dpritchard.net ¦ misc

I thought I should take a moment to list a few things that people should note before linking to, downloading from, complaining about, or citing, this site. This idea sprung site Rui Carmo’s prudent stand about what he does and does not publish on the internet.

General Disclaimer:

• This site is published, edited and maintained by me. If you have a problem with something on this site then contact me. Or just get over it.
• If I publish something that sounds stupid, it is probably an original thought. If I publish something intelligent or helpful, then it is most likely not.
• The content on this site (especially the stupid-sounding, original, stuff) is covered by a Creative Commons by-nc licence. This includes any and all text, images, videos as well as any original site design and source code.
  Note, however, that the design of this site is based on Phu Ly’s Simpla Theme which is licenced under a by-sa licence and Textpattern (The CMS that drives this site) is licensed under the GPL.

Flickr / Gallery Policy:

• Sets of photos (from trips away etc.) will be uploaded in their entirety so that people who went with me on those trips can browse them.
• People can contact me if they want a copy of the full-resolution images, and I’ll post them a CD.
• Once everyone has received these CD’s (sometimes it takes a while for me to get around to this) then I will prune the set of photos down to my favourites only.
• I will not post pictures of people when these pictures can be used to personally identify that person, unless I get explicit permission from that person. It’s a privacy thing.
• If you want an image removed from either my Flickr page or this site, for whatever reason, then just contact me.

Two years ago I knew next to nothing about websites or even how to create one. Since then I have self-taught myself HTML, PHP, MYSQL and a little CSS.

Now designing and building websites is a part-time obsession.

I had wanted this site to be purely self-built. The theory was that it would be a good way to improve my coding skills and, although it would be pretty crappy to begin with, the site would improve slowly as my skills improved. Ultimately I had hoped to build some sort of database-driven site, from the ground-up.

The sad truth is that by the time I achieved that goal I would be a very old man and in the mean time I would have had to have managed the static pages of my site “manually”. Fortunately there are some enormously talented people out there who make their work available for us all to use and enjoy. I have tried most of the major players on the open-source CMS scene, but Textpattern is by far my favourite. It has a reasonably steep learning curve, but once you get over that it is an awesomely powerful platform.

So what you see here is a compromise. Primarily this site is still a proving ground for my skills as a self-taught website builder, but now this happens around an organised core of content.

Most of that content will be boring stuff. You know, the sort of stuff that appeals to me and I am likely to forget. My blog especially will probably just contain random uninteresting information. From time to time I might post up something that could be a useful reference for other people, scientific methods, computer-related how-to’s, stuff like that. Things like that will probably be posted to the articles section.

Regards,
D

Info about me

Contact Me

If you want to contact me, please email me: dpritchard [at] xtra [dot] co [dot] nz

Smart kids will realise that the [at] and the [dot]‘s should be replaced with appropriate punctuation. The hope is that dumb kids and email-skimming robots will not be able to figure this out.

Regards,
D

Display of categories (presentation > forms > default) has been commented out untill I can find a way of conditionally excluding categories if none are present. That random comma that makes it’s way into the markup even when there are no categories for the article drives me nuts. mdm_if_category (or gho_if_category, whatever) seems like a good option, but the link to the plugin seems to be dead.

UPDATE: The author name is also commented out. Probably forever. No one needs to see my name on every single post.

This is just a little list that I will try and update when I install new TXP plugins:

• vdh_flickr
• ob1_modified
• Beginning

Here is a list of plugins that I have tried but, for whatever reason (usually I’m too dumb to work them), I have uninstalled them:

• rss_unlimited_categories