Tag Archives: Southanuk

And just where have you been?

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Hello all! Yes I am alive, just life and stuff has got in the way recently.

 

So what have I been up to?

My Protein I studiedFor those who might not know, I’ve just come to the end of my BSc after 4 years. After all those years of strife, I graduated earlier this year. The sense of relief to actually hold the confirmation letter in my hand was great. I had a great time over those 4 years and (cliché as it may sound) changed me for the better.

Even after all that, I thought it’d be a clever idea to go on and do a MSc. This time round its Bioinformatics. “Why Bioinformatics?” I hear you screaming from the top of your lungs. Well, my final year project was an in silico analysis into a protein using homology based modelling techniques for both secondary and tertiary structure (Wiki if confused). This lead to me becoming rather interested in bioinformatics, hence my choice in Masters. After doing my BSc in Medical Genetics, Bioinformatics is a big change in direction for me and getting my head around things like Perl and R is taking some getting use to.

As to the future, I’m not all too sure, I’d like to do something like Genomics or Epigenetics for a PhD but knowing me I’ll probably change my mind a million times before settling on something. Lets see what this year brings first.

 

Wait a minute…

As I probably should have mentioned at the beginning of the post, if you couldn’t tell, I’ve revamped SouthanUK for the umpteenth time. This time round it shares some of the features from previous iterations but the focus this time is less on tweets, more on content. I came to the conclusion that sifting through millions of pages to find posts was not the best idea so now the tweets have been banished from the main index of pages and are now searchable if you so wish. The top 5 or so tweets are available to view at the top of the index page only. Follow me on twitter for latest news and ramblings.

Theme refresh

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Just a quick little post to say to have a look at my new redesigned page templates for the Podcast and for Twitter posts.

If you can’t be bothered to click here are some pictures;


Well that was weird – WordPress encoding

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Seems the site decided it was time that it shouldn’t encode the site properly.

utf8-whatisthat

Since Southanuk is a relatively old WordPress installation [Around 2006] it was using an old character set, namely latin_1. Converted it to UTF8 and all is now good and properly displaying. Have a few celebratory ‘ , – s.

 

For others having the same problem with WordPress not encoding pages properly, I recommend the bbWP2UTF8 plugin. Its very simple to use and is a lot easier than this method, although saying that, it may work if the plugin doesn’t.

[edit]

Well something went wrong very shortly after I had posted this, post numbers weren’t auto-incrementing. Should be all fixed. Also discovered a very nice MySQL command to help convert those troublesome characters to UTF8:

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME = replace(ROWNAME,'’','\'');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'…','...');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'–','-');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'“','"');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'â€Â','"');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'‘','\'');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'•','-');

update DBNAME

set ROWNAME= replace(ROWNAME,'‡','c');

[Source]

GEF follows shortly and possibly something on Monday if I can get it to work.

Southanuk Mobile – WPTouch and Android

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So recently you may have noticed I bought myself a brand new HTC Desire. Since then I’ve been striving to get this site to display properly in the web browser.

 

SouthanukAndroid

To achieve this I used the fantastic WPTouch made by BraveNewCode. A very simple and easy to use plugin that requires hardly any configuration. Its very easy to add new user agents of websites I wanted to target and looks great too! You can also integrate your Twitter account into it using their other plugin WordTwit [Unfortunately I don’t use that on this blog, but I’m sure its up to the standard of WPTouch.]

 

To try it out on your mobile device, point your camera to this QR code and give it a scan, or just enter m.southanuk.co.uk to view it also.

[qrcodetag]https://m.southanuk.co.uk[/qrcodetag]

New features – Facebook like and Disqus

Featured Articles SouthanUK General No Comments

What’s all this you say? Well Southanuk today has some new features that should make your stay much more inviting and interactive.

 

Facebook’s new “Like” button

fblike

As announced by Facebook at the recent F8 conference in the USA, the new like button can be easily added to web pages and adds instant integration with the ever popular social networking site.

 

 

 

I found it very easy to integrate indeed as per so:

  • Add an instance of Facebook’s Javascript SDK to your website’s source code. Ensure you have an application ID from Facebook also or the button will not work.
  • Generate your like button here and click “Get Code” and select the XFBML version and copy the code.
  • Then simply add the button code where you want in your site’s source code and you’re done!
    • [Wordpress blogs] instead of putting in a URL, add the following into your loop:
<fb:like href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" layout="standard" show_faces="false" width="xxx" action="like" font="segoe ui" colorscheme="light" />

 

As you can see, very easy indeed.

 

Disqus Comment Plugin

disqus

Finally, the latest addition to the site is the very versatile, Disqus commenting system.

 

I felt that my old plugin I used was too bulky and was rather unessacary for just simple commenting. People don’t want to have an account for every site they visit, so allowing them to use their current Facebook, Twitter or OpenID accounts means less time registering. You don’t even need one of those accounts as posts can still be done via Guest with no account whatsoever.  Try it out next time you fancy having a little comment.

 

Stay tuned for more updates via following me on Twitter @fatjoe151