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.

Of backing up and checking twice

July 21, 2008

How good is your memory? Chances are it’s better than mine. At the very least, your short-term memory has to be better than mine, as mine borders on ‘utterly pathetic.’

As i recently mentioned, I’ve redone my website a tad and I busted my ass to cover as many of the style bugs as possible. Everything was going well until I upgraded to Wordpress 2.6. Now I’m not saying the version of Wordpress busted my website good and proper, but that’s what happened.

Redesign is finally up

July 14, 2008

Finally got the new design up, though I will admit that there are still some tweeks that I’ve got to address. I’ve got the design stable enough that I’m comfortable releasing it now. I’ve lost enough sleep on this damned thing already, so some small things I’m not overly worried about

This design has been in the works for at least a month now, though probably longer. I made sure I didn’t rush into the markup, and so there was a lot of time spent in Fireworks tweaking things. Once I was finally happy with the design – which took a while – I finally moved everything into HTML which was …fun.

Technology, Upgrades, Updates

October 5, 2007

If anyone’s been watching this site in the past little while (I’m sure there’s gotta be at least 1 out there) they may have noticed a whole bunch of weird things going on with the site. I assure you they are all for the better. Since I’ve had such a heavy swing of reviews (it’s not purposely done, I just watched a bunch of movies and read a book within the same 3 days) I decided I would switch it up a bit.

New layout

September 18, 2007

Got a new layout goin, though I have yet to swap the googleAds to the new colour scheme.

Later.