My first free WordPress theme is now available.
It is named anIMass and has been designed to be suitable for Internet Marketing but it is flexible and can be used for regular blogging and as a general theme for any purpose.
It can be seen live on my theme test blog at onlinewpthemetest
Well it has been a while since my last post here. 2 or 3 weeks ago my site went down & the host server thought a WordPress plugin was the cause. They disabled all my 30 or so WP plugins &Â then restarted this site. I have finally re-activated the majority of the plugins and so far the site is still working! I do not know which one was the problem!…It was a bit of a pain.
Anyway now my blog is updated to the latest WordPress3.0.1v and I have been creating my own WPTheme for my chessblog (www.chessat.richard-dickinson.com). This has had ups and downs and currently it is not working properly in IE but works fine in Firefox. Hopefully I can fix it soon!
 I have learnt a lot about WP theme creating and HTML5 (+ a little CSS3) but there is a lot more to do and learn! The joy and pain of WordPress! I think overall WordPress has a lot going for it so hopefully my experiences with it will help me blog and interact via the internet better and so the more I learn and know about it the better I can use it.
 Plenty of other things have been happening in between the odd bit of gardening and going to work. I still though am not in my ideal work situation (but who truly is?!). Of course the children are on summer holiday now and thankfully we have had and hope to continue to have a decent bit of summer weather. I look forward to a few days holiday in around a weeks time but feel I have a lot to do-so I must make time to get out with Hilary, Chris and Elizabeth. A nice trip to the coast would be good.
That is enough for now! I hope to post more regularly now the site is back in action-best wishes to any and all readers! 
This week is National Insect Week and coincidentally I have had two bee hives to deal with in the last week outside our house. Two beekeepers were called and they took the hives away. Bees are of course needed to pollinate plants and they also produce honey.
Beehive closeup
Beekeeper about to remove beehive
Other than that it has again been busy in our home. Elizabeth returned from France from her watersports week with the school having greatly enjoyed the trip. She tried sailing and windsurfing and liked them. It would ‘bee’ nice if Elizabeth & I could get to do some windsurfing and or sailing locally! (do not really have the time though).
Unfortunately Dad had to go to hospital last week and is there now and treatment includes some form of radiotherapy which is not pleasant. Mum is of course worried as we all are-c’mon Dad -get better soon!
I today finally got IIS7 and Xampp back working together on my computer after they decided to conflict over a week ago. Strangely I am not certain what caused the problem nor how I managed exactly to fix it. It was a pain to fix as it has taken this last week fiddling around. Hopefully now I can continue with my web design development on my localhost server in php and asp. I briefly looked at Umbraco CMS and that may have caused my localhost IIS7/Xampp problem-but I am not sure. Also I can now continue with my new WordPress theme development for my chess blog theme. I am now using WordPress3 on my localhost servers but haven’t yet upgraded my live WP sites to WordPress3 yet. I shall though look at doing this soon!
Meanwhile sport continues. England actually scored and won 1-0 versus Slovenia in the World Cup in South Africa and now will play Germany next.
Wimbledon has started and Mahut and Isner are probably still playing their match! After 10 hours they were 58 games all in the final set!! Quite remarkable…:-)
Last Tuesday was my wife’s aunties 85 birthday so we went to a local pub for a celebratory meal. A good time was had by all. It is not everyday you are 85 years young-congratulations Aunt Doreen (AD to those close by)!
Aunt Doreen 85th birthday
Other news:
My wife and children are away on half term holiday in Rhodes.
I am left on my own at home as my employer would not give me holiday at this time. I have been looking at computer graphics in C & C++ and finding it a little tricky as these languages do not seem to have inbuilt graphic functions and need additional libraries to add better graphic features ( ie Allegro/CGUI/FLTK/Win32/MFC etc). This is a bit of a contrast to Java that has better in built graphics features (Java Awt and Sing).
This is all with a view to me making a Chess GUI! Well why not! Sure will be a good challenge for my coding skills. This looks like it will be a long ongoing project though.
Meanwhile here are a couple of random recent photos:
1. Flowering Chives:
Flowering chives in pot
2. Evening view from my front door:
Late afternoon view from my front door
 This weekend I also started to consider coding my own CMS in php for some of my older websites. Again this would be an interesting coding challenge for me, but I have lots of other things to do first so I doubt I will find time to do this soon.
Lastly I saw this video on YouTube this weekend and it struck a chord! Enjoy
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(NB do not forget to visit www.chessat.richard-dickinson.com for my weekend chess news and games!)
Hi all
Today we had a chimney cowl fitted!
Chimney cowl at home
Hopefully this should stop birds coming down the chimney (it has happened several times!) and keep the rain out too!
Who won the UK election? Â The Conservatives!
However the Conservatives did not get the majority needed to govern outright.
So now there are deals going on between all the parties but it looks very like Gordon Brown will stand down as Prime Minister and the Labour party overall had disappointing results.
So the outcome is the UK will get a new government and we will experience change. I hope this will be change for the better and everyone will work together to help one another and the UK in these hard world economic and social times.
Cometh the hour of need cometh the Government of need?!
Today Chris (my 14 year old son) and I have tennis matches. Chris is playing away at Framlingham and I am playing at our tennis club Culford Tennis Centre.
Chris has been having coaching and playing regularly but I have just had 2 or 3 practice games with Chris so far this season. Here is Chris at Culford on the indoor court;
Chris tennis indoors at Culford
UPDATE:
I had a strange match today! To start with it was raining and one lady on the opposition team did not want to play in the rain-fair enough I suppose! I stayed on court in the rain and played one set of a mens singles with my team mate and when we finished an hour and 15 mins later the sun came out!
Then I found to my amazement our opposition team were still here and now they wanted to play! I was quite tired & soaked through but went on to play the match.
My partner and I lost the first match 3-6 4-6 and drew the other match 6-2 6-7 (lost on tiebreak).
I was shattered and am just recovering now! I need to get fitter…..
Chris lost his match. He played on astro turf and is not used to that surface and the low bouncing ball so the home team had an edge as they were used to the astro surface.
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