GDPR: you are allowed to maintain a blacklist, suppression list or stoplist. You are also allowed to freak out and panic.

In May the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force (and no, brexit won’t get us out of it – still no benefit to brexit. Sorry.) In my view this is shaping up be a complicated piece of law for small businesses to follow, both intellectually and technically. Worryingly, I’ve not heard much…Continue reading GDPR: you are allowed to maintain a blacklist, suppression list or stoplist. You are also allowed to freak out and panic.

Quickly removing date/time stamps from a text file using find and replace (Gedit, Fedora)

I have been writing a lot recently about little obstacles I have come across while helping the Church of England move content from their old sites to their new ones. Making a list of all the content to be moved is often the first job, but many of the older/proprietary platforms don’t have the ability…Continue reading Quickly removing date/time stamps from a text file using find and replace (Gedit, Fedora)

Removing every other line, or every nth line, from a list using LibreOffice Calc

This is particularly useful when working with lists copied and pasted from withing software (like WordPress or Drupal). Perhaps you are making a list of blogs you have written or you want to check the order of a menu: often when you copy this data you get spare bits of html such as button names…Continue reading Removing every other line, or every nth line, from a list using LibreOffice Calc

Allow your contributors to upload a profile picture to WordPress without using Gravatar

There are lots of benefits to contributors uploading a profile picture (also known as an Avatar) to your WordPress site: it makes it clearer who is writing each blog, it helps the writer feel part of your site, it makes your site more personable and friendly which helps your readers to engage more. WordPress, by…Continue reading Allow your contributors to upload a profile picture to WordPress without using Gravatar

Help I forgot to make my user an administrator when installing fedora

When installing fedora I almost always forget to tick the “make user an administrator” box. Then when I want to install some software or update later I get a rather morose ticking off from my terminal…  “Username is not in sudoers file. This incident will be reported”.  Just what every girl wants to hear… one…Continue reading Help I forgot to make my user an administrator when installing fedora

How to open gparted in fedora 25 (wayland): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0

Today’s task list involved installing Fedora 25 (yay!) on my new computer and reformatting some hard drives to use as backup disks. The install was fine however I couldn’t seem to get gparted started (poet / know it). Gparted is the tool I find most useful for dealing with hard drives, partitions etc, but apparently…Continue reading How to open gparted in fedora 25 (wayland): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0