Cathedrale Notre Dame de Bayeux
The heart of Bayeux is a cathedral town. Bayeux cathedral is on the gentle slopes which rise above a small river The main shopping street run east west just a couple of blocks north of the cathedral with a quaint residential area (with some nice cafes) just to the west of the cathedral. The cathedral [more…]
By Kate
Spanish Skirted Dress
The picture is a bit blurry – I must take a better one, but after sharing the pictures of Dante Marioni’s Blue Group, I thought I would add this blue dress I designed. I love the Spanish skirt. In case you are wondering what this is doing on an Ancient Egypt site it’s simple. In [more…]
By Kate
Californian Halloween
I never understood the fuss about Halloween until I spent a Halloween in Silcon Valley. In Britain was are used to seeing a few houses decorated at Christmas. The road up from me is one where most houses are illuminated outside. That’s nothing though compared with the decoration I saw in Old Palo Alto. Whole [more…]
By Kate
Burgundy Orchid
When I was in Thailand I visited a couple of orchid farms and can’t recall quite which orchid farm this was taken in but it was just one of literally thousands of blooms. My father used to grow orchids and was always excited when he got one or two blooms. I’m really not sure how [more…]
By Kate
Blue Group – Glassware by Dante Marioni
Blue Group is a 1994 piece by the American artist Dante Marioni which was displayed in the Stanford Museum in 2008. It features three tall, slender pieces of hand-blown glass in lustrous blue. [more…]
By Kate
Embedding Hybrid Hooks in Code
The Hybrid Hooks PlugIn is great for quickly testing something but once it is working then it is secure from accidental editing if it is transferred to functions.php. I added a <div class=”halo”></div> “before_content” to provide the halo around post elements. Once this was stable and signed off, I transferred it into functions.php very simply: [more…]
By Kate
1920s Flappers
When I was a little girl, I used to watch the old 1920s silent movie, Chapin, Buster Keaton, the Keystone Cops and the like. They weren’t exactly highbrow but for a young girl growing up in the 1970s they were fun all the same. They have left me with a love of the 1920s. Some [more…]
By Kate
Egyptological Hieroglyphs Version 0.6
The changes in version 0.6 were considerable with support of shading added as well support for cadrat groups, although this remains somewhat primitive. The plugin now includes an initial version of the User Guide as well. I also changed the HTML markup for cartouches so the closure is now much better. There’s still a 1px [more…]
By Kate
Rotor Version 1.1
Rotating and flipping images is computationally heavy and I didn’t want anybody deep-linking into our rotated images. To prevent that I have adjusted the code of the .php which serves the rotated images to add an extra 45 degree rotation if a rotated image is deep-linked. I could block display entirely but until I am [more…]
By Kate
Versioning – Release Notes
Commencing with version 0.5 of the Egyptological Hieroglyphs plugin code this series of notes has been established to provide version release notes. Version 0.5 includes the following substantive functionality: Separators: -!*/ and spaces Rotations: \r0 to \r3 plus \t1 to \t3 and /r+ve Output types hiero (default), color, html, raw, help and version Scaling – [more…]
By Kate
Building a Hieroglyph Parser – Intro
Somehow online Egyptology sites manage without hieroglyphs, or struggle to laboriously add them by hand. It is a labour too as most alternatives mean that each glyph has to be uploaded as a separate image and then laid out manually. Even then those who leave comments cannot add hieroglyphs and, in a Web 2.0 world, [more…]
By Kate
WordPress and Footnotes
There’s a little known WordPress function which can strip the links out of content and move them to the bottom of an article as footnotes. Just what we need for the magazine! Footnotes [more…]
By Kate
Create an RSS Shortcode
Although I had two small self-hosted WordPress blogs before Egyptological, it’s the first set of sites I have built properly. One thing I have learned is the power of shortcodes. I like the ability to embed functionality into pages rather than use widgets. One I created, and which is used extensively on the Portal is [more…]
By Kate
Introducing Kate Phizackerley
If Kate had been an animal, she would have been born a cat – lovable, affectionate with flashing eyes and an independent streak. To find out more visit Kate’s personal portal or read her publication history. You can contact Kate via her contact form. [more…]
By Kate
Will the WordPress plugins you add be supported?
One of the great pluses of WordPress is that there are so many plugins available to add those nifty extra bits of functionality which aren’t in the core but which make your site special – or just allow it to meet your minimum requirements. Most of those plugins are free which is another big plus [more…]
By Kate
Adding Co-Authors
One of the requirements for a magazine displaying academic and near-academic papers is the ability to cope with co-authors. As standard, WordPress only supports a single author and that author has to be set up as a user. Now it’s possible to make then only a subscriber, but I still dislike the equivalence between author [more…]
By Kate
Google XML Sitemaps PlugIn
The Google XML Sitemaps PlugIn was the first added to the site. It builds a site map in a form easily read by search engine spiders. Every site needs readers and that means at least some effort needs to go into improving the visibility of the site with search engines. The Google Sitemaps PlugIn does [more…]
By Kate
Risk Assessment
As part of building our magazine we undertook a risk assessment to make help identify and address potential problems and issues. In this post, learn about the basics of risk assessment [more…]
By Kate
Browser Compatibility – Pseudo Elements
(This is an article for HTML/CSS newcomers.) When building Egytpological we took the decision that: we wouldn’t support IE6, and would support IE7 and IE8 for functional essentials (while pushing the design further in better browsers) The attached table gives some clues as to why this is necessary. It shows browser compatibility for pseudo elements. [more…]
By Kate
Scenes from an Italian Restaurant – Billy Joel
There is some great material on YouTube and I’m delighted they have come to an agreement with some major artists to feature their material. The trouble is, one is never sure which artists’ work has been approved and which haven’t so videos might disappear or embedding might be disabled. It’s a shame because it can [more…]
By Kate