2009

I’ve just got back (early) from another great bike trip; the annual “Trek” held over the Melbourne Cup weekend. This years trek involved 18 folks on 16 bikes, some great weather and the usual brilliant roads.
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Well it’s been just over three months since I started training with my current school. I must say I’m still struggling; both physically and technically. My fitness has dropped off significantly since the Black Belt qualifier with Bushidokan; I struggled to do 20 push-ups last night. (more…)

I recently acquired a dead Dell 4700 desktop machine from my father. After replacing the power supply, adding some memory and a gigabit ethernet card, it was ready to go. I’d been thinking for some time of setting up a Linux-based home server for print sharing and backup. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 desktop and proceeded to configure the machine.

This article looks at how I configured the machine as a home print server, exploring the terminology and options for the un-initiated (like me).
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This blog has become schizophrenic; rather than blogging about one thing, it’s covering many aspects of my life. So I thought I’d find a way to present different views. I had already categorised my posts into general areas, now I needed a way to present the different views with some commentary. The best way was a set of category-based pages, with some text at the top describing the area of interest and then the category-based listing of posts below.

This post describes how I implemented a set of category-based page templates in WordPress, covering the design and implementation.
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One of the main parts of this blog is the Now Reading Reloaded plugin for managing the books I’m reading and have read. The plugin is great providing library, page, author, tag and search views. It also has a review/rating system where you can rate a book and write a review. However it does not provide a template to display favourites; like a “top 10″ list of highest-rated books. So I thought I’d write one. It was a bit of a challenge figuring out the URL structure, but once I did that, the template implementation was reasonably simple; the functions I wanted were already implemented in the plugin just not exposed in the provided templates.

This post is a summary of how I implemented the favourites page, including the URL structure required for Now Reading, how I added the new page functionality to the plugin code, and how I implemented the new template page…
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