Category Archives: Web Design

The Daily “Diana” Express

Web Design

Daily Diana ExpressThere used to be an ongoing joke that you knew it was Monday because the Daily Express had a Diana Exclusive on the front page. Then I started to notice that almost every day was Diana day, so I thought about writing a script to cache the front page and then comeback months later and check. So the fruits of my code is this: Daily Diana Express. It goes back to the start of March and has every front cover. A quick scan of all the thumbnails and I have counted that 34 / 178 covers featured Diana, another 20 had the royals (Harry / Will / Kate / Charles / Camilla / Ann), but more suprising and featured in this fortnights Private Eye was that 70 out of 118 (59%) papers since the 5th May have Madeleine McCann on the front page.
So maybe its time to stop calling the paper The Daily Diana Express and instead The Daily Maddy Express?
Featured on Liberal Democrat Voice

PHP Question – Removing tags and content

LibDemBlogs

This is mainly out there to those who code in php.
At the moment LibDemBlogs, strips out all formatting from blog posts, mainly to ensure that cut-off <b> tags don’t end up bolding everything, but also it puts each post on a equal platform.
However over time I’ve noticed an increase use in the <strike> tag. This tag strikes through text and is normally used to later correct a mistake, or imply someone might not be telling the truth. But as LDBlogs removes the formatting, it makes for an odd read.
So I’m trying to completly remove everything between the tags, Google and even myself believe that this should work
$post = preg_replace('/<strike>([^>]*)<\/strike>/i', '', $post);
However LDBlogs is still showing the deleted text. Any other ideas?

Fixed! The code was working, just happened that the bit of the WordPress RSS feeds I was reading had already removed the tags and other stuff, reading the <content:encoded> gives me the original text.

Live stats

LibDemBlogs

I’ve recently upgraded the MyBlogLog stats for LibDemBlogs. This now means that you see today’s most popular stories and not yesterdays on the site, and that I can see which posts were most popular over a period of time, making it a bit easier for Stephen Tall to do the weekly round-up each Sunday on LibDemVoice.

Whilst on MyBlogLog I noticed the option to add your Twitter status, after Facebook this morning it looks like Web 2.0 is getting smaller.

MyBlogLog and Gravatar

Web Design

Just reading the MyBlogLog Blog and have discovered that they’ve been swallowed up by Yahoo! Hopefully new servers and stuff should mean that they have less downtime and better spam filters. Then whilst wandering about the web I noticed the Gravatar is back up and running, although as much as the claims about servers being better I’m noticing the image display to be a bit slow. However if you don’t have a Gravatar account already get one. It really helps give you a sense of identity on the web when posting on LibDemBlogs or even comments on most blogs these days.