Wordpress | All the Billion Other Moments

ProgPress 0.8.5

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

I’ve updated my ProgPress Plug-in. This version should (hopefully) solve the issue with php4 that recently came to light. It also uses an inline version of the default styles in feeds, which looks a lot nicer.

If it doesn’t seem to be working after upgrading/installing, please check the ProgPress settings page.

Popularity: 1%

Posted in technology | No Comments »

“Now Reading” Plugin and WordPress 2.8

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Overall my WordPress 2.8 upgrade went fairly well, at least as far as any site visitors would see. The admin was a different story.¹ After some poking around² I was surprised to find out it was Rob Miller’s fabulous Now Reading WordPress plugin³ preventing me from editing posts.

I’m not sure exactly what changed in WordPress to trigger the issue, but after some poking I tracked down the problem, and I think I found a solution other than removing the plugin.

In the file wp-content/plugins/now-reading/url.php, look for the following:

function is_now_reading_page() { global $wp; $wp->parse_request();

I commented out the call to $wp->parse_request(); and it fixed the problems I was having with the site admin, and so far it seems Now Reading is unaffected by this change.

Popularity: 7%

If you’ve ever used the Google Gears/Turbo Mode stuff in the WordPress Admin, I advise you to do the upgrade in a different browser because it seems to be responsible for a lot of problems folks are having with the automated upgrade [↩]
and upgrading one of my own plugins [↩]
It powers the library pages here on the site. [↩]

Posted in technology | 6 Comments »

Use Google Libraries 1.0.6

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

Required Upgrade for Users of WordPress 2.8

I’ve updated my Use Google Libraries plugin to support WordPress 2.8.

Disables script concatenation in WordPress 2.8, since it seems to have issues when some of the dependencies are outside of the concatenation.
Persists flag to load scripts in the footer in WordPress 2.8

If you’re using WordPress 2.8, you’ll want to upgrade ASAP. Download it from the Plugin Directory (or use the auto-update feature). If you find it useful, feel free to leave a tip.

Popularity: 1%

Posted in technology | 1 Comment »

Use Google Libraries 1.0.5

Friday, March 20th, 2009

Updated Wordpress Plugin

I’ve updated my Use Google Libraries plugin. This version implements a pair of suggestions from Peter Wilson.

Use Google Libraries should detect when a page is loaded over https and load the libraries over https accordingly
Use Google Libraries no longer drops the micro version number from the URL. The reasons for this are twofold:
- It ensures the version requested is the version received.
- Google’s servers set the expires header for 12 months for these urls, as opposed to 1 hour. This allows clients to cache the file for up to a year without needing to retrieve it again from Google’s servers. If the version requested by your WordPress install changes, so will the URL so there’s no worry that you’ll keep loading an old version.

What are you waiting for? Download it from the Plugin Directory (or use the auto-update feature in WordPress 2.7+). If you find it useful, feel free to leave a tip.

Popularity: 1%

Posted in technology | 2 Comments »

Links of Interest (February 5th 2009 Through February 24th 2009)

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Plugin Authors, Are you making the best of Readme.txt?: A comprehensive guide to where the WordPress Plugin Directory pulls the data it displays. A must read for plugin developers. Especially important with the recent changes to the directory's search capabilities.
Tags: development wordpress plugins
Cross-Browser Inline-Block: If you've ever tried to create a flexible gallery style layout of elements of varying heights, then this is for you.
Tags: webdesign hacks CSS howto HTML layout inline-block
HTML5 Canvas Cheat Sheet: A compact reference for HTML5 canvas element.
Tags: webdesign html5 development reference canvas web cheatsheet HTML
Dalek War Boxset: This Doctor Who Restoration Team article detais the process of restoring color to "Planet of the Daleks" episode 3. It was theorized some years ago that interference on the surviving 16mm B&W telerecording (made by essentially pointing a film camera at a TV) might contain some valid PAL color subcarrier information. Unable to get funding to investigate the idea (which sounds a bit more far fetched than Dalek's to me), the informal Colour Recovery Working Group was started up online. The group succeeded in recovering color information from the telerecording. Meanwhile the Restoration Team commissioned Legend Films to colorize the episode (a process that's come a long way since Turner, but can still look a bit flat in the end). The finished version blends these two sources together, then processes them via VidFIRE (the process of restoring the original 50 field per second interlaced image from a telecline, another process developed during restoration of Doctor Who episodes).
Tags: Doctor-Who BBC Restoration-Team Colour-Recovery-Working-Group Colour-Recovery VidFIRE
Bacon Stupidity: For the month of February, Michael J. Nelson (MST3k, Rifftrax) has pledged to eat nothing but bacon. Yup, bacon. All month. Just bacon.
Tags: humor health bacon Michael-J-Nelson

Popularity: 1%

Posted in Links | 1 Comment »

New WordPress Plugin: Use Google Libraries 1.0

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

Speed Up WordPress Using Google’s AJAX Libraries API

I’m happy to announce my new WordPress Plugin Use Google Libraries. This plugin loads a number of standard Javascript libraries used by WordPress from Google’s AJAX Libraries API CDN. What’s that?

The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular, open source JavaScript libraries. [...] Google works directly with the key stake holders for each library effort and accepts the latest stable versions as they are released. Once we host a release of a given library, we are committed to hosting that release indefinitely. [...] We take the pain out of hosting the libraries, correctly setting cache headers, staying up to date with the most recent bug fixes, etc.

Or, in plain English, it should make your site load faster. It could also make other people’s sites load faster too, if they’re also using this plugin.

Supported Libraries

Any WordPress themes or plugins that load any of these libraries via enqueue_script() should automatically take advantage of Use Google Libraries.

Why not give it a try?

There’s nothing earth shattering here, but my goal was do one thing and do it well. You can read the documentation and download the plugin from the Use Google Libraries page in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Popularity: 1%

Posted in technology | 4 Comments »

ProgPress Updated

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Partly due to the strangeness that drove me to change hosting providers I found out that the previous version of ProgPress had an issue running under php4. That should now be fixed in the latest version (0.8), now available on the ProgPress plugin page

Popularity: 1%

Posted in Output | No Comments »

Announcing ProgPress 0.1

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

I’ve finally gotten around to wrapping up the CSS based progress meters I’ve been using on this site into a WordPress Plugin. This is my first plugin for WordPress, and it’s in it’s initial release. If you try it out let me know. I’m open to feature suggestions, etc.

Links of Interest (August 24th 2007 Through August 31st 2007)

Friday, August 31st, 2007

Science Fiction Writers of America abuses the DMCA – Boing Boing: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America invoked the DMCA to request works be removed from Scribd even though in a number of cases they had no right to do so, including Creative Commons licensed work.
Consumer Reports says ‘keep that car’: Driving one car for 15 years is cheaper than buying a new one ever 5 years. Nice to see I’ve been doing the right thing all this time.
YUI Theater ? Joseph Smarr: ?High-Performance JavaScript: Why Everything You?ve Been Taught is Wrong?: Video of Joseph Smarr’s talk on High-Performance JavaScript.
30+ Firefox Add-ons for Web Developers & Designers: Nice collection of Firefox extensions useful for web developers and/or designers.
Redirection – Manage 301 redirections without modifying Apache: Wordrpess 2.1+ plugin to handle redirects. Looks very full featured.
eTextbook seller fails logic test: Evo points out what I assume is a hilarious misuse of survey data. CafeScribe is supplying a “book” scented scratch and sniff sticker to customers because people like the way books smell.