Save Billy!

Billy Burke, of Killorglin, Co. Kerry has been waiting for a lung transplant for three and a half years. His story has made the headlines here because he was turned down for a transplant in Newcastle as he had an infection in his lungs. However he has been accepted by a hospital in Manchester, but because the Irish Government has an exclusive deal with Newcastle, Billy won’t have access to lungs that become available in the Republic. This is what Billy’s family and others want to change.
Check the site for more info.
(via Owen)

Street Photographer Interviews

Several excellent interviews of street photographers in the latest Popular Photography Magazine. (via PhotographyBlog)
Later… I noticed one piece of advice that was repeated in several of the interviews. You should manually focus your camera to 2 or 3 meters, and set the exposure before hand. That’ll certainly avoid the 1-3 second lag while the auto-focus kicks in, especially in low light.

b2++ Photoblog

What with the proliferation of photoblogs around the Internet I thought we should get in on the act!
Features:

  • Displays one image, with optional surrounding html code.
  • If no image is available selects a previous image at random.
  • Only certain images will be used. No surprises!

What to do:

  • Add this code to your blog template: {photoblog}
  • There are optional parameters too:
    start: Starting html code.
    msg: Title of the picture.
    randmsg: Title of a random photo
    end: Ending html code.
    class: css class inserted into the img tag.

    ie. {photoblog start="<div align='center'>" msg="<b>Pic of the Day</b>" end="</div>" class="pictureborder"}
    To always display a random photo just pass when='random' to the plugin.
  • Upload images to your blog with the filenames photoblog-YYYYMMDD.jpg

A Night at the Opera (House)

I went to see Calexico the other night. They played in the Opera House here in Cork on Wednesday night and for some reason I forgot to blog this event! (oh yeah, you don’t need to know everything about me do you?)
Anyhow, Calexico were .. good, not great, but good. I think everyone was waiting for Alone Again Or which has been played quite often by Ryan Tubridy. They played that near the end of the night and thankfully I woke up just minutes before. Oh, did I forget to tell you I fell asleep? Sorry, the rest of their music just didn’t do anything for me. (Apologies to Calexico fans who come here via Google, leave a comment if you want to vent your anger!)
In fact, the support band, Fred were excellent! My foot tapped along to their tunes, they looked like they really enjoyed playing and there was good rapport (thanks pron@#linux) between band members.
On the way back to the car I bumped into one of Fred’s lovely violin players. She was giving directions to a group of lads over from Wales and I recognised her from earlier so we had a bit of a natter and I told her Fred rocked, Calexico sucked. I think she appreciated that!

Edit in 2023: Adding YouTube videos!

Paginated Posts in b2++

Minor b2++ update here but it’s a good one for those of you with lots of content. b2 always had a “Previous Page/Next Page” function but I never enabled it in b2++. This morning I fixed that so to activate it do the following:

  • Go into the Options page and change “Show XX days/posts” to “Show XX posts paged” where XX is some number.
  • Add the following code to your blog template: {$posts_nav_link}. I’ve put mine instead a blockquote tag but you can do what you like to style the links.

Next up is a Smarty function that takes as parameters a b2 function name and parameters to make it easy to call original b2 functions.