The McKenzie's Blog…

We started out a weeks camping by leaving the house about noon on Sunday. The drive to the camp site, Brickyard Farm Camp site (Banham, Norfolk, NR16 2HQ), was only about an hour or so from home. Even at the reduced speed we had to travel at because of towing the trailer. After a stop at Sainsbury in Thetford for a few last minute supplies and lunch as well, we arrived at the camp site at about 1400hrs, plenty of daylight left so we could take our time getting everything set up.

Lisa and Emma immediately found the horses in the fields to go and see plus a swing set to play on as well. I was a bit worried for a while, there were no other kids around. Then, a family came trooping back into camp. They’d been out to the Banham Zoo. It’s about 1/2 mile down the road. Anyhow, Lisa and Emma quickly became acquainted with Hanna, 7yrs old. They spent the next 3 or so hours playing all sorts of games and running around the farm.

The camp site itself is a small family run business. It’s run the brother of our neighbour, very nice folks. They popped around to check on us and see how we were settling in. Quite layed back, they haven’t asked for money as yet. The site is, as I mentioned, small. Only about 6 or so pitches, most with electric. We didn’t bother with that, I’d brought the 120amp battery with us. More then enough power for the week to run a laptop if needed and charge the phones. I brought a 12v florescent lamp as well but likely won’t need it.

The kids are knackered. They’ve had a busy afternoon that’s for sure. Tomorrow we’ll be walking to the zoo and checking out the animals and whatever else they have there.

Well that’s about it from here tonight I think. the big people are knackered too and ready for bed now as well.

Watch this space for the day 2 report. I won’t be posting pics on the blog, but check on facebook, flickr and mobypictures and of course Twitter.com/m1xzg for updates.

Btw, this is all from my phone, there are likely spelling errors, I will fix them later. Don’t think I have a spell check on here.

Posted by Wordmobi

Camping Trip – Day 1

We started out a weeks camping by leaving the house about noon on Sunday.
The drive to the camp site, Brickyard Farm Camp site (Banham, Norfolk,
NR16 2HQ), was only about an hour or so from home. Even at the reduced
speed we had to travel at because of towing the trailer. After a stop at
Sainsbury in Thetford for a few last minute supplies and lunch as well, we
arrived at the camp site at about 1400hrs, plenty of daylight left so we
could take our time getting everything set up.

Lisa and Emma immediately found the horses in the fields to go and see
plus a swing set to play on as well. I was a bit worried for a while,
there were no other kids around. Then, a family came trooping back into
camp. They’d been out to the Banham Zoo. It’s about 1/2 mile down the
road. Anyhow, Lisa and Emma quickly became acquainted with Hanna, 7yrs
old. They spent the next 3 or so hours playing all sorts of games and
running around the farm.

The camp site itself is a small family run business. It’s run the brother
of our neighbour, very nice folks. They popped around to check on us and
see how we were settling in. Quite layed back, they haven’t asked for
money as yet. The site is, as I mentioned, small. Only about 6 or so
pitches, most with electric. We didn’t bother with that, I’d brought the
120amp battery with us. More then enough power for the week to run a
laptop if needed and charge the phones. I brought a 12v florescent lamp as
well but likely won’t need it.

The kids are knackered. They’ve had a busy afternoon that’s for sure.
Tomorrow we’ll be walking to the zoo and checking out the animals and
whatever else they have there.

Well that’s about it from here tonight I think. the big people are
knackered too and ready for bed now as well.

Watch this space for the day 2 report. I won’t be posting pics on the blog,
but check on facebook, flickr and mobypictures and of course
Twitter.com/m1xzg for updates.

Btw, this is all from my phone, there are likely spelling errors, I will
fix them later. Don’t think I have a spell check on here.

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged about anything meaningful. It’s not for the lack of anything to blog about, just more about my lack of ambition really.

In July I attended WordCampUK 2009 held in Caerdydd, Cymru (Cardiff, Wales). I was going to blog about this, but having read the huge number of postings by others that attended the event (A decent search), I figured there was nothing more that I could write to equal or better what others had already said. I will say that it was an awesome weekend though! Met loads of great people and even participated in the #Wordhack – Mobile Kubrick Theme project.

In July I also got a new phone, the Nokia N97. While it’s a very slick phone, it’s far from being without faults and bugs. To be completely honest, I’ve not been surprised by this, Nokia has made it a business mission it seems to release stunning devices that were only half thought out and loosely hacked up and released, clearly done late on a Friday afternoon after everyone had been out for a pub lunch lunch earlier in the day. For it’s flag ship phone it’s a pretty piss poor showing. Think I’m being too hard on it? See here “N97 Sucks”, “N97 Bugs”, “N97 is crap”. To contrast this however, “N97 is great”. Over all I really really love the device and it’s huge potential, but that is overshadowed by Nokia’s classic lackadaisical approach to building phones of late.

