The challenge of developing a database to hold information about my ink, pen and notebook collections really fired my imagination. When wrote in my last post “One day I may turn it all into a real database to enable filtering, sorting and immediate updates” I really should have said that I would do it within the next week.

Some caveats to start. The database has been developed using Microsoft Access. I know that will send shudders down many a spine, however I know how to develop (or knock something up quickly) in Access. It’s not a skill I’m proud of but it’s come in useful over the years. Also, after having considered it carefully I can’t justify the time involved in developing a database on the web server. Finally I have found a plugin for WordPress called Footable that allows searching, paging and sorting of table data. It may not have the elegant sophistication of something I could have carefully honed over the coming months (or years), but it works and avoids the need to have the database on the server. Whether the setup constitutes a real database I will leave for others to judge. It works for me, and that’s all I need.

What I am really pleased with is that after initially planning to generate HTML table data and then to copy and paste it into the relevant pages (which would soon have become boring and repetitive) I decided to go the whole hog and use XML-RPC to update the pages directly from MS Access instead. After a few false starts (there’s not a lot of documentation out there) it works like a charm. The extra effort was well worth. In time I may use the database to hold information that should be updated from time to time, such as that on the Resources Page. I can even use it to create posts from scratch (which is why a test post briefly appeared and was deleted again).

The only compromise I have had to make is that I had planned to put all the ink related tables on the Ink Collection page. However, Footable doesn’t seem to work with multiple tables on one page, and so each table now has its own page and the Ink Collection page has been changed to an index page.

To get some data to work with I put all my ink cartridges into the database, along with one ink sample. As the featured image shows, I do have more than one sample, but with one exception I’ve ultimately bought a full bottle, so I can’t see any point in including so much duplication. Cartridges do have a separate use so all of those have been included.

The next to be added will be my notebooks. Pens will following later, but I’m still pondering how best to present the information on pens.

I also plan to theme the tables to better integrate them into the style of the rest of the site.

The post Collections Update appeared first on Stationary Journey.

The following features of Jetpack are now unavailable and will affect the appearance of this site:

• Jetpack Comments – which allows commenters to use their Social Media accounts to post comments
• Likes
• Contact Form – although I’ve switched to a different plugin so this page still works
• Related Posts
• Shortcode Embeds – which are used to embed, for example, YouTube videos

Several other features which normally work behind the scenes (such as Markdown support) are also now unavailable.

Once I know more about this problem I will post an update here.

The post Website Issues November 23, 2014 appeared first on Stationary Journey.

The quest for the new Theme is over. After spending what felt like an eternity reviewing lots of different responsive themes, I finally settled on – wait for it – “Twenty Fourteen”. The view on Mobile devices really swung it for me. However, not content with that, I wanted to put my own stamp on it and in celebration of the fine Spring weather here at the moment, I decided to create my own “Fantasia on a Theme of Twenty Fourteen”.

Well, that was the plan. The stock Twenty Fourteen is quite dour, all that black and green, but no combination of Spring colours I came up with looked half way decent. So I threw that idea out of the window. My next few attempts ended up looking far too much like other mods of Twenty Fourteen out there. Quickly going nowhere, I started a web search for colours I liked the look of and finally found inspiration with a couple of paint colours on an old Art Deco paint palette – no surprise then that it looks a little old-fashioned. So here we are – hardly Spring-like, but I’m happy with it. At least until I see something I like more. I’ve spent more time that anticipated recreating my old customizations, or modifying them to the new theme, but that comes with the territory. Still need to tweak a few things, like the pagers (again) which I’m not happy with at the moment. I’m also trying to get my head around the “Featured Image” which I’d never really considered before. In the case of this post it was downloaded from Pixabay.

As the title of this post is completely misleading, I will finish with a real work of art (one of my favourite bits of English Pastoral).

The post Fantasia on a Theme of Twenty Fourteen appeared first on Stationary Journey.

Yes, the name of this blog has changed along with the domain name. When I first started the blog I already had the domain name terryfinney.com and as this would be a personal blog, not devoted to any topic in particular, I thought using my own name would be the thing to do.

However, after looking a a lot of other blogs recently, and listening to the inestimable Ed Jelley on a recent Pen Addict podcast I realised that I had made a mistake. I must stress that this is not intended as a Pen Blog, but I have drawn a lot of inspiration from Pen Blogs. I also though that if I was going to change the name (and domain), the sooner the better.

