2008 October - Jofftastic - Musings and rants of a Peterborough blogger

Monthly Archives: October 2008

Peterborough gets another KFC

Oct 29

KFC’s a funny one. It’s always been in the shadow of the golden arches and on the High Street at least, is also overshadowed by Burger King but it’s on the retail parks that KFC earns it’s chicken wings.

Peterborough’s always lacked a serious KFC restaurant. Ok so it’s had the London Road restaurant for as long as I can remember and it’s starting to show it’s age with a horrendous car park and poor location for most of Peterborough.
More recently we had the KFC built on the outskirts of a land refil site, so on a good day you get a lovely ripe smell of decomposing whatever filling your nostrils. And that’s just from the restaurant kitchen… sorry, I had to get a joke in there somewhere – I actually don’t mind KFC restaurants and have even partaken in the odd mystery shopper experience there.

Oh, there’s also the Xtra services restaurant on the A1/A605 which has the misfortune of being on the site of one of the most depressing motorway service stations I’ve ever been too.

Peterborough Park and Ride

Oct 24

Only an absolute fool would attempt to drive into Peterborough for Christmas shopping in the weeks running up to the big day (less than 9 weeks to go by the way…), which is why it’s great that for another year Peterborough City Council’s Travelchoice have announced that from November 1st to December 27th a free Park and Ride service will be in operation.

Now you can leave your car in a secure car park on the outskirts of the city and sit back whilst someone else does the driving for you! As the roadworks around Peterborough are horrendous yet again, using the Park and Ride bus service makes more sense than ever!

Saturday services will be run from the Diligenta (what used to be Pearl) car park, in Lynch Wood, and from outside Perkins car park, in Oxney Road (near Sainsburys), to Queensgate Shopping Centre. The Oxney Road service also stops at Midgate.

Also, from November 30th until December 21st, an additional Sunday service will be in operation.

Steven Fry in America

Oct 20

If like me, you’re hooked on watching Steven Fry’s travels across the USA in his London Taxi then you’ll no doubt be itching to visit some of the destinations on his journey.

Unlike Steven though, I’ll settle for a hotel rather than some good ol’ gin-u-wine American hospitality so finding a great hotel is essential. Thankfully it’s the Internet to the rescue with fantastic websites like Cheaperthanhotels, with last minute deals and discounts for pre booked rooms. This is how the smart traveller books rooms and prices are often cheaper than what native Americans are paying!

CMS Made Simple WYSIWYG table outlines

Oct 14

CMS Made Simple is a great content management system. It’s free, easy to get to grips with, quite powerful and the forums are fairly helpful when you need help.

There are obviously quirks with it (as there is with all off the shelf software) such as tables inserted within the WYSIWYG editor lacking any outlines, making placement quite problematic (think “invisible table”).

Thankfully there is an answer with at least the current versions of CMS Made Simple (1.4.1 at the time of writing this) having an option to turn table outline borders on and off.

Method

From within the CMS Made Simple admin control panel, go to: Extensions > TinyMCE WYSIWYG > Advanced (tab)

There you should see a checkbox for the option “Include only screen CSS”. Tick that, update the settings and give the WYSIWYG editor a whirl.

If all has gone well, you should now see the outline borders when editing page contents.

Sky TV installation in Spain

Oct 10

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being stuck in a Spanish hotel or villa with nothing to watch on TV except local (Spanish) channels, MTV and if you’re lucky CNN, then your prayers have been answered.

I knew you could get satellite TV pretty much anywhere in the world, but Sky TV with Sky+ is the trump card. Now you can pause and rewind live television, easily set up all your favourite programmes on series record and generally have a better life!

non-www to www redirect in ASP

Oct 01

If you’ve ever wondered how to redirect users from a non-www (e.g. domain.com) to www (e.g. www.domain.com) URL when you’re using ASP (Windows Active Server Pages) on your website then wonder no longer.

By combining a simple 301 redirect with a check in the URL for the string “www”, you can ensure that users to your website always view the www version. Reasons for this could include ensuring that session state is maintained or for marketing purposes.

Implementation

If InStr(LCase(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME")),"www") = 0 Then
    Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
    Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.domain.com"
End If

Simply include this code at the top of any pages you want to redirect (ideally add it to an include file that is used on every page).

The code above isn’t perfect as any URL with www in the name will never redirect, such as http://wwwshop.com, but some simple string manipulation will fix that.

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Jofftastic

Musings and rants of a Peterborough blogger

Monthly Archives: October 2008

Peterborough gets another KFC

Peterborough Park and Ride

Steven Fry in America

CMS Made Simple WYSIWYG table outlines

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Sky TV installation in Spain

non-www to www redirect in ASP

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Monthly Archives: October 2008

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