GE2015: Seven Reasons To Vote For The Pirate Party

I've been supporting the Pirate Party ever since I met the leader, Loz Kaye, in 2012, as he was on his way to an anti-ACTA rally. We need to get a Pirate into Parliament: the grovelling lickspittles we have now haven't got a clue about how to run the country, much less the internet. It's not an easy task, though.

Copyright's Control Agenda — Why We Need Reform NOW

It's easy enough to change the law, but how in the world can you change someone's mind? This is the real issue to address because it underpins the thinking behind our over-long, over-broad copyright terms. I've spent a week trying to understand the other side's point of view, and this is what I've learned: it can all be expressed in one word: Gollum. Here's why.

Wishing you a very

Merry Christmas

and a

Happy New Year

Alternative Browsers: Seamonkey, Maxthon, And Opera, Oh My!

Well you'd have thought that the browser wars had already ended and Firefox declared the winner, but on the internet, it's never really over. When the browser I've been championing for years, Cometbird, let me down by going all slow all the time for no apparent reason I decided to wait and see what the developers would do about it. The answer, it seems, is either "Wait for Firefox to sort it out" or "Lose interest and quit." I'm unwilling to put up with bad service so I tried some other browsers out. This is how I fared.

Introducing "Scraptivism:" Five Rules For Arguing Politics Online

I've said it before and I'll say it again; I love a good online scrap, and by "good" I mean the ones I win. TTIP promoter Mark English and his EU colleagues have been getting a battering online over their awful FTA and it's been a lot of fun being part of that. Don't feel bad for them, they're selling us out and until they stop, we need to keep the pressure on. There are, of course, rules for doing this in a country where using insulting language can get you thrown in prison.

A Good Time To Bury Bad News: Four Things To Keep An Eye On

@ian_pace I can't help thinking that this is a good time to bury bad news. Don't get too distracted by this to keep an eye on them.
— Wendy Cockcroft (@wendycockcroft) July 8, 2014

Call me cynical but can you blame me? This has been floating about since last Tuesday and I can't help thinking that now that the activists are aware of it, the powers that be are working to suppress it with everybody's favourite pastime: making outraged noises about kiddie fiddlers in high places. People of Britain, we need to talk about the five things we need to be keeping an eye on where Our Glorious Leaders are concerned.

Lies, Damn Lies, And The Labour Party

I received a reply from Matilda Quiney at the office of Harriet Harman, Shadow Deputy Prime Minister and Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport, regarding a query referred to my MP Hazel Blears about websites being shut down by the City of London Police without due process.

Basically, she replied, "Oh, no, the press says they're not," along with some drivel that I'll reproduce below.

Someone Is Wrong On The Internet - Why That Matters

I could save you all a long read of a rant-y post by simply stating,

"Spreading falsehoods is damaging to individuals and groups. Permitting this to proliferate consolidates the lies and makes them hard to counter, particularly when there's a strong emotional hook.*"

There you go, we can all go home now. Except that trivialising the fact that untruths are being spread around packaged as facts is one of the problems one has to contend with when attempting to counter misinformation. I really can't win, can I?

Mobile-first themes: Hit or Miss?

Perspective Therapy screenshot

There appears to be a general trend to mobile-first web design these days, and all the trendy bleeding-edge ones are so mobile-ready they don't look too good on desktop PC screens. We still use them, you know.

My Story In Pictures

When Blogger's Search Engine Didn't Work, I Built My Own

So I've finished moving to Blogger in anticipation of losing my hosting when it runs out in August due to the fact that I'm not planning to renew it.

First thing I've noticed is that I feel like I've been pushed backwards through time to 2007 when I first started playing with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Moving (blogging) house

It began in February 2011, when I was persuaded to set up my own business as a web designer. I'm not business-minded, I just like to mess about on the internet. I tried various web hosting providers and eventually settled on iPage as the best paid provider. I ran the business for two years, putting bread on the table to the best of my ability.

My New Blog

Well I suppose I'd better introduce myself.  I'm Wendy, an administrator working for a facilities management company. I'm opinionated and a bit of a smart alec but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Pirate Party Talking Points: Patents

Patents are supposed to provide a means for restricting profiting off an invention to the inventor. They're a short-term monopoly on innovation and distribution and cover everything from hoovers to drugs. The Pirate Party is concerned at the way the patent system is being abused and fears the advent of patent trolling to the extent that it happens in America.

Pirates are opposed to the idea that patents, in and of themselves, create jobs. No, manufacturing inventions creates jobs. Patents can actually prevent jobs from being created when they're over-broad or based on obvious or extant items (prior art).

Austerity: Why It's Popular And Why We Should Oppose It

I've said this till I'm blue in the face: there's no such thing as a free market. The pretense that there is drives the Austerity programme that is causing people to struggle to afford the basics all over the world where this nonsense is applied. Don't ask for more than you get, you're told. There's always a choice. Well I've gone a bit mad making anti-austerity gifs to hit back at this notion. I see it's only people in double income households who say this. You never seem to hear it from the less well-off members of our society.

