liv | Helpful people (Reply)

Lots of really helpful posts popping up on my reading page recently.

For local people, diziet has lots of detail about the closure, current and planned, of the busway cycle route: Important walking/cycle link closed, poor diversion, terrible signage.
Meanwhile, for DW neighbours, runpunkrun noticed that DW has taken a step towards joining the 21^st century with an @ usernames feature. This lets you make specialist DW links to usernames without having to type the whole clunky <user name="exampleuser"> pseudo-HTML. jesse_the_k explains the syntax in more detail in the comment thread, including how to link to profiles on non-DW sites, and how to escape the @ symbol if you just want a literal @ sign.
For people who like languages, cosmolinguist has written a completely brilliant three-part explanation of how to read the International Phonetic Alphabet (those weird, mostly letter-like symbols that are used in formal contexts to explain how to pronounce words): Part 1; Part 2; Part 3. I particularly enjoyed the series because it explains not only how to read the IPA, but why it is the way it is, with lots of exciting information about phonology.
And for people who like cake, hilarita very helpfully indeed posted an excellent LEMON cake recipe. jack and I, who are not very experienced bakers at all, found the instructions completely foolproof, and the resulting cake definitely lived up to its all caps title. We made it with ordinary, wheat-based self-raising flour as gluten free isn't an issue for us, but there's an explanation in the post of what gluten free flour mix to use if you need that. Many thanks, Hilarita!