Sillybean

I’ve written another WordPress plugin as a result of one of my client projects. After I imported old blog posts from Blogger into WordPress, all the Blogger tags had become WordPress categories. That was a huge number of categories, so I used the category-to-tag converter on the whole lot of them… only to realize that [...]

I’ve just returned from HighEdWeb ’08. I came down with a cold the day I left and am just now starting to feel normal, so I was way less bouncy than usual and didn’t attend much of the after-hours stuff. Still had a great time, though.

If you’ve been following my Twitter stream, I imagine [...]

Adjusting settings in Firefox and OS X to restore the full keyboard navigation (including form field drop-downs!) needed for accessibility testing.

Got the MRI on my neck. No word yet from the doctor, naturally. The neck is not too bad at the moment, but the insomnia and the migraines have been slapping me around for the last few days. You know you’re having a lousy week when PMS is a welcome relief.

I have design ideas [...]

Post and Page Excerpt Widgets let you display excerpts from posts or pages in the sidebar. For some reason, page excerpts were taken out of WordPress somewhere along the way, so the widget requires the Page Excerpt plugin to handle those. If The Excerpt Reloaded is installed, the widget will use that function; otherwise it’ll [...]

Justine’s new site is live.

Whew. Lotta work went into that one.

I’ve set up a lot of new WordPress sites lately, and I’ve come up with my own homebrew installation package. All but one of these are admin tools; I don’t have a standard list of theme additions because every site is so different.

Akismet is the only spam blocker I’ve ever needed with WordPress. Manageable is [...]

So my host had a rather catastrophic disk failure on Wednesday. After much thrashing around, they’ve restored us using an old file backup. The databases are fine (otherwise you wouldn’t be seeing this), but files and email were restored from May 15. They might be able to recover the rest, but they might not.

For this [...]

Major work project #1: 90% done.
Major work project #2: ... yeah, I should get started on that.

Seekrit project #1: 99% done. Waiting on other people1 and, predictably, a bugfix for IE6.
Seekrit project #2: 80% done.
Seekrit project #3: at best 5% done, but got a jump start this week.

Steph: 100% tired.

1 While I’m waiting on others, [...]

For the last few versions, WordPress has allowed you to specify a page as the site’s home page, rather than the usual list of recent posts. However, in the list of pages, it doesn’t indicate which one is the home page. This annoys me.

So I wrote a plugin. Since it relies on CSS trickery, [...]

The lost data was not recovered, but MAMP was persuaded to cough up its database connections, and Time Machine is now ticking merrily along — although, since it has over a month’s worth of stuff to back up, it’s taking a rather long time. If your Time Machine gets stuck near the end of its [...]

For some time now, the laptop has been in the habit of shutting itself off without warning when the battery gets low. The meter will say it still has 20 or 30 minutes, and then ZAP: blackness. Various support technicians have assured me that this is normal behavior with Intel processors (!) and/or that they [...]

If you don’t want your thumbnails to get distorted, you need to change WordPress 2.5’s default setting before you upload your photos into the media manager. Go to Settings > Miscellaneous and UNcheck the “Crop thumbnail to exact dimensions (normally thumbnails are proportional)” box.

I really can’t believe they have that box checked by default. It [...]

If you hate the new Write area in WordPress 2.5, check out this mod. It works beautifully with Fluency, which itself fixes a lot of things I didn’t like.

As soon as Fluency supports drop-down menus, my world will be a happy, happy place.

I’ve written a WordPress plugin for my critique group. It gives you a new template tag, <?php show_comment_author_checklist() ?>, that generates a list of registered users with the names of those who have commented on the post (as well as the post’s author) crossed off. See the plugin page for more details1.

This is useful for [...]