takes several weeks, and it works for me to draft it as separate HTML pages. I also sometimes want to include active content or multiple images, and I don’t want to create a large and unwieldy WordPress database full of such stuff.

Finally, my online photo galleries are managed and generated using Jalbum, and I wanted to find a way of neatly integrating single images into my blog, complete with the watermarks and metadata extraction which Jalbum manages so well, without duplicating that functionality in WordPress.

This is probably typical of many older web sites, but WordPress doesn’t really embrace the integration of external content. This article describes how I solved this problem, and a WordPress plugin I have developed to make my solution reusable.

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The Big Blog Split

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Posted on 11 July 2010 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Well, maybe not exactly a split as such, but a new structure. “Thoughts on the World” is a pretty eclectic mix of professional, personal, humour and photography-related content. However, one reader who follows mainly my “professional” content expressed a wish to see this separate from the more personal stuff. Given that I’m about to add more photography and review content to the blog, it seemed reasonable to try and meet that request.

I have therefore now created a number of new “views” of my blog, and a number of specialist feeds, as follows:

For more details, visit my Blog Views and Feeds page.

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New Blog Now Live – Please Update Your Feed

Posted on 20 June 2010 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Hi,

My new blog is now live. This allows a lot more flexibility, including commenting etc.

Please can you make sure you are taking your RSS feed from one of the following:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThoughtsFromAndrewJohnston (preferred)

https://www.andrewj.com/blog/index.php/feed/ (straight from my site)

I still need to update some of the links to longer old articles, so please bear with me if these are a bit odd over the next few days. Also you may see some duplicate items in the Feedburner feed – if so, please ignore these, and they should clear shortly.

Thanks, and enjoy the new blog.

Andrew

See http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThoughtsFromAndrewJohnston
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Lots of News

Posted on 16 June 2010 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Quite a lot of news…

Migration of our web sites and email to the new hosting server is almost complete. See previous article/rant for some of my findings. After some initial frustration with my hosting provider (WebFusion) when I discovered the
limitations of their new Linux shared hosting services compared with the old one, I have to say a big “Thank You” for their efficiency in finding a better solution for me, and providing me with effective technical support to get it up and running.

If you do have any problems with our sites or email, let me know…

I’m currently developing a new blog, based on WordPress. This will make it easier to post “on the fly” than with the current solution, hand-carved from XML and ASP (now PHP).

When the new blog is running, I’m going to have a regular post for fans of my photography, so you can see what I’ve been working on. In the meantime, I’ve updated my gallery pages so they are a bit easier to navigate, bookmark and search.

And talking about my photography, I’ve recently been accepted by the Alamy stock agency. So please all rush at once and spend lots of money licensing my pictures for all those uses you’ve dreamed of but were too polite to mention 🙂

See you soon,

Andrew

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Website Returns, and New Photos

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Posted on 6 March 2009 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Apologies for the state of the website over the last week – a problem with the hosting server. I seem to have worked around it for now, so thanks for your patience and those who alerted me to the problem.

My photography zone has been updated with images from my trip to Maine, Vermont and New York last autumn, and from the dramatic Winter weather in the UK. Photos from my trip to the Venice carnivale should start to follow shortly.

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Photography Blog

Posted on 25 July 2008 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

I’ve now created a separate category for photography-related blog posts, so if you’re interested you can track these separately

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My Photo Gallery is Now Live

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Posted on 4 July 2007 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

I’ve always had a strong interest in photography, both as a practical tool to record our experiences in life, and as an art form. Fans of the Coppertrees Calendar will know how I’ve had great fun capturing friends, family and travel over the years.

I’ve also always had great admiration for those photographers whose work can really move the emotions, particularly the great landscape photographers like Ansel Adams. Taking good representational photographs is hard enough, but establishing a composition which can both emotionally inspire the viewer and satisfy the critics is even harder.

Over the last year or so I’ve been rediscovering photography with a Digital SLR, and on my new photography pages you’ll find some of my efforts, plus (in coming weeks) some hints, tips and tools for the D-SLR photographer.

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