dixson.org » Web Tech

Plugging plugins

Chris — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:13:12 +0000

I’ve installed and recommend the following WP plugins:

1. WP FancyZoom by Stephen Granade
http://granades.com/wp-fancyzoom-wordpress-plugin/

…FancyZoom is a nice, modern way of making popup images.

This is a “pluginized” version of Cabel Sasser’s FancyZoom which I had used on my old site. It rocks. [Cabel is one of the founders of Panic, Inc., makers of beautifully designed and highly useful Mac software. I use Transmit daily.] Thanks for the WP version Stephen.

2. Scissors by Stephan Reiter
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/scissors/

[Scissors] …adds cropping and resizing functionality to WordPress’ image upload and management dialogs.

Very handy and easy to use.

3. Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator by Arne Brachhold
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

Moved to WordPress

Chris — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:19:15 +0000

I’ve moved on from Movable Type 4 to WordPress 2.7. MT, which I have used for years, is a very powerful weblog publishing system and I recommend it in many situations were its features and flexibility warrant. But, as a developer, the template system was burdensome in my opinion and I had a tough time adapting to the new MT 4 architecture. Additionally, I have a few client projects that I’ll be doing in WP so the time was right to make the switch.

The WP install was simple and I encountered zero issues on my shared server at Joyent. I imported my MT posts into WP with just a few clicks. I also changed the theme to iNove. Next, I need to learn more about developing my own themes.

Follow me on Twitter

Chris — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:00:19 +0000

twitter.com/k1prd

Underestimating consumer response

Chris — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 17:45:19 +0000

Kirsten and William had an article published in Advertising Age, “How to Build the ‘Brand Called You’ in an Online Era.” The article refers to the Online Identity Calculator we built to determine your GQ (Google Quotient). When I built this calculator, I was assuming it would be revealed to a small audience while in beta mode – not mentioned in Ad Age! But in a matter of hours it went from Ad Age to several popular bloggers and then news of it snowballed. Much to my chagrin, I had set the response function of the calculator to simply send email with the collected data to a mailbox specifically created for this purpose. I started to notice email trickling in with data…then the trickle became a flood. I went from 20 messages in a ten minute period to about 1800 by the end of the day. I scrambled to stop the email and activated the database code I had waiting in the wings, commented out the email notification lines and then sat back and issued the command:

select count(*) from idstats

In 15 minutes it went from zero to nearly 300 database entries (rows) and within a few days, it surpassed 21K rows. Talk about underestimating response.

Hosting and Blog Changes

Chris — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 01:45:47 +0000

I finally made the switch and signed up for hosting with TextDrive several weeks ago and love it. TextDrive is not for the technically challenged. You will get your hands dirty with mod_rewrite, htaccess tweaking and adjusting the server settings to your heart’s content. It’s a rush to have this kind of power over a hosting account (Did I just say that? It’s a rush? I really need to spend less time in front of this damn computer. ) Basically, I can install and configure just about anything I want or need on the server (within reason of course.) So far I’ve taken advantage of PHP5, WebDAV and sharing iCal files. Soon I’ll be working with ROR, Lighttpd, and Subversion (to manage the mess I make of my source.) I’ll be doing my Rails development and testing on the Macs and PCs here at home – in a shared hosting environment you do not want to piss off your ‘neighbors’ by hosing the server with shaky development code.

After being down for about a month, I got this blog back up (as you can see). Upgraded to MT 3.3 and imported my previous posts from MT on my old server. Still need to work on the templates. Excuse the clutter, design inconsistencies, and other glitches – I’m aware of them and making corrections.

I gave up on the MT security plugin I wanted to use. After several careful re-installs and configuration changes, it just kept spitting out errors. Maybe I’m just too tired today to determine the root of the problem (in my defense, the documentation for the plugin ~~sucks~~ is lacking in many areas. ) But the errors appear to be rooted in dynamic file publishing – or the lack thereof. For now, I’ll let it sit a few days and revisit the plugin with a clear mind.

ROR

Chris — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 17:10:26 +0000

Been experimenting with Ruby on Rails (ROR) the past few weeks. Picked up a copy of “Get Started with Rails” from Carson Workshops. All I can say is that ROR has exceeded my expectations and what took me a few days to complete in PHP, took me a few hours in ROR. Yes, other MVC frameworks exist, but ROR just seemed a better fit for my needs and skills. Check out, www.rubyonrails.org and, for you Mac OS X users, Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X and Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger.

Web Design Group Meeting

Chris — Tue, 10 May 2005 01:31:04 +0000

Last night I attended a meeting held by The Manchester Web Design Group. Good conversation, intelligent people and a chance to get out of my home office and talk shop with other developers. It’s always refreshing (or not) to know we all face the same issues regarding Web standards. I came away from our meeting with more devotion to open source software and more annoyance with Redmond. As fate would have it, when I got home, I ended up dealing with the Blue Screen of Death on my wife’s PC. I went back to my Mac, cranked up KoRn and spent the next 30 minutes perusing troubleshooting pages at MS.