What else is new… I blogged recently about Lisa losing her first tooth… well it looks like another one is fixing to fall out soon. This is also the bottom one next to the one that fell out last month. Hehe poor kid will have a big hole in her smile for a while I think. There’s no sign yet of the new tooth showing up either.

Holiday’s… not really planned much this summer due the appalling weather we’ve been having this year. Typically British is the common phrase you’ll hear people mention. Loads of rain and grey/black skies. I have however booked a week off in August and we’re hoping to get out and do at least a couple days of camping. I’ve found a place in Suffolk that looks nice. Loads of woods to go walking through and they allow camp fire, which is very rare here. That would be nice for the kids to sit by the fire and we’ll take some marshmallows for them to roast over the fire too. We’ve done that before but it was over the BBQ, lets face it, there’s no competition between marshmallows over a BBQ or a camp fire!.

Not really much else to blog about right now. I’ll close off this posting for the time being. I hope to do more frequent blog postings, but then I’ve said that several times in the past and #failed at it

From the looks of the weather we’ve had it should be a good summer for camping … at least I sure hope so anyhow. Need to get the tent dug out and setup in the garden for to check it for any damage and such .. it’s been put away for 2 years since we last used it .. there was no camping last year.

I’ve been looking at some camp sites and one that has stuck out as looking like a fun place to go (for the kids too) …

River Dart Country Park – http://www.riverdart.co.uk/ Check out the pics of the place on the site.

Also found this place http://www.woodovis.com/cmx/content/view/2/4/ seems all right. Will have to check them out more.

It’s still a bit early and not all of the details are available as yet .. but I’m waiting with bated breath for all the details.. I’ve actually already booked my hotel room.. didn’t want that to be the primary reason I couldn’t get there.

I’ve been using WordPress now for what.. nearly 3 years I think.. maybe only 2, can’t remember. But I’m dead impressed with it… I’ve been watching all of the WordCamp events around the world and waiting for one to come up here.. I know they had a 2008 one in the UK, however I missed that completely for some reason..

Check out the WordCamp UK website:

http://wiki.wordcampuk.tonyscott.org.uk/Main_Page

And follow them on Twitter too: http://twitter.com/wordcampuk

I hope to meet loads of people there.. sounds like it should be great fun!

#wordcampuk

While working on a couple of WordPress projects for two sites I host (www.cambridgerepeaters.net & www.cambridgeshire-raynet.net) I had the need to do mass account creation.  These were 30+ accounts at a time, not a thrilling prospect to do that via the normal admin interface.  Searching the net was nearly useless, until I found a WP plugin called “Import Users Plugin for WordPress”.  This worked, but was very simple and didn’t suit my needs.

So, after looking at the script and figuring out how it worked (I’m not PHP coder but I can get by in a pinch), I managed to hack the script to do what I wanted.  The script as provided above only allows for the email address and login name, the 2 required bits of info to create a new account on a WP system.  However, I needed to be able to specify:

• first name
• last name
• password

Another nice thing to have on the import is being able to set the WordPress user role (access level), so I shoved that in as well.  On the plugin page I posted a comment about my updates and a link to the new modified script:

I’d like to submit another modified version of this great script. The changes I’ve made to the script allows for adding first and last names, setting a password and setting the role for the imports. I’m also using the more powerful method of account creation, “wp_insert_user” this allows a lot more in the way of adding nice things to the script and new account.

The import file or manually entered format is:

username|firstname|lastname|password|email|role

All fields except username and email are optional, but all fields must be delimited, ie:

fred|Fred|Rivers|mypassw0rd|fred@rivers.com|Editor
sam|Sam||sam@mypress.com|

Fred has everything assigned while Sam will be emailed his generated password and his role will be set to whatever was selected from the drop down box on the form.

I’d be interested in any comments on my changes. There have been quite a few changes, I suggest a diff of mine and the latest modified one.

My modified version can be found at:

http://www.uk-experience.com/scripts/dd-import-users-mod_wp27.txt

I hope people find this useful, I think it’s a function that’s needed by far more people then you might expect.  In my mind, it’s something that should be part of the core code for WordPress.  I can see more modifications coming to this script as my projects progress.  While looking into changes for the script I’ve found other things that would be nice to have at the time of import too…

Watch this space…
Updated script

2009.06.17 @ 2013GMT

Version 1.1.13 – Added user URL to be imported into user details (not the default assigned blog for WPMU)

dd-import-users-mod_wp27_v1.1.13.txt

Note the new format when using this version:

The import file or manually entered format is:

username|firstname|lastname|password|email|role|URL

All fields except username and email are optional, but all fields must be delimited, ie:

fred|Fred|Rivers|mypassw0rd|fred@rivers.com|Editor|http://blah.com
sam|Sam||sam@mypress.com||