Postcards From My Life

Dear Reader,

Yes, I’m still alive and no I’ve not taken to just shoveling up the crap the “devzone“:http://devzone.zend.com/public/view turns down. I’ll return to blogging soon and even to “blogblinging”:http://blog.calevans.com/blog-bling/. But here’s what’s up right now.

The company I was working for is in a bit of a financial pickle. I’ve picked up a short-term contract doing some super-secret cool stuff but it’s not permanent. So if you know of anyone looking for someone to take their development team to the next level, send them my way. “Obligatory link to my resume”:http://www.calevans.com/view.php/page/resume I have a lead on something permanent if this contract goes well but I don’t have a feel for that yet so I don’t want to jinx it.

I’ve been working a lot in “AJAX”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX for the past couple of days using the “YAHOO library”:http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/index.html. I must say that it is an impressive if large piece of code. I’ve been using the “dragdrop”:http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/dragdrop/index.html portion of the code and am really liking what I see. It’s not as ‘user friendly’ as “script.aculo.us”:http://script.aculo.us/ but it’s much more powerful. I started this project in “script.aculo.us”:http://script.aculo.us/ but had to abandon it because I couldn’t get the fine-grain control I needed. Basically, IMHO, “script.aculo.us”:http://script.aculo.us/ is great if you are looking to Web 2.0-erize your site but if you are building a serious application, you are going to need “YAHOO library”:http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/index.html. When I finish I’ll blog togehter a little tutorial about what I learned because a lot of what I’m learning I’m having to learn by reading other people’s code and keep trying different things till something works. (Old-school, cave-man coding)

Someone reported today a problem with “WP-Notable”:http://www.calevans.com/view.php/page/notable and “WordPress 1.5.1″:http://wordpress.org/. I don’t have a 1.5.x blog running anymore so I can’t test it. I know what the problem is but 1.5.1 doesn’t support the function I need to call. So for the moment, if you are running 1.5.x I highly recommend you use one of the other packages that do this. (No, I won’t point you to one, google around, you’ll find them.)

I’m working on my “tagcloud”:http://www.calevans.com/view.php/page/tagcloud project. I’ve decided that it needs a second dimension. Right now size indicates popularity of the topic. (Well, it really depends on how you set your CSS) I also want to be able to imply a second dimension. In the test case I’m working on, I want to confer relative age of the topic. (Very popular but old isn’t interesting, kinda like George Clooney) I’ll be doing this by fading the color as the second dimension.

Anyhow, that is what’s up with Cal. Hope you’ve enjoyed it. Hey, in case you missed the memo, my weekly “Zend Framework Mailinglist”:http://www.zend.com/lists/fw-general/200604/maillist.html Roundups now have their own tag. Check them out “here”:http://devzone.zend.com/public/view/tag/Roundup.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)

=C=

Dear Reader,

Yep, it’s that time again. Time to dive in, grab the new code and beat it into submission.

I’ve updated WP-NOTABLE, part of the BlogBling line of plugins. I fixed a problem where it would reset your options each time you went to the admin page. I’ve also implemented support for ma.gnolia.com thanks to their support department sending me the code.

You can download from the Project Page. Complete (and hopefully user friendly) instructions are there as well.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)

=C=

Dear Reader,

This is for all of you who use my blogbling plugins. I’m in the process of updating them all. I’ve updated WP-NOTABLE and WP-ESBN and WP-FATTER but the rest will be updated soon. The reason for the update is that it was pointed out to me that the plugins that ran in the_loop were causing a lot of hits on the database. I’m updating them all to be more database friendly.

Also, I’ve recently updated to Wordpress 2.0.2 All plugins seem to be working fine. The only thing I had to do was check my ESBN options, for some reason, they did not survive the deactivate/Activate. I’ll look into that.

