I’ve only recently discovered the “Notebook” series from O’Reilly, having long since been a fan of their books. This book takes you from the position of “familiar with C#.NET” and transforms you into a guru!

The format is very much a hands-on tutorial – it’s not a book to read on a long journey! You need to be sitting at the keyboard and imersed in what it tells you to do.

The author is not only very knowledgable, but also very good at passing on knowledge and experience in a format that is pleasant and easy to read.

All in all, a great purchase for anyone who needs to improve their C#.NET skills.

Breaking news – the Semiologic website that I referred to in my previous post is down!

Is this planned maintenance?  Is there a problem??  Are they even aware of it???

All that I’m seeing is a default Wordpress page:

Watch this space – I’ll post a message once it’s live again!

I was wrestling (again) with Wordpress yesterday trying to persuade my custom, Semiologic theme to let me change the color of the site title above (now blue – it used to be red!).  It was clearly an <h1> tag, and was clearly in the #sitename section, but no amount of coaxing, hacking or swearing would persuade it to change color.  It was clearly happy as a red title!

Then I remembered that I’d installed Chris Pederick’s fabulous Web Developer’s toolbar under Firefox!  Using this, there’s a great facility where you can “View Style Information” (under the CSS menu) simply by using the mouse to point a cross-hair cursor to various screen elements.  I never knew cascading style sheets could be so easy!

Anyway, it turns out that my <h1> tag was also a link, so my CSS needed to reflect this.

As you can clearly see at the top of this page, the title is no longer red!

John 1 – Wordpress 0! 

OK, OK, so it’s probably obvious to anyone who’s been using Wordpress for a while, but I’ll tell you what, trying to find out how to get the word “Links” to appear on my right-hand sidebar, rather than “Blogroll” has taken hours of searching!

It’s just NOT documented anywhere that I could find.  There’s no plugins to fix it for me.  In short – it seemed impossible!

In the end, I decided to do what any good programmer would do – hack the code!

I spent quite some time sifting through the source files trying to find where “Blogroll” was hard-coded, but again, my search was in vain!

Then it struck me.  Since “Blogroll” is a default category, maybe it was just picking up the category name….?  Yup!

OK, OK – it’s easy when you know how!

Later!

Most people will be familiar with having hyperlinks automatically appear in their Outlook emails whenever they type a URL (unless they’re using text mode).  However, I see many technically adept people sending out just a simple URL that’s not clickable.  This is due to how Outlook uses auto-correct to change a simply URL into a hyperlink once you move on to the next word.

This means, quite simply, that after typing a URL, just hitting the space bar will convert it to a link ready to be sent out.

Easy when you know how!