Owls Count

Earlier this week saw the launch of a new website for British Orienteering. For reasons concerned with membership renewal the site has gone live before it is finished, which means that some features are missing or not fully working. First comment is that this is a big improvement on the old site - it looks much nicer and clearly a great deal of thought has gone into the new site. However, I have some concerns/problems and these will be mentioned in this post with suggestions on how the problems could be fixed. I am posting this here as it gives me the easiest way to include screen shots [1] to illustrate my points.

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I have had a while now and have decided to post a reflection on my two summer orienteering weeks - the O-Ringen and Spey2007. Before commenting on the two events I link to photo 1 and photo 2 of me on the run in on the fourth day of the O-Ringen and photo 1 and photo 2 of me on the run in on the second day of Spey2007.

A problem I have with the Scottish Six Days is the lack in variation in the courses. My course was about six kilometres each day and the winning times were: 38:11 - 49:35 - 42:39 - 39:25 - 46:54 - 41:00. At the O-Ringen there was a middle distance course and the winning times were: 34:57 - 43:01 - 23:24 - 31:26 - 37:08. The elite had a better programme at Spey2007, with a classic, two middle, and three long - something I would like, but I simply could not manage the total distance the elite covered over the six days.

In contrast Spey2007 had a better variation in terrain - sand dunes, moorland, varying types of forests. At the O-Ringen we ran three days on the same area and then had some variety on the final two days. Of course, having three days on similar terrain meant that I felt that by the third one I felt I had improved enough to orienteer reasonably well.

At the O-Ringen all the days were within walking distance of the campsite. This meant that once you were at the event you could leave the car where it was - or even get to the area by public transport and require no car at all. At Spey2007 getting to the areas meant a reasonable journey on most days.

I really enjoyed both events and the contrast between the two provided a good summer of orienteering. Now thoughts turn to planning summer orienteering trips for next year, and beyond!

Tip #6 : Enhancing WordPress administration: Whenever I update a WordPress blog I think how overly complicated the ‘Write Post’ page is. There are lots of different pieces that you could use - most of which I have never had cause to touch. The post linked to suggests using Clutter Free to improve matters and, having installed this plugin, I am impressed. The ‘Write Post’ page is now so much more simple.
From the same set of tips I also added WP-AddQuicktag, which allows me to add some more quicktags for the chunks I html I often use. The code, as linked to, needs a small edit to make it work on all update/edit pages. Edit the line:
if(strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], ‘post.php’) || strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], ‘page-new.php’) ) {
to be:
if(strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], ‘post.php’) || strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], ‘page.php’) || strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], ‘page-new.php’) || strpos($_SER VER['REQUEST_URI'], ‘post-new.php’) ) {

Related to this is the question: ‘WordPress Visual Editor - Do you Use It?‘ I do not, switching to the basic editor wherever possible,

The new version of WordPress, the software used for this blog, was released yesterday. I took the plunge and updated straight away. Everything seems to be up and fine, but if any of you notice a problem then let me know.

However, on upgrade I noticed a jump in database queries on page load - nearly double the previous level. I have made a few changes to the internals of my custom theme and this has improved the situation, but I think there are some more improvements possible. These changes should not be noticeable to anyone visiting this site.

Recently I decided that it would be useful to use a task manager. Several of my colleagues are using Remember the Milk and I decided to join them, since then we can share tasks when needed.

I was really impressed with the signup process. It makes sensible use of technology to tell the user whether the text they have input is correct for the field as the user fills it in. This is better than the user being sent to a check page, since it is often difficult to choose a unique username.

Also, a few months ago I was signing up on a site which used a different method for asking the user for his or her time zone. Rather than directly asking for the time zone it presented the user with a list of current times and asked for the correct one to be selected.