To the best of my knowledge all of the ones recently updates are now working correctly. Feel free to correct me on this.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Yep, it’s that time again. Time to artificially inflate my stats by releasing yet another update to one of my plugins. Many thanks to badrad (sorry, I don’t have a link to your blog) for pointing out to me that in it’s original form, it was making 12 calls to the database for each story, on each page load! While I’m working on reducing that number to 1 per page load, currently, I have it down to 1 per story.

Also, thanks to Faber at smarking.com. He took it upon himself to figure out the plugin and send me the code necessary to include his service. That was very nice of him. Since I had to re-write anyhow, I decided to re-write the part that adds new services in to make it easier for others to add them in. If you have a social bookmarking service and want to be included, either grab the code and send me the updates and a correctly sized graphic or just send me the graphic and your API. (HINT: Those who do the work themselves get included faster.)

Oh, the code now generates span tag around each element with both a class and an id. The project page includes some basic instructions to create an effect.

Anyhow, now that you are complete bored, head over to the project page and grab the latest version. The page gives Install as well as UPGRADE instructions.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Alexadex has been updated to support the new API, there are 2 new tokens you can use to display info.

Alexadex is a plugin you can use to add your blog’s value to your sidebar (or whevery you feel like putting it.) It uses the data from www.alexadex.com

More information can be found on the project page.

As always, questions, comments and old iPod harddrives are always welcome.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

It’s been a while since I touched this one but when it’s borked, it’s borked. Many thanks to Bonita for pointing out the error and helping me test the fix.

New code can be downloaded from the Project Page. Also, I’ve re-written the Sample Page to show the tags I use to create the effect. I hope this makes it easier to implement.

As always, questions, comments and iTunes gift cards are always welcome.

until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Yep, another quality Wordpress plugin from the makers of BlogBling. This one integrates your blog and ESBN. Now you can get an Electronic Standard Book Number (ESBN) for each blog entry and you can proudly display it on your blogs. I originally saw ESBN when Pete reviewed them on mashable.com.

Pop over to the Project Page for downloads and install instructions.

As always, comments, questions and Pizza are always welcome.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)

=C=

Dear Reader,

Thanks to someone who doesn’t use Alexify but wanted me to do his research for him, I found out that Alexa has changed the URL for their thumbnail engine. So I’ve changed the plugin and am releasing it into the wild.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Minor feature added and a bug fix. Thanks to this conversation, I’ve figured out that I really need to urlencode the urls before placing them in the href. So I’ve done that. In the process, I noticed that I left furl out of the list. There was a checkbox on the admin page for it but it wasn’t displaying.

Finally, I added a select box to select the type of spacer between the graphics. There are several silly options like a dash but the main ones of importance are nbsp, space and no space. Those are the ones that most people are going to be using.

You can grab the code from the project page.

As always, questions, comments and items off my Amazon wishlist are always welcome.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Quickie here. The API for www.alexadex.com changed. (Thanks Colin, you rock) So here’s the update to keep things in sync.

The interface now tells us when the price last changed. I’ll update the plug in to incorporate that info this weekend.

TarBall and Zip file are available on the project page.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Several people have helped me work out a couple of bugs, kinks and general uki-ness in what has become my most popular plugin.  This is not a major update so don’t feel pressured to upgrade. However, if you are running into a problem with the plugin, this may solve it.

Project Page

The current version is 1.1

Please read the instructions on the project page if you are upgrading. I’m in the process of standardizing all of my BlogBling plugins and some things have changed.

As always, questions, comments and pizza are always welcome.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Yep, that time again. Let’s play PLUG-IN!

I was surfing around the other day and saw a cool site www.alexadex.com. If your site is tracked by alexa.com then this site allows you to purchase shares in your or any other blog. (Funny money of course) It’s a pretty cool game. But I want everybody to be able to watch the rise and fall of my site’s value. So I write a quick plugin for it.

The project page has instructions on how to install and configure.

This is yet another in the BlogBling seriese of fun but mostly useless plugins for WordPress. As always, have fun with it.

