Tag Archives: WordPress

WordPress contribution is not for the technically inept.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I love WordPress. It’s perfect for what it does. And even when you want it to do something it wasn’t made for, you can probably find an add on to make it (or at least hire a developer to make one for you).

When you need to make one you kinda run into problems though. The documentation is so damn iffy, and the support is fairly slow moving. The irc channel sucks. So, for the good of everyone, whenever I have spare time I’m going to do a bit on the documentation (which is in a wiki format). I can’t believe there are still some fairly common functions that’re used in WordPress that aren’t even covered yet.

A while ago the only support I could get was from a wiki page in French. Fortunately I could read it, but still. That’s just not good.

None of the code for WordPress is commented either, which I think is a really important thing within an open source project! You can’t get more developers if they can’t understand what your code is doing without rummaging through every include. It’s just not cool.

Last night's happiness involved a gun, and some mutant rats

Just off the bat, I’m getting really annoyed my my mysqld dieing all the time. I’ve no idea what’s causing it, except that maybe WordPress (which seems to be the only affected thing at the moment) is a little too intensive for my 64Mb server.

Database dieing was the reason I didn’t do last night’s happiness update, but I’ll do it now.

Yesterday’s most happiest thing for me was probably getting Fallout 3 for my xbox. That game is freaking awesome. It seems huge and expansive, however I’m worried that – because things don’t respawn (at least, I don’t think they do. There’re still dead bodies lying around that I killed in-game days ago) – I’ll kill everything and then won’t be able to level up any more. Last night, the stupid Brotherhood of Steel guys killed half of the Raiders before I had a chance.

I only found out you can queue up attacks in the VAT thing a few hours into playing…

I bought Ghost Recon too, but I don’t really like it, so I’m putting it on ebay. I only need one bid to get my money back, to be fair, and I think people will be looking to collect as many game as they can during the holidays. Especially with people getting new xboxes and stuff for Christmas.

Confidently inexperienced.

I feel like there’s something I should be doing, but there really isn’t.

I just write up my CV, which I just need to get someone to check (I’ll probably email Paul, and ask him to take a look at the online version). It’s a paragraph over a page, so I’m not sure what to do with that. I read a post somewhere that the requirement for CVs to be only a page is silly now, since people have more roles within their jobs than before, so they take up more space explaining.

I have a list of job openings that I’m perfect for all printed off and ready for me to sort out. They’re based sort of around the West Midlands, which means I’ll be able to move out. I’m very nervous, and don’t feel like I have enough confidence to have other people relying on me yet. I suppose the only way to get that confidence is to do it; fake it till you make it.

I might actually start writing up a plug in for WordPress, for the competition, though I’m not sure when the deadline is. Either way, a useful plug in would still generate traffic, and hopefully donations! More importantly, it’d be something good to put on my CV as actual work experience. At the moment, I’ve had to really talk up what experience I do have.

WordPress Plugin Competition; I have an awesome idea

I’m done with coursework for now. I’ve been doing it for ages. Three hours constitutes as ages, methinks. So, I’ve taking a little break. I’ll start again at ten. I really need to finish both pieces tonight, since it’s weeks after the deadline and the marks have to be sent off Tuesday. I have to hand in both pieces of coursework… tomorrow, really.

Anyway, lets forget about that for a little while, it’s giving me a headache.

There’s a WordPress plugin competition! I was thinking the other day that I really wanted WordPress to do something for me, and I couldn’t find a plugin for it that works well. So, I might as well write it myself and potentially win a prize! The caveat to that though, is that I can’t tell people what my idea is, else they’ll steal it so I’m not even sure if it’s a good idea. Meh, I need it, so if nothing comes of it, at least I’ve gotten what I want. In the process, I’ll be learning new stuff about WordPress so it’s a win-win even if I lose.

The competition opens after my exams, so I won’t be having to mix it with reivision. I might have to mix it with finding a job though… If I win, it’d look awesome on my CV though!

Finding a job is another stress point (though, not too much), so I’m not going to talk about that either just yet.

Eventide: my version of the WordPress theme Dusk

You probably noticed that my template is a lot like Dusk, but with a few changes. I’ve changed quite a bit, and fixed a few bugs since I think that Beccary has kinda stopped updating, and also, her website has a virus on it, somehow. (All I know is that whenever I go to her homepage, Norton pops up.)

Screenshot, minipreview of Eventide

So, you can go ahead and download Eventide – my version of Dusk – over on my goodies page. It’s under GNU GPL, so use it however you want.

Phone posting and WordPress

The thought of adding more multimedia to this blog makes me happy. I’d do video, but I’m camera shy, so I figured the next best thing would be voice. Now I could do that manually, but where’s the fun in that so here’s what I want to be able to do:

  1. Phone somewhere. I’m guessing this’ll be my server.
  2. Get greeted by a lovely voice, saying hai.
  3. Enter a PIN number or something.
  4. The application/server records what I’m saying to an audio file, which it moves to my web directory.
  5. WordPress notices the file and shows it like a new posts.

I want all the above to be automatic from when I phone, so I don’t even have to be at a computer.

For those of you that don’t know (which I expect most of you don’t), I’m running a Debian virtual server. Since it’s a shared server, I can’t really do anything with hardware except for what’s already there, and I’m not sure what is. Let me know if I need anything, and I can find out.

I know there are programs like Asterisk that deal with VOIP, but I’m not exactly sure what they do, since I’ve never looked into this field. And also, I don’t know the technical name for what I want, so searching for it doesn’t do much help.

I don’t mind paying for phone calls, but I doubt that I’d be able to get a phone number for my server, right? I don’t mind using things like Skype to phone the server, but I guess there’ll need to be some other open source software to be able to do what I want.

Once the application stores the audio file, I can do all the WordPress work myself, so I won’t need help with that. It’s really just steps one through four that I need to learn how to do. Any pointers?

An update to the Dusk theme

I’m using the Dusk theme, by Beccary (you can get to the links from my footer) because it’s beautiful. I did find a bug with the permalink not showing properly which I’ve fixed. I’ve emailed Rebecca Wei about it, but until she fixes it in her release, I figured I’d write down how I’ve fixed it myself, for other people that want to.

Both fixes are in the main index file (index.php). On one line, you just need to add a space. It’s line 11.
<h2 class="posttitle"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php _e('Permanent link to'); ?><?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
Needs to be changed to…
<h2 class="posttitle"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php _e('Permanent link to'); ?> <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
The next fix is to line 31.
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php _e('Permanent link to'); ?><?php _e('Permalink'); ?></a>
Should be…
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php _e('Permanent link to'); ?>"><?php _e('Permalink'); ?></a>

Or, you can just download up updated version of Dusk – Eventide – from my download page.