Philip John

  • Samsung Galaxy S3 first impressions

    It’s now been two weeks since I took delivery of a brand new Samsung Galaxy S3 (SGS3) and here are my thoughts. I left it two weeks because I was without a micro-SIM for it for most of the first week! Many of my thoughts are born out of having switch from the HTC Desire…

  • Bad ads

    Finally, I  plucked up the courage to purchase my shiney new Samsung Galaxy S3 (more on that later) and whilst reading the latest news on the Guardian app I noticed that they (or their ad server people) still don’t know how to do ad targeting properly. See my screenshot of the app below, taken on…

  • NESTA Destination Local – initial reaction to funded projects

    A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article for the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network about Destination Local in which I outlined my view that the hyperlocal sector would be better helped by small amounts of money, with less stringent criteria, aimed directly at independent hyperlocals rather than any tom, dick or harry with the…

  • New WordPress Plugin: Story Latest

    I wanted a way to easily present a “latest articles on this story” list on Lichfield Live articles so I developed this simple plugin which uses a shortcode and tags to achieve that. For example, the Friary Outer development is an ongoing story that we’re covering. All of the related articles are tagged with “Friary…

  • Planning Applications for WordPress: New Plugin

    It was great to hear last week of the progress Chris and his team at OpenlyLocal have made on resurrecting Planning Alerts. Thanks to their efforts we now have a site where we can view planning alerts for each council across the country. Not all councils are there yet, but it’s a great start. As…

  • New WordPress plugin: Restore Admin Header

    WordPress v3.3 removed the header from the admin interface, merging it with the admin bar. This meant that the link to your site’s front page was taken away and you now have to go through drop down menus to get to the link. Instead, this plugin puts that link back onto your admin interface. Download…

  • Hiding bbPress topics from logged out users

    I just spent hours figuring this out so I thought I’d try and save others the bother by sharing it here. The basic aim was to hide the contents of topics in a bbPress 2.0 forum from any users not logged in. This makes for a nice private forum. I found suggestions about making forums…

  • The Walled Garden

    The Walled Garden

    Thanks to my involvement in Lichfield Live I discovered earlier this year a project based out of Woodhouse Community Farm in Fisherwick, near Whittington. The Walled Garden is a community-supported agriculture project set mostly within the listed walls that once stood part of the Fisherwick Hall Estate. Jess and I joined in July and for…

  • Think open data is just the realm of geeks? Not in Lichfield…

    This is partly the reason why I love Lichfield so much. Our council CEO recently joined Twitter and was last night tweeting (much revered) webmaster, Stuart Harrion; [blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/Ninadawesldc/status/133285420699095042″] Where else do you get a council chief exec tweeting her webby on a Sunday evening about the Open Government License?! Fantastic!