WordPress Plugin for Managing a Rota

Internet, Technology, ,

I recently had the situation where I wanted to install a plugin on one of my WordPress sites that would enable a number of people to volunteer to man an art exhibition for various shifts on a rota basis.

I searched around for a rota plugin but the only one I found had only been updated 8 years ago so that was not something I was happy with using.

There were a bunch of plugins that came up for managing employee shifts etc but it took me a while to find a plugin that seemed to do what I wanted it to.

In the end I found a great plugin for a simple rota system which is called Sign-up Sheets and you can create an entry for each shift and for each date and also add how many spots there are available for that rota spot.

An except from the sign up view front end

To show the rota on the front end you need to add the code [sign_up_sheet] to a page you have created (this was not immediately obvious!) and that will show you all the available slots for the dates and times you have created.

Another good thing is that when someone signs up for a slot they get sent an email confirming that slot so that they know what they have signed up for.

I have only used this so far for the one exhibition and it seems that I will need to delete any old data if I want a new rota to be the only thing to show on the website but that is fine, once the date is gone then I won’t need it to show any more.

There is also a pro version of the plugin with extra functionality which I have not tried but will do if I need it.

I just wanted to share the info about this plugin being useful for rotas as it did not come up initially in my searches.

John Martin’s Book on Surviving the War

Books, Society

Anyone who watched The One Show this week and saw war survivor John Martin telling his story about how he survived being blown out of his plane and being held captive in the 2nd World War, could not have failed to be moved by it.

In secret, the One Show had arranged to get his memoirs published into a book as it was his one great wish. The book is called “A Raid Over Berlin” and it is available to buy from many bookshops.

It is an important book, we think, as it is a record of what happened in the war from a personal point of view and these stories should not be forgotten. Future generations need to know about the sacrifices that a whole generation made.

Unfortunately, after his story was told on the One Show, the book quickly sold out and there were reports of the price going up to £32 – obviously upsetting people as the proceeds of this book were going to charity.

There is still a high demand for this book and as we write it is currently unavailable on Amazon, eBay and Waterstones but can be ordered though some book shops with a wait time of 2 weeks.

No doubt the publicity spurred a large number of sales but the publishers obviously didn’t realise how many copies were going to be sold.

We expect that there is another print run going on right now and will be buying it as soon as it is back in stock.

If you do wish to buy it through Amazon, then this is the link – as we are Amazon affiliates, we will get a commission for any purchases made through this site but will donate 100% of any commission made on this book to the Royal British Legion.

Has Facebook Gone Down?

Social Networks & Online Communities

There seem to be more and more occasions recently when people are unable to get into Facebook. Sometimes it can be your own issue (perhaps with your wireless connection or with your computer) but other times it may be the case that Facebook has gone down for a large number of people, if not everybody.

Today (20 November 2018) Facebook seems to have gone down or just gone slow for some people but there will likely be other occasions when this happens.

Sometimes you may get a completely blank screen, either with or without an error message or it may be that your feed just loads really slowly or you can’t click through to another area of Facebook.

You may get different messages when Facebook goes down

Inevitably people turn to social media alternatives to find out if Facebook has indeed gone down and the hashtag #facebookdown is a well used one.

If you are looking to find out if Facebook has gone down, or its it is just you,  check out this link so that you can see if there are a bunch of posts from users unable to get into Facebook.

You can also just tweet with the hashtag yourself to add to the conversation that tells people that Facebook is offline!

Why does Facebook go down? Well that could be down to a number of factors including a possible error when an update has been installed and for some reason things haven’t been checked as well as they could have been.

Free SSL For Hostgator Customers

Internet, Technology, , ,

Following recent announcements by Google, some Hostgator customers may have received an email telling them that they could get a free SSL Certificate for their websites (although I was not one of them!).

Activate Free SSL on WordPress

I thought it would be useful to show how this free SSL certificate could be activated on your WordPress sites on Hostgator in case anyone was not aware of this offering.

But first a small amount of background. For the last couple of years Google has been saying that it will highlight sites that do not have an SSL certificate by flagging up a message on Google Chrome to say that your site is insecure if you do not have a certificate on it.

This has led to some people clicking away from sites that say this under the impression that their details may be stolen etc of they continue which is obviously a bad thing for website owners.

Google Announcement

In February 2018 they made this announcement that from 1st July 2018 this would happen to all sites, thus making it pretty important to have the SSL certificate installed from tomorrow.

However, up until then, only business customers could have a free SSL for their websites on Hostgator and anyone else had to pay from $39 upwards to buy a certificate via Hostgator.

Hostgator Announcement

On 31st May Hostgator posted this on their blog which said that there would be a free SSL for Hostgator customers for their sites.

The blog post did not go into much detail about how to activate the free SSL certificate which is also available to those on shared hosting and reseller plans so if you are wondering if this applies to you, try the following:

Check Your Site

Firstly, to check that your site has the certificate, type in https in front of your website URL. You can see if the site will load over https as well as http.

If it does then you will need to force the site to use https by using an SSL Plugin. The most popular one to use is ‘Really Simple SSL’ which does what it says on the tin. Check it out in the plugin directory:

Obviously, before you make any major changes to your site you should take a back up.

really simple ssl

How to Activate Free Hostgator SSL

Click on ‘Install Now’ and then ‘Activate’

You may be lucky and the Plugin activates automatically with no issues or you may have to go through a couple of other steps (our sites varied even though they are all on the same server).

You may get the message ‘Detected possible certificate issues’ if the SSL certificate fails to activate:

detected possible certificate issues ssl

If this is the case then click on ‘Reload over https’ – you will likely have to logon again to your website.

If you repeatedly get issues with this not working just keep trying! Try loading the site with https before clicking, or if possible logon as another admin user. Otherwise close your browser and try again and it should work eventually.

Once this works you should get this message:

almost ready to migrate to SSL

or you may bypass the first error message and get this one straight away. If so, click on ‘Go ahead, activate SSL!’

You should be all set to go and your site will default to your free SSL certificate when you load it.

Downloadable Printable UK TV Schedule – World Cup 2018

Fun Stuff, Sports

So the World Cup 2018 has started and there are games on every day and it can be a bit difficult to keep track of. Obviously you will know when your own team are playing but you might want to watch out for other teams too.

So if you are looking for a printable UK TV schedule for the World Cup so that you can keep something with you to hand to refer to and know when all the games are on then we have one here for you.

Yes you can go all techno and get the official app but sometimes it just makes things easier to look at the whole schedule on a piece (or 3 in this case) of paper.

So here is the schedule, showing what date and time the matches are on, together with whether they are on BBC or ITV and with a space for you to complete the scores.

We will update this as we go along with the relevant teams showing in the quarter finals, semi finals etc so if you want to you can come back and print page 3 again once these things have been decided.

Download the printed World Cup 2018 schedule of games here. The format is a 1 page Word document (updated for the last 16).