WordPress plugins, I has them

January 12, 2009

The lolcat title reference aside, I have actually started producing WordPress plugins for myself. I’ve always wanted to make them, and so a while back I set aside a day (well two, once I got the hang of it) and learned. Granted I’ve still got a ways to go, but at least I’ve finally got my foot in the door with it all. The trick is to make sure to create things that are actually useful so that people will actually use them.

So as a result of my tooling around with WordPress, I’ve created two plugins for people to use.

Colour Swapper in Wordpress

October 9, 2008

Who likes website colour swappers? Anyone?

When I developed the theme I am currently using, I searched high and low for something I could steal take inspiration from. The funny thing is that most people don’t even know where the colour swapper is on my site. So few in fact that I had to add a caption to it to help make it a little more obvious.

In any case I felt that I would share the method I used to create the swapping functionality on my website. I’m aware that most of it can be figured out with a little imagination and some source viewing, but I think that going through it step by step is more helpful.

UPDATE – 10/09/2008 - In record time, a second pair of eyes looking at this has managed to refine the process. Thank you Bart for pointing out that if the CSS files are named the same as the Title attribute of the Anchor, then you can drop the whole If statement. I’ve updated the tutorial accordingly

Getting more with the MORE tag

October 2, 2008

So who out there uses Wordpress? I’ve been told it’s somewhat popular.

I myself am a fan despite it’s assault on the CPU and database. It’s fast, it’s simple, and so long as your website isn’t gaining huge traffic (or you’re paying peanuts for CPU usage and storage) than it’s a great selection. It’s fairly customizable, has a huge support and user base, and it’s just damned easy to use. I’ve been slowly getting more and more into customizing and extending what Wordpress can do out of the box.There’s more in the code than people think.

Recently I a friend of mine ripped a strip off of me for only using summaries in my RSS feed. He told me that he, along with other net-savvy users, didn’t have time to get teased by RSS summaries.

UPDATE: As of December 3rd, 2008 I’ve turned this baby into a plugin! Check it out.

Respect the Process, Damnit

February 14, 2008

I went to college.

Shocking, I know. I did though, and on the lovely diploma that I earned and gently stuffed in a drawer somewhere it says that I am both a computer programmer and a systems analyst. What that means is not only am I (supposedly) competent at coding solutions, I am also (apparently) competent at looking at a system and figuring out how things should work.

I always chuckled in my Analysis classes. “Come on, this is all common sense!” I would proclaim. I took what the teacher said for a grain of salt and left it at that.

SharePoint 2007: What the hell, man?

January 31, 2008

So I just spent four hours of my life fighting with SharePoint 2007. I can’t explain all the details because my employer pays me, which in turn pays the bills and they frown upon my telling of company secrets. I can, however, bitch about some things that have been irritating me over the past while. As it turns out everything I hate converged on me today.

Let the story begin!