Open Rights Group: Manchester Meetup

I was at the ORG meetup on Tuesday the 6th, I didn't get to write about it till now because my computer's RAM went and had to be replaced. Pirates Loz Kaye, Jack Allnutt, and Maria Aretoulaki were there (of the ones I recognised - apologies for not mentioning those I didn't) and I took the opportunity to introduce my husband Richard.

Difficult Decisions

What do you do when you can't keep doing the thing you love but would like to keep a hand in anyway? I've had to make the difficult decision to move my business away from directly providing web design services to recommending other people's web design and service businesses. There are three reasons for this:

Fake Traffic And What You Can Do About It

To be perfectly honest, I never really bothered about fake traffic one way or the other. I could always delete spam because my blog is set to hold comments in a moderation queue, so I didn't really bother about the ones that slipped past my anti-spam plugins. However, when it caused my hosting account to be suspended, I realised I'd have to do something about it.

The Ten Web Design Commandments

And lo, it came to pass that word came to Wendy Cockcroft of the advent of Web 3.0. An angel of the internet came down and declared, "Blessed art thou, Wendy, for thou hast sought out the web design blogs of knowledge of good and evil, and hast partaken thereof. Now take down these ten commandments of web design and development, and go forth into the world and preach them unto the multitudes."

Blogger As CMS? Uh, Yes

When Mumba Kafula and I discussed updating Dynamic Heights, the brief was to provide her with a cost-effective CMS and hosting plan that would keep all of the features she liked intact while giving her the means to make changes herself as and when required. I'd noticed that Blogger can be used as a CMS, so went to work.

Typically, a CMS (content management system) has features that include static pages and a means to produce dynamic pages to serve content for users to interact with, e.g. call-to-action buttons, contact forms, or buying online. WordPress is the most popular one and most blogging programs can be used for this purpose. Until recently, Blogger's limitations left it out of consideration as a CMS because it was just too "bloggy" and I didn't know how to set a static page as the landing page. I also wanted to add a slideshow and make it look nicer than the old one.

Making the move

I set up the Blogger blog on Mumba's Google Apps account and copied and pasted the content onto it. One of Blogger's limitations is it doesn't like clever CSS in the template and won't stand for gradients like the one in the original. You can host the CSS in Google Developers and link to it but Mumba prefers the sunshine-y background I've got for the new installation and provided me with a lovely pic of herself to put in the sidebar. The old silhouette pic went and I found a decent stock images website to use, though I've given my husband Richard a cameo on the Services page. The old site was hosted on 000webhost with a blog on Google Sites. The switch to Blogger put the whole thing in one place. Now all I had to do was make it look like a website, not a blog.

The Home page

On Blogger static pages, the default is to put the page name at the top and bottom. It doesn't look right and I had a heck of a job finding the right bit of code to put in place

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<style>

h3.entry-title{
display: none !important;
}
</style>
</b:if>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;static_page&quot;'>
<style>

h3.post-title{
display: none !important;
}
</style>
</b:if>

Then I did the menu. I wanted the Blogger website to look as much like the installation as possible. The Template/Customise/Advanced/Add CSS area permits you to add your own code, as long as it's CSS.

#navbar { height: 0px; visibility: hidden; display: none;}
.tabs-inner .section:first-child {
border-top: 1px solid #edddc6;
}
.tabs-inner .section:first-child ul {
margin-top: -1px;
border-top: 1px solid #edddc6;
border-left: 0 solid #edddc6;
border-right: 0 solid #edddc6;
}
.tabs-inner .widget ul {
background: #e7d6bd url(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-r9Y1gqzu2qw/ULFk6MiE_BI/AAAAAAAAEVY/MIxcFFnAnO0/s1600/menubg.png) repeat-x;
_background-image: none;
border-bottom: 1px solid #edddc6;
margin-top: 0;
margin-left: -30px;
margin-right: -30px;
}
.tabs-inner .widget li a {
display: inline-block;
padding: .6em 1em;
font: bold 14px Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;
color: #d7b789;
border-left: 1px solid #84500f;
border-right: 1px solid #84500f;
}
.tabs-inner .widget li:first-child a {
border-left: none;
}
.tabs-inner .widget li.selected a, .tabs-inner .widget li a:hover .widget li a:active {
color: #84500f;
background-color: #d7b789;
text-decoration: none;
}

Change those values to whatever you want them to be. Note that I added an image for the navbar. I hosted it on Blogger by uploading the image to a blog post, then right-clicking and choosing "View Image." I right-clicked in the image, selected "Copy image location," then went back and deleted it from the post. Then I added the image URL to the code.

Blogger is a bit funny about colours and won't let you add your own code except in the advanced CSS. I got around that by uploading a small image 20px X 20px with the colour I wanted on it for the background. I wanted to change the page background. Here's the code:

.content-inner {
background-color: #ffeed5;
}

Getting rid of comments is best done manually. It's in the settings drop-down menu on the right-hand side of the page or post when you're in edit mode. You can also change the date of the post. Then there's the bloggy bits on the bottom of the page, the share buttons, etc. Here's the code:

.feed-links {display: none;}
.post-share-buttons {display: none;}

Finally, I didn't want all of my images to have that light-box effect so here's the code to change that:

.post-body img {
padding: 0px;
background: transparent;
border: 1px solid transparent;
-moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px ;
-webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px ;
box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px ;
}

There is, of course, the matter of the slideshow. Nivo does some lovely sliders and they're responsive now. I'm pleased to say they do one for Blogger and there's a gadget maker service that creates the components for you. I didn't want to insert the slider in as a gadget, I wanted to be able to insert it into one individual post.

Way2Blogging has the solution. Use the script generator to generate the code, then copy and paste it into the Template/Edit HTML area just above </head> tag. Then get the code, which ought to look something like this:

<div id="w2bSlideContainer">
<div id="w2bNivoSlider">
<img alt="Achievement" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eQz8dFjOfQk/ULbE1zMKBaI/AAAAAAAAEZw/iEg4KynEj_8/s1600/slide2.png" title="Are you ready to achieve?" />
<img alt="confidence" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-R-ihUVu7i4o/ULbExmWCJoI/AAAAAAAAEZU/LmJL3Uptz40/s1600/slide1.png" title="We can help to build your confidence" />
<img alt="Optimistic" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ccWvGzejI08/ULbE2tce9YI/AAAAAAAAEZ4/9VpvOEvHn2g/s1600/slide3.png" title="Be optimistic about your future" /></div></div>

and go to the post or page of your choice, then choose the HTML option in the edit mode, then paste the code in wherever you want it to go. One thing you'll notice is that the images don't fit the page properly. You need to get the original-sized images in there for it to work as intended; the script shrinks them, for some reason. If for whatever reason you get stuck with a revolving timer image, it's because the .js file has been deleted or moved. Drive HQ hosts scripts and there's always someone somewhere who does. You can use the file URL without causing any problems for anyone. If that fails, do a search for jquery.nivo.slider.pack.js till you find a storage service that lets you link to it. Or you can pay for a Google Apps account and store scripts there.

I chose the two sidebar layout; be aware that if you choose that, it's stuck like that for every page. That's why it was so important to get the slider to only go on one page.

The Domain

Moving the domain to the new installation was a huge pain, mostly driven by the fact that the instructions aren't as clear as they could be. If you're moving your domain from one website to another, here's what to do:

My BlogSpot URL is: dynamicheightstraining.blogspot.com

My domain URL is: www.dynamicheights.org.uk

DNS changes:

@ A 216.239.32.21
@ A 216.239.34.21
@ A 216.239.36.21
@ A 216.239.38.21
www CNAME ghs.google.com.
vlejgcawotqx CNAME gv-qzron2doln5ykisamrwr3qnrhqzcudage7vce7dtlxmb26evstja.domainverify.googlehosted.com.

If you do anything else you'll get a 404 error because it's not properly connected. Thanks to Nitecruzr at Google Product Forums › Blogger ›for his assistance.

Mobile

Blogger is a huge pain in the bum if you want to have a static page set as the home page, then view it on mobile. Since there's not a Blogger-friendly responsive Nivo Slider yet, or at least one I'm happy with, I've had to come up with two; one for the static home page (PC version), and one for the blog post that shows up on the mobile version. I didn't set it to go to a mobile template in settings; it'll default to mobile by itself.

Because of the need to scale the slider for mobile, I've had to make a mobile version of the home page and set it as a post published a hundred years in the future so it always shows up on the first page. I also had to make a separate menu for it that only shows up on mobile devices and style it so it wouldn't suck. You can use what you like; I used a link list and styled it as a vertical menu using a variation of the menu code above. I've got a browser resizer I use to check how websites look on different-sized devices. Add /?m=1 to a URL to check how websites look on mobiles.

Conclusion:

Ever since I learned that it's possible to build a website on Blogger and make it look professional I wanted to have a go at it. As free hosting option, it's a great idea and you can do most of the things you would do on a standard dynamic website there. Since you're riding piggyback on a Google service, it does wonders for SEO. Needless to say, it can integrate seamlessly with other Google products, e.g. Google Drive and Google Plus.

However, the limitations continue in that you don't have the level of control you would have over, let's say, a WordPress website and many of the functions and features I take for granted on WP have to be included as hacks, not options built into the template design area. Making it look like a "normal" website requires a coding sleight of hand that isn't necessary on WP. I'm happy to recommend it as an option to clients but I suppose I'm naturally biased towards WordPress. I'm open to persuasion, though.