Questions, comments and items off my Amazon Wishlist are always welcome.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Yep, it’s that time again. Time to start updating the BlogBling plugins. Hey, if I don’t make some change every week, how do you expect me to sustain my hit rate? :)

WP-Alexify has been updated. This is a major change. I removed the JavaScript I was using to display the tooltip and went with the wz_tooltip.jz library. This should fix the Safari comparibility issue.

Also, I’m consolidating all of the BlogBling plugins into a single directory. This should make it easier for me to share code among them, reducing the amount of code I have to distribute. So make sure you read the update instructions if you are already running Alexify.

Finally, this one contains my BlogBling updater code. It phones home every 7 days and sees if there is a new version available. It does not collect any information about you, your server or anything else. It just tells me which plugin to check and then gives you the current version number. If you don’t like this you can set the Check Interval to 0 and it will never check again.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)

=C=

Dear Reader,

Grab your hip-waders and don your helmets boys, we are going in. Yep, I’ve released yet another plugin in my series. This one puts a bar of icons at the bottom of each post allowing your readers to submit your posts to several different social networking and bookmarking sites. (del.icio.us, digg, fark, etc.)

As with most of my plugins, this isn’t a unique idea, just my implementaion of it. Many thanks to Kirk Montgomery for the graphics.

The project page and installation instructions can be found here.

Or if you are already suited up and ready to go, grab the tarball here and head on in.

As always questions and comments are always welcome.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)

=C=

Dear Reader,

A quick one here for those writing WordPress plugins. I’m experimenting with something here and thought I’d share. One thing that bugs me about writing plugins is when I make a new version, I have to go to several places and announce that there’s an update available. So I’m toying with the idea of having the plugin check every x days to see of there has been an update.

The way I do this is in the plugin’s option page (the only place I would ever do this) I put the following code at the bottom of this post.

Currently, this one is hard coded to check every 7 days. I’m thinking about changing that to like 3 and maybe making it an option so the user can set it to 0 and never have it execute.

I’m throwing it out here for others to review. My question is, it is ok to have a plug in ‘phone home’? I know I’m not collecting any stats but this could easily get out of hand if some reasonable guidelines aren’t set.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)

=C=

CODE:

<?PHP
/*
* Version Check code.
* This is a bit verbose. I'd like to cut it down a bit. I know this works
* in almost all cases. Some places may not have curl installed. I could do
* it in AJAX calling the plugin itself with a parameter and firing off a
* call but that's basically the same as what I'm doing here. So why bother.
*/
if (($notable_settings['last_version_check']+(86400*7))<mktime()) {
$elements = parse_url('http://blog.calevans.com/
plugin_version_checker.php?plugin=wp-notable');
$current_version = 0.00;
$line = '';

if ($fp = @fsockopen($elements['host'],80)) {
fputs($fp, sprintf("GET %s HTTP/1.0\r\n" . "Host: %s\r\n\r\n", $elements['path'] .
(isset ($elements['query']) ? '?'. $elements['query'] : ''), $elements['host']));
while (!feof($fp)) $line .= fgets($fp, 4096);
fclose($fp);

$line = urldecode(trim(strtr($line,"\n\r\t\0"," ")));
$work_array = explode(" ",$line);
/*
* This does not allow for any additional messages to be passed. It
* assumes that the last time coming in is the version #.
*/
$current_version = $work_array[count($work_array)-1];
update_option('notable_last_version_check',mktime());
} // if ($fp)
if ($version!=$current_version) {
?>
<div class="wrap" style="border:solid 1px red;">This is version <?=$version;?>. The current version
of the plugin is <?=$current_version;?>. Click <a href="http://www.calevans.com/view.php/page/notable"
target="_NEW" title="Opens a new window.">here</a> to go to the project page to find out more.
<?PHP
} else {
?>
<div class="wrap">This is plugin is up to date.<br />
<?PHP
} // if ($version!=$current_version)
} else {
?>
<div class="wrap" >
<?PHP
} // if ($notable_settings['last_version_check']!=(mktime()+(86400*7)))
?>
</div>