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Tom Fotherby

Tom Fotherby

Session sharing in PHP – The easy way

By Tom Fotherby on August 2, 2010

I used to think that a hard part of scaling a website from one webserver to two webservers was sharing the sessions between the machines to keep the users logged in whichever machine they were served by. I was pleasantly surprized that it is possible to accomplish sharing sessions between two servers by changing only […]

Posted in Technical | Tagged PHP | Leave a response

WordPress spelling auto-correction now fixed

By Tom Fotherby on August 2, 2010

In WordPress 3.0, my WordPress logo image (on the left) broke. So I opened a bug and six weeks and 100 bug comments later, I have upgraded to 3.01 and it is working again. Thanks guys! The reason why the logo image was broken was quite interesting(?)… In v3.0 WordPress automatically started auto-correcting Wordpress to […]

Posted in Technical | Tagged Bug, Wordpress | 4 Responses

Repeal the Digital Economy Act

Repeal the Digital Economy Act

By Tom Fotherby on July 11, 2010

There’s a fantastic new UK government website called yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk which gives us the chance to tell the government which laws and regulations we think they should get rid of. Please take a minute to vote 5 stars on repealing the digital economy act. Why? What’s so bad about the Digital Economy Act? My objection to […]

Posted in Journal | Tagged Freedom, Politics, UKGovernment | 1 Response

Masters of Doom (David Kushner)

Masters of Doom (David Kushner)

By Tom Fotherby on June 10, 2010

History, 9/10 – Mar/10-Jun/10 A great computer game history book about how the two Johns started a company and developed some of the epics games of my childhood, in particular: Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Loved John Carmacks programming dedication and legacy – what a hero!

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged history, Programming | 2 Responses

WordPress image gallery plugin

By Tom Fotherby on April 16, 2010

When I was building the property gallery for greekislandpropertyfinders I wanted to use a fancy javascript image gallery like Galleria, however I came across a problem with Galleria in that it couldn’t display more than one gallery on any page. It’s open-source so I used the source code to help write my own version and […]

Posted in Plugin | Tagged WebDevelopment, Wordpress | 33 Responses

PeoplePerHour Trailer

By Tom Fotherby on March 27, 2010

PeoplePerHour (my primary employers) have a new trailer. It’s fun watching webpages I have helped build woosh past a’la star wars. It’s bold and upbeat, I love not doing things by halves:

Posted in Journal | Tagged PeoplePerHour | Leave a response

Mini Keyboard (Rii mini, Model: RT-MWKOI)

Mini Keyboard (Rii mini, Model: RT-MWKOI)

By Tom Fotherby on March 23, 2010

This gadget should be really good because it is nice and small, works in Linux out of the box and it is super convenient having a mini combined mouse and keyboard at hand. However, unfortunately, the mouse isn’t sensitive or responsive, the key-presses have unpredictable delays, the range isn’t good enough and it completely stopped […]

Posted in Toys | Tagged Gadget, Hardware, Keyboard, MythTV | Leave a response

Sponsored fast

Sponsored fast

By Tom Fotherby on March 23, 2010

My brother is doing a 72 hour sponsored fast with some friends to raise money for MS: Three whole days without even a single scrap of food entering our bodies, only having water to keep us going. I’m joining in – it started at 11am: I ate the following a few minutes before 11am: Massive […]

Posted in Journal | Tagged Charity, Food | Leave a response

Matter (Ian M Banks)

Matter (Ian M Banks)

By Tom Fotherby on March 19, 2010

Sci-fi, 7/10 – Jul/08-Mar/09 This story is set in a Shakespearean-like era with kings and princes and swords and battles – minus the romance. Actually, it’s more like medieval Merlin and the knights of the round table because the civilization is shrouded with myths and has the equivalence of dragons because it is semi-integrated with […]

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged Ian M Banks, Sci-fi | 4 Responses

Batch optimise Images with a single command

By Tom Fotherby on March 4, 2010

I find the Page Speed tool from Google extremely helpful for optimising my websites. I have a tip which can save time if your website is failing the “Optimize Images” test. Using the in-built Smush.it is one option but if most of your images are jpegs, you can achieve the same result and save time […]

Posted in Web Design | Tagged CommandLine, Graphics, Performance | Leave a response

Default search engine in Ubuntu Firefox

Default search engine in Ubuntu Firefox

By Tom Fotherby on February 19, 2010

Ubuntu will be switching their default search engine from Google to Yahoo in the next release (v10.04) because they have struck a deal where they will get a cut of the money made whenever a user clicks on a advert after doing a search. The only reason that this is interesting is that Yahoo search […]

Posted in Tech Journal | Tagged Google, Microsoft, Open-source, shameless-self-promotion, Ubuntu | 1 Response

Nerd Music

By Tom Fotherby on February 19, 2010

I love my nerd pop – here’s some links: The jQuery theme song by Jonathan Neal – http://jquery.thewikies.com/jquery.mp3 – It’s catchy. The free software song: By Phoenix Imago – http://www.gnu.org/music/freesoft.ogg By Fenster – http://audio-video.gnu.org/audio/Fenster-Free-Software-Song.ogg By RMS (the orginal) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw Coder girl by dalechase – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-m6JDYRFvk Search Engine Rap Battle: GOOGLE vs YAHOO and MSN […]

Posted in Tech Journal | Tagged FreeSoftware, List, Music | Leave a response

greekislandpropertyfinders.co.uk

By Tom Fotherby on February 19, 2010

We have just finished and published greekislandpropertyfinders.co.uk which is a modified clone of http://www.heidijoycegardens.com. Technical details of site: The site is written in PHP using WordPress as a development framework. Uses the 1KB CSS grid framework. Uses Jquery including the anything slider and Galleria. The site has a newsletter sign-up form written as a WordPress […]

Posted in Client Work | Tagged GIPF | Leave a response

WordPress Tag Cloud – How to cap the font size

By Tom Fotherby on February 18, 2010

On the Bitvolution WordPress theme, the sidebar is quite small (only 220px) and the default WordPress tag cloud widget was producing tags that were clipped in a ugly manner. By default, the WordPress tag cloud widget has a maximum font size of 22px so I was looking for a way to reduce it. Note: If […]

Posted in Technical | Tagged PHP, WebDevelopment, Wordpress | 1 Response

Firefox 3.6 opacity crash in Linux

By Tom Fotherby on February 11, 2010

A website that I was working on suddenly started crashing Firefox 3.6 on my PC (Ubuntu 9.10, 64bit). I’m talking a full out hang with 100% CPU usage and a frozen mouse and keyboard and the only way to recover is to remote login from a 2nd PC and kill the Firefox process. I found […]

Posted in Technical | Tagged Bug, Firefox, WebDevelopment | Leave a response

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