Helpful Hackery

Using my hacker knowledge for the good of others. Plugin Progress, cmdln’s Chapters, and Patching Portfiles.

Plugin Progress

I recently updated ProgPress, my progress meter plugin for WordPress, based on some outstanding requests for functionality and better documentation.  It now has (hopefully) useful documentation, new options, and works as a shortcode.  If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, and you want to track progress towards a goal, you should check it out.

cmdln’s Chapters

My friend Thomas “cmdln” Gideon mentioned that chapter marks in the AAC version of his amazing podcast were going away, a casualty of his switch from Mac OS X to Linux.  I’ve spent a lot of time messing with this very thing, and I was glad to share this useless information specialized knowledge, and give Thomas a pointer to the mp4v2 project, which has a utility for just that purpose.  After an email explaining how the tool worked Thomas announced that chapter marks would be staying, and he was able to automate the process.

Patching Portfiles

I was happy to see that epubcheck added to MacPorts.  I was less happy when the wrapper script it installed didn’t work for me.  Luckily it was easy to fix, so I submitted a patch.  My automated MacPorts update installed it this morning.