IT Werkz Sometimes

I’ve been studying to take the ISEB Intermediate Certificate in Software Testing for the last couple of weeks and it hasn’t been easy. Having tested software for a very long time it should be relatively straightforward, but not so.

What they teach you on the Intermediate course is the best practice and the theory of testing software and mapping that to what I do and probably do reasonably well doesn’t really work. The Intermediate Certificate also builds on the original Foundation Certificate, which I passed the exam of about 4 years ago, but not the ISEB version that I took and passed but the ISTQB version and the version of the last couple of years. If that wasn’t enough to make it hard I didn’t actually do the ISEB Foundation Certificate course, I just sat, and passed, the exam. My thinking at the time being that I should be able to pass a basic software testing test.

That background has firmly jammed the chickens back in their roost but I have at last started to make some progress with the course and in the next week intend to do the exam. Failing the exam isn’t worth thinking about as their is another little scenario knocking about just to compound the whole thing.

I have also in the last couple of weeks been on a course for the ISEB Practitioner Certificate in Software Test Management. The entry criteria to get onto this course is that you have passed the Intermediate Certificate, which I haven’t yet, but which the course providers assume I will. This course is even more theory but I have learnt quite a lot about test management which is something I have never had any interest in before. I’ve been reading some of the example exam questions for both courses and sometimes I can barely understand the question. Don’t think there is much chance of anyone passing these exams if English isn’t their first language (Hell, English is your first language and you’re having trouble. Ed). The confusion continues.

There is yet another version of the Wordpress software – 2.8.6 – that I use for the writing of this blog and as usual they are begging everyone to update to it. I think the Wordpress people have the mentatility of students, or definitely a level 1 CMMI company, as most of their software releases are buggy, invariably loads of plug-ins don’t work and templates shudder at the site of a new version before falling over in a wobbly heap, but so do most templates when run against any version of the Wordpress software. This is why the template I use for this blog is so darn boring, coz it usually still stands up after yet another cack-handed Wordpress upgrade. This company need to be bought by a professional software company and have their software regression tested before release. That’ll induce some culture shock.

Been listening to Them Crooked Vultures, a supergroup made up of Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age, Dave Grohl of The Foo Fighters and John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin, and they make quite a good racket.

When I tweek this blog I do all my edits on the server which is just a tad hairy coz if I screw up I’m not sure if I can unscrew myself!

I do backups to various PC’s and cloud drives so I am covered up to a point (Just like them old tape streamers that you could never restore from eh? Ed). I’ve been thinking about editing Wordpress themes on Dreamweaver and hadn’t a clue how to go about that so did some searching. Firstly you need to create a folder on your PC to store everything and then FTP to that folder the Wordpress theme’s stylesheet – style.css – and then FTP the complete images folder – on the hosting server – to the same folder on your PC. Create a new HTML document and save that in the same folder, on your PC. Then comes the nasty bit. Grab the code for the header – header.php on the hosting server – and paste that, in Code View in Dreamweaver, into the newly created HTML document. Then paste the code from the main index template – index.php, sidebar – sidebar.php and footer – footer.php into the new HTML document.

Actually that’s not all, you also need to change the location of the CSS file in the header and also dynamic calls for the blog name and sub-titles and as the darn thing won’t have access to your database tables they’ll be no content to display so somewhere headings and article text will need to be added. Jeez, this ain’t easy and you’ll probably spend hours messing about just getting the blog into Dreamweaver so that you can then start hammering away at it.

Hmm…just thought, so even when I have tinkered away at a Wordpress theme in DW how the heck do I get all that amended code back to the server? Do I have to unpick it all and regenerate individual PHP files for header.php etc? Nope, this is just asking for trouble. Think whats needed here is an add-on or plug-in to Dreamweaver so you just point DW at a Wordpress blog and it sorts itself out and then displays your blog locally but in DW. I then remembered that MS Expression Web imports web pages so tried it and though it did download a pile of docs I haven’t been able get it to display squat yet.

I tried six Wordpress themes that were given away on a magazine the other day and none of them worked. If I was an expert at CSS I could probably sort them out. I suppose I could create a new blog and therefore there would be no content to import and then maybe these WP themes might work. Trouble with that wonderful idea is that I can’t remember how I created this darn thing. I did some jiggery-pokery then imported the articles from a Wordpress.com version of this blog. But what was the jiggery-pokery?

I downloaded a few user generated free Wordpress themes and as usual most of them didn’t render correctly. I considered paying for one but couldn’t find a theme I liked, but I did bump into some software called Artisteer which will generate Wordpress themes.

I installed a demo version of that and played around with it a bit and noticed that some of the suggested templates looked suspiciously like some of the free themes I’d seen and tried. That wasn’t a good start, a Wordpress theme generated by commercial software which I had tried and found it not to work. Anyway I created a new theme and loaded that up to the server and tried it and what a mess it looked. The posts were displayed in one of the side bars and the main body was empty. No doubt if I fiddle around enough with Artisteer I can get it to work but if I’m going to do that then I might as well just use Dreamweaver and get a better looking page that will work.

On the cover of a magazine there was a CD with three free professional themes from both StudioPress and ThemeGalaxy. So I tried them with my test site. All six when demo’d from the CD looked great. When I tried them with my chock-full test web site they also looked a mess. Jeez, I’m starting to think it’s me or my test site rather than these themes. I removed all of the widgets to see if they were the culprits but most of them still rendered badly. I’m probably just doing too much and these themes are to be used from the initial start of a web site, when there is nothing to import, and not by using them to try and jam a couple of years of cack-handed web site nonsense.

I also downloaded the Web Developer plug-in for Firefox and that’s yet another learning curve. On the Wordpress.com pages they mention a Custom CSS Upgrade app that they sell. That looked quite interesting but I couldn’t find a link to actually pay for the darn thing. Wordpress obviously don’t do useability testing.

Just had a look at my Akismet stats and I usually get around 500 spams a month for this blog but in April I got 26,000. What the heck happened.