Posted by Ryan Cullen | Posted in Council, Lincoln, Politics | Posted on 14th April 2010
It’s a question one might ask if they visited www.lincoln.gov.uk.
The homepage has no mention of an event taking place on the 6th May

Clicking on Residents still has no clues.

Trying Elections in the sidebar finally takes me to a bland page which has a link for 2010 Elections.

And then visiting this page I am only informed about the seats per ward for the council elections with the rules.

At the moment there isn’t a list of candidates for the City of Lincoln council election for which we have thirds (nominations closed last Thursday).
And amazingly there is no mention of a General Election. No information on what to do if you wish to stand, when they might be counting the result and how to register to vote if you aren’t on the electoral register.
Whilst I knew that this was never going to be the year of the e-lection, this is shocking behavior from the City Council.
Posted by Ryan Cullen | Posted in Lincoln, Politics | Posted on 12th April 2010
Currently down Dixon Street in Lincoln we have the privilege of two Tory posters. However glancing at them whilst in the car I seem to be coming back with these messages:
Never Vote Tory

Vote For Me

Of course on May 6th I’ll be voting Liberal Democrat.
Posted by Ryan Cullen | Posted in Other | Posted on 10th April 2010
So it turns out the Tory bribe to those married isn’t really worth much at all.
To start with it’s only worth at the most £150 a year. With the average cost of a wedding around £20,000, it would take 133 years to get your money back.
Secondly it is only available as a tax-break transfer. So if someone in the relationship is earning less than £6,475 you could transfer £750 of your tax allowance to your partner, both earning more than this and it’s pointless.
Thirdly the person receiving the transfer must be earning less than £44,000 a year.
However the greedy nature of me went, at least I’m going to get the cash. That was until I got out the calculator. Currently the wife is getting statutory maternity pay which means that even we won’t get this bribe.
Of course under equality law this tax break is also available to couples in a civil partnership, but really, how many are in the situation where one is earning less than £6,475 a year, whilst their partner is on less that £44,000??
I think I prefer the LibDem proposal to lift the basic rate of tax up to £10,000 instead of this Tory fudge.
Posted by Ryan Cullen | Posted in Beatrice | Posted on 7th March 2010
On the 4th March at 2.05am Beatrice Mary Cullen was born weighing 6lb 1oz.

Sometimes I feel like putting my hands up in the air
Many thanks for all the cards, tweets and facebook messages we’ve received.
Just a couple of quick points, until she feels old enough herself:
- she won’t have a Facebook account
- she won’t have a Twitter account
- she won’t have a blog
- she won’t be joining the Liberal Democrats
She will however have her photo taken at every opportunity and have the images uploaded to both Flickr and Facebook as quickly as possible, as well as cute.argh.tc.
Posted by Ryan Cullen | Posted in Plugins | Posted on 16th January 2010
Do you have a WordPress blog, but hate playing about with the source code of your theme to insert the Official Twitter Widget?
Do you wish that instead you could just have a WordPress widget which did all the hard work for you?
Well now you can, with the (Un)official Twitter Widget.
This simple WordPress widget allows you to have the Twitter widget on your sidebar.
I wrote this widget for a client who wanted the new Official Twitter Widget, however all the WordPress plugins I came across either used the plain old widget, or did their own thing with the data.
It’s based (heavily) on the work from seanys, which used the old widget.
To install either use the built in plugin installer and search for (Un)official Twitter Widget, or visit the WordPress Plugin page and download the file, unzip it, and FTP it to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder.
Posted by Ryan Cullen | Posted in Plugins | Posted on 19th December 2009
Do you scheduled lots of posts on WordPress?
Do you then find yourself posting an immediate post 10 seconds before a scheduled post is going live?
Do you kick yourself for ending up with two posts so close together?
If yes to all three, then my plugin may help.
Scheduled Planner is an admin plugin which appears in the Add New / Edit Post section of WordPress. At the moment it just rests in the top right as I’ve yet to work out how to make it in to a nice widget. It shows the last two posts published on your blog, and then all the scheduled posts. Allowing you to work out if it is safe to hit Publish or if you should schedule this post for 3 hours time.

To install just download the ZIP file and dump in your wp-content/plugins/ folder or use the Add New feature in WordPress (search for Schedule Planner)
Tested on 2.8 and 2.9.
Latest version now hosted on wordpress.org here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/schedule-planner/
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