Today is Stop Cyberbullying Day, and like I said yesterday I’m very angry about what happened to Kathy Sierra, and other people who have suffered abuse from Cyber Bullies, stalkers, and trolls. Rather than just write further about how awful cyberbullies are, I’ve decided to offer some tips for helping people fight back.
(more…)This week you may already have noticed the newly launched version of Design Meme. It’s more of an evolution from the previous design, rather than a completely new direction. The overall darker design is something I had intended to do since switching from Movable Type to Wordpress and moving to the new hosting company. I also wanted to move away from the standard 2-column blog format a bit, and get a bit more creative with colours and typography.
(more…)Many of the interesting techniques I’ve been seeing on other blogs, like AJAX comment submission, and live comment preview, are default features of the new K2 Beta theme. Unfortunately, when I switched to the new template the comment preview didn’t seem to be working. I tried downloading the files again, de-installing, re-installing, but the comment preview still wouldn’t work. I spent a while looking at support blogs, forums, and even the PHP code for the plugins themselves before I realized what was going wrong. I’m hoping that posting a brief explanation of the problem, and how to fix it, will be helpful for anyone else who runs into this issue…
(more…)While this blog uses Wordpress, at work I still have a few sites built using Movable Type. One of those sites is an events calendar, and I had been working on a iCAL template so that I could easily import the events into other calendars. Getting the file to work with iCalShare was pretty easy, but one of the older systems at work was a bit fussy. It didn’t like any of the special characters, like accented vowels or curly quotes that invariably crept into the event descriptions.
I spent quite a while looking for a way to remove all of these characters, but all the existing plugins and filters seemed to leave some of them behind. I spent some time thinking about using Brad Choate’s Regex plugin, but after double-checking Movable Type’s Global tag attribute filters I found what I was looking for. Sort of.
dirify also converts certain high-ASCII characters (accented characters, etc) to low-ASCII characters, meaning that something like crudité will be converted to crudite. For example, if the value of the tag without this attribute were Foo “Baz” is< br /> