Ruthie is pleased to announce her new website (warning: liable to induce narcolepsy in anyone other than criminal lawyers, defendants or magistrates). This will be a blog dedicated to an academic discussion of criminal law, with particular emphasis on regulatory crime, which is what Ruthie actually does all day when she’s not playing on here. I’ve set this up with a view to encourage more heavyweight specialist contributions, which clearly this blog does not support.
Tag Archive for 'wordpress'
Geeklawyer finally figured out what was going on. The podpress Wordpress plugin was screwing up the Rss feeds: once disabled they returned to normal. It’s a bugger but at least the problem has a known cause. It means podcasts will have to be done in a different way for a while.
Update: hacks have been done. All is well. Honest.
OMG!! 
It seems (thank you Charon for spotting it) that the Bar Council has been stunned into action by Geeklawyer’s shameful mockery (For which he is very very sorry indeed, please put down that dentist’s drill Mr Voss).
The Bar Council has a blog! Chairman of the Bar Geoffrey Vos QC has broken a bottle of champagne over the servers and watched them slide into the Thames to the cheering of massed ranks of two barristers and a girl from the typing pool. Nice.
Initial signs are, however, slightly worrying: it’s very pretty and nicely laid out; great. However, and this may be just initial teething troubles, it seems to be impossible to add comments even after one has registered as a site user. Geeklawyer phoned the Bar Council’s press office and so one hopes they will do something about it PDFQ. While he is happy to pour scorn and derision on the faux blogs and trogs, the last thing he wants to have to do is mock is his own governing body. Please get it right and don’t be sucky.
Geeklawyer really really wants this blog to work and he will be adding this to his RSS feed. Tim Kevan seems to have been roped in and is involved in some capacity (Geeklawyer has taken umbrage that he was not approached) so they have a degree of ‘bought in’ savvy about blogs and they ought to be able to get it right.
Oh, and Geoffrey you may wish to attend Lawblog 2007. Just leave the instruments of torture at home, eh?
Disasters, it seems, like buses come in threes. First Geeklawyer’s blog goes tits up then Charon QC’s blog follows suite.
OK, before the Singing Accountant jumps in to point at that Geeklawyer has made a catastrophic 50% balance sheet error, he’ll admit that, technically, that is only two disasters. Geeklawyer’s fee notes have also been known to make a 50% error too, but rarely in the punters favour. An odd thing mathematics.
Geeklawyer can see colleague bloggers cowering in fear, desperately backing up Wordpress databases as you read. Uncertain times, uncertain.
Martin at Legal Scribbles has expressed his disapproval of Geeklawyer’s continued use of the ‘Kubrick’ visual them for this site. Geeklawyer doesn’t share his passionate, even, dare he say it, irrational dislike for it to anything like the same extent.
However it does need tarting up. And since fate has landed this blog in a moment of chaos it is as well to ride it to advantage. As a part of that process therefore various themes will be tried over the next few weeks and so do not be surprised, nor whinge, if thing visually break.
The one thing that has always left Geeklawyer unimpressed with Wordpress is the degree to which ‘themes’ encompass not merely visuals but the underlying code of the site. When one thinks of themes one normally imagines just visual changes and in many user interfaces this is so. In Wordpress a theme also encompasses functionality and in Geeklawyer’s view that is ugly software design since it entangles matters that should properly be left apart.
update 18th March 2007: You see? this is what Geeklawyer means. He picks a shiny new theme to try out and all his customisations fall off because they only applied to the default Kubrick theme. Now he has to spend X hours buggering around hacking someone’s template adding adsense & other plugin bits. Grrr. This is why he wants to hack his own CM system though so it can be done right from the outset …
Dammit. This is Sunday he should be in church praising damned Jesus. Or at least down the pub, oh, of course he can’t do that either if he’s going to keep the harridan off his back.
Two coincidences allow Geeklawyer to exercise his vast ego yet again. He previously used a PC running SuSE Linux and it had no microphone attached, no big deal. However, it mysteriously died and he needed a new machine PDFQ — pretty damned fucking quick. Geek readers will understand this to be paper thin justification for buying toys.
The toy in question was an 24 inch iMac with a second screen. As a toy this is so cool than even with his vast vocabulary Geeklawyer lacks words to express it adequately. What it does have is an inbuilt mike: hardly novel he’ll readily concede but personal revolutions often arise from small combined conveniences. So when he found that the iMac would combine readily with the Audacity editor (or the GarageBand software) it became trivially easy to cut mp3s of his voice. And my, how he love’s the sound of his own voice.
Secondly, Geeklawyer found a very tasty little Wordpress plugin that automated podcast creations. So the revolution is ready to roll. There is now a new category on the blog of ‘podcast’ for your aural delight. He hope doing podcasts is less effort than typing articles but we shall see.
[You may have some difficulty loading — if so click on the ‘audio mp3’ button. And while rss feed now works for rss, iTunes barf on the rss feed for some reason — it whinges “does not seem to be a valid podcast url”. Can’t think why but Geeklawyer will go all geek on it at some point soon, but has too much evil to do today so It’ll get done later.
Update: Rss feed now works — wont make an arse of myself telling you how long it took to fix such a trivial problem!
To subscribe via Apples iTunes copy the link from the side menu into the ‘subscribe to Podcast’ box or whatever URL/Feed box on your software.]
Standard Podcast [2:20m]: <a href=”#” onclick=“javascript: podPressShowHidePlayer(‘1’,‘http://blog.geeklawyer.org/podcasts/episode1.mp3” ‚300,30,‘true’); return false;”>Play Now | <a href=”#” onclick=“javascript: podPressPopupPlayer(‘1’, ‘http://blog.geeklawyer.org/podcasts/episode1.mp3” ‚300,30); return false;”>Play in Popup | DownloadGeeklawyer blogged recently about the problems he was having with Wordpress blog comment spam. since installing the ‘captcha’ package filosofo there have been zero spams. This has reduced the management workload massively which enables Geeklawyer to spend more time with his pub. Bliss.
There comes a point in the life of all blogs when popularity gives rise to abuse. Geeklawyer feels truly pleased and honoured, ahem, that spammers have seen fit to deluge his blog’s comment capability with adverts for Viagra and teen sex. Continue reading ‘Anti-Spam measure on Geeklawyer blog’
What the fuck is up with this site?
Geeklawyer’s ISP screwed up and trashed the blog. OK there are backups. The problems is that Geeklawyer has found serious bugs in Wordpress (yea the Wordpress guys would probably call them ‘design limitations’) that means he cannot easily recover old posts and comments.
Alarmingly the only comments he could initially recover were Ruthie’s. And this site was for a time comprised of her postings alone. Not only was that tedious to read it was an affront to Geeklawyer & so he laboured long into the night to figure out a solution. The hacked solution exists but is going to be laborious to implement.
So in the mean time this site is likely to be up and down more frequently than Ruthie’s knickers at a rich lawyers conference. Yes, that much.
And since Ruthie is 38 this Wednesday he thought that for the short period of anarchy while the blog is restored, as a birthday present to accompany his expensive card, he’d indulge her fantasy in taking over the blog: hence the title and strap-line.
Revel in your accidental victory Ruthie: it will last but a fleeting moment.
update 1.40am: Sanity is restored; Geeklawyer’s posts are now back. However cleaning up the mess remains and stuff like spam traps and other site add-ons still need to be installed. So things are likely to be a bit flaky around the edges for a while yet.
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