Even though this isn’t a Pen Blog, I still wondered if every play on the words pen, ink, notebook, stationery, desk etc, etc, etc, really had been exhausted. After much thought I came up with “Stationery Journey”. I patted myself on the back for the clever wordplay but assumed somebody must have used it already. To my surprise (apart from a mesmerising YouTube video and a couple of fleeting references), it hadn’t been, and the domain name stationeryjourney.com was still available. Then I reminded myself that this is not a Pen Blog, and such a domain name would be easy to mistake and mistype (probably as stationaryjourney.com). Wait a minute though – “Stationary Journey” would do just fine – and it appeals to my sense of humour. The domain name for this was available too, so I immediately picked it up, along with stationeryjourney.com (not sure if that was being greedy or a genuine attempt to point mistypes in the right direction).

Following the instructions at How to Properly Move WordPress to a New Domain Without Losing SEO I made the changes today. Not sure if my SEO really is intact, but it sees to be such a black art that I’m not sure how I would ever be able to tell. Old links at terryfinney.com should redirect to stationaryjourney.com, as should the domain stationeryjourney.com

So, excuses to type in some real content are running out. Just the theme left to go.

The post What’s in a Name? appeared first on Stationary Journey.

I’ve also made a few more changes intended to resident he visual clutter, especially where the content rarely changes. The about.me widget has gone, replaced with a Connect widget with smaller icons. The About page has been knocked into shape though. I have also removed the 500px and Picasa widgets. I really liked the 500px site when I first joined, there are some fantastic photos there, but I rarely visit now so this widget would have been rarely updated. Picasa used to be my main cloud storage and sharing site for photos but its being slowly crushed under the Google+ heel and I’m finding sharing so cumbersome that I would rather concentrate on Flickr for that.

I’ve swapped Disqus for the Jetpack commenting system. Still not sure about that, but as there are no comments yet I won’t worry too much for the time being.

The Official sharing buttons for social networks won’t work properly in Chrome, and that one is really annoying me, but I can’t track down the cause. Update: Almost immediately after posting this I found the cause – the “Disconnect” extension for Chrome – when disabled the official buttons work fine – so that’s what I’m using now.

Finally, I’ve reduced the number of posts appearing on the home page and reordered the widgets in the sidebar to balance things up a bit. Ultimately I plan to change the theme when I can find one that works well with everything (such optimism).

The post Keeping up Appearances appeared first on Stationary Journey.

So I have reverted back to editing in a browser. I had previously found this to be too distracting, so I also tried out WordPress’s “distraction free” full screen editor. Coupled with the “full screen” mode in the browser (F11 in Chrome and Firefox) it really gives a minimalist approach which I think I can live with.

I have also disabled the Visual Editor – I only switched to it once during drafting this post and it mangled some html I had entered. So I have now removed the temptation to use it at all (the profile page in the Admin Dashboard is the place to disable it.)

Having done that and gone into full screen mode, most of the handy buttons (apart from those to insert images and links) have gone. Although I’m fairly competent with html I need the easiest way to show a few words in bold, or insert a heading when necessary. This is where Markdown comes in, which is now available through the Jetpack plugin (it just needs to be enabled).

The following are a few examples of Markdown (Hosted on Pastebin because WordPress insists on transforming some of the characters in the links to html entities):

And here are the results:

This is a level 2 heading

This is a level 3 heading

This is some normal text. Here is some text in italic, bold and monospace.

• This is a bullet point (the preceding blank line is needed)
• This is a second bullet point

1. This is a numbered list
2. This is the second line – the number used doesn’t matter!

This is quoted text
This is a second line of quoted text

Say I want to put something in *asterisks*

This is a simple link: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics

This is another link example with a title.

The Markdown Mark comes from here: https://github.com/dcurtis/markdown-mark

The post Distraction Free Writing and Markdown appeared first on Stationary Journey.

I’m not impressed with the way WordPress manages links, so it comes as no surprise that this feature is now deprecated in new installs. If there was any easy way to categorize batches of links quickly I would have finished by now.

In putting the page together I had to set up a page template and a custom theme (the latter because the Jetpack Custom CSS editor wouldn’t play nice). Now both are done I suppose it will be easier to make my own modifications in future.

According to the Internet, this is a Lifestyle Blog, rather than a Niche Blog. Also according to the Internet (and I’m paraphrasing now), if you want to be read, then you should set up a Niche Blog and not a Lifestyle Blog. This is a tremendous relief. I’d hate to think anyone was actually reading this.

The post Resources Page appeared first on Stationary Journey.

A test to see how the Posterous bookmarklet works.

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