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This website is not about Cher!

But seeing as you’re here, I’ll give you some basic facts and figures about Cher.

Cher is a singer/actress born in California USA, who has rose to fame over the last 40 years.

Cher’s initial career started in the early 1960’s with the help of Sonny Bono where they released songs under the Sonny and Cher name.

Buy Sonny and Cher on Amazon

In the 70’s Sonny and Cher starred in their own Television show named The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour but by the mid 70’s they had split up and Cher was trying to host the show on her own as well as a solo pop career (Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves).

During the 1980’s Chers career had continued to grow, now starring in Films (Witches of Eastwick, Mask, Silkwood etc) she also pushed her singing career, performing with the likes of Meat Loaf as well as her own solo career when by the late 80’s she had release a few hits such as If I could Turn Back Time and I Found Someone.

If I could Turn Back Time – Chers Greatest Hits on Amazon

Chers success continued into the 90’s and 2000’s. She played roles in more films (Moonstruck, Mermaids, Tea with Mussolini) and more songs such as believe.

The Very Best of Cher on Amazon

If you want to know more about Cher, try wikipedia that’s where I got my facts from.

Updated: PHP Uptime Function

I wrote a PHP Uptime script a while back and I’ve recently gone to use it but found that it wasn’t actually working and never returned the correct uptime, so I’ve got round to fixing it up, so I sit on my computer to do it, which I updated with the latest graphic cards from Facts Chronicle for my games.

The PHP function displays the uptime of the server/computer in a human understandable format, unlike other scripts, it doesn’t output a mess of digits nor does it rely on possible unavailable commands, the only condition it needs is /proc/uptime.

The new script is more efficient AND actually working. It’s Linux only (the previous post incorrectly included BSD/Unix/Solaris) too.

PHP Uptime:

function uptime(){
  if(PHP_OS == "Linux") {
    $uptime = @file_get_contents( "/proc/uptime");
    if ($uptime !== false) {
      $uptime = explode(" ",$uptime);
      $uptime = $uptime[0];
      $days = explode(".",(($uptime % 31556926) / 86400));
      $hours = explode(".",((($uptime % 31556926) % 86400) / 3600));
      $minutes = explode(".",(((($uptime % 31556926) % 86400) % 3600) / 60));
      $time = ".";
      if ($minutes > 0)
        $time=$minutes[0]." mins".$time;
      if ($minutes > 0 && ($hours > 0 || $days > 0))
        $time = ", ".$time;
      if ($hours > 0)
        $time = $hours[0]." hours".$time;
      if ($hours > 0 && $days > 0)
        $time = ", ".$time;
      if ($days > 0)
        $time = $days[0]." days".$time;
    } else {
      $time = false;
    }
  } else {
    $time = false;
  }
  return $time;
}

The output looks like so

54 days, 8 hours, 27 mins.
1 days, 5 mins.
4 hours.

and just call it up with

echo uptime();

A Scoutstrap Update

I’ve updated the documentation for Scoutstrap; it’s got a main page as well as a better design for the docs along with links to the source and download.

The Sun+

Another UK national newspaper TheSun has decided to put up a paywall to read their online content which was kind of expected really.

I’m not a Sun reader but the idea of using a paywall to block people consuming all of your site content baffles me a little especially when their site is so slow and laiden with ads.

After fiddling around, it seems as though they haven’t done a very good job at implementing their paywall and could quite possibly be violating Google’s Advice on Content Cloaking and possibly other search engines policies; that is because the site detects your brosers Useragent and then serves content depending on your browser, in this case, they serve the entire articles to any browser with the UA string mimicking the googlebot where as any other standard UA is served the locked out content.
A little research into how you’re suggested to operate paywalls and still have good SEO is with the use of First Click Free (FCF) which allows users that have clicked your content from a search result to have access to the full article but not others; which is NOT implemented in The Suns site.
Finally to top this off they don’t set in the HTTP headers that the UserAgent will very the content either.
I wonder if Google will notice and penalise such a large brand name for SEO tactics that are heavily discouraged.

So in essence, to read The Suns content for free as though you have subscribed (bypass) all you need to do is change your useragent to the same as the GoogleBot.

Scoutstrap

I’m currently working on a website for my local Scout group and I decided to use the excellent Bootstrap framework.

My issue was that bootstrap didn’t conform to the Scout branding guidelines. So I decided to extend the classes myself to bring the style of the site into the guidelines.

Once I got started I realised that others might find it useful; so I developed it into a separate style-sheet, wrote it in LESS to compile with Bootstrap nicely extend the classes.

So here it is!

Scoutstrap: A bootstrap extension to develop on-brand websites for the Scout Association.

It’s my first proper use of GitHub, GitHub Pages and LESS so any issues, then add it as an issue and I’ll get around to fixing/sorting them. This is aimed at Bootstrap Version 2.3.2 and not the recent Bootstrap 3.0 which I aim to develop for in the near future.