Month: November 2020

WordPress menus ‘feature’

Posted on by Andy Pierce

The configurable menus in WordPress have a checkbox labelled “automatically add new top-level pages to this menu” where if checked every time you make a new page it gets added to the menu.  That might be good for drop-down menus but otherwise very rapidly clutters up the page.  By default themes come with a ‘Primary menu’ and you can configure that as you would like, HOWEVER the ‘automatically add new top-level pages to this menu’ button, although you can check and uncheck it, doesn’t do anything… new pages are always added to the primary menu regardless.  You can go into the ‘customize’ option for the theme and manually remove all these pages, but that gets to be a hassle.

To fix the problem, you have to actually create a new menu yourself, any menu at all, and use that.  Confusingly, ‘Primary menu’ is both the name of a menu, and the location of a menu.  After you’ve made your own menu (I called mine ‘main nav bar’) you can set that to be in the ‘Primary menu’ location and you’re then free to delete the ‘Primary menu’ menu and things work as expected.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

(the checkbox not working on the default setup is definitely a bug)

Fish increase in popularity

Posted on by Andy Pierce

As reported in the Guardian “Going for gold(fish)” the pandemic with associated lockdowns and work-from-homes has led to a upsurge in popularity for aquariums at home.  Something nice to watch from the side while on those conference calls.  This is good news, but problematic in some ways as the investment in time and maintenance is often severely underestimated.

[Peter Pritchard, CEO of Pets at Home] said the cost of setting up a tank started at about £50, with the fish “a couple of pounds” on top of that. But as with any hobby, the sky is the limit, with the retailer selling extras such as £60 ornaments shaped like the Acropolis.

It’s obviously not as simple as buy a tank, put in some water and a fish, sprinkle in some food flakes every now and then and off you go.  That said there are lots of online resources so with a little research people won’t go far wrong.  At least the fish part is reasonably straightforward, now if you want live plants to go with those fish, then you’re entering a whole new world of complexity (and expense).

Magnetic algae scraper

Posted on by Andy Pierce

About every three weeks or so I have to give the algae a good scrapedown with a credit card blank.  It involves getting essentially my whole arm into the tank with some complicated manoevering to get through the narrow access at the top of the aquarium.  It takes a pretty good hour to get things sorted out.  I’ve been wondering about whether it’s worth getting a magnetic algae scraper to clean the algae without having to get all wet doing it.  Lots of good choices there, with some people advocating for “the flipper“, while the platinum standard (even more expensive than gold) seems to be the ‘Mighty Magnets‘ range.  What puts me off is the fear that they will scratch up either the inside (or the outside!) of the tank, whereas I’m pretty sure the credit card blank is generally problem free.  The other upside to a magnetic system would be getting in behind plants and decorations.  I haven’t been brave enough to pull the trigger on getting one of these yet, but maybe someday…

Lots of great videos about magnetic algae scrapers, but always for glass… bad sign so much silence about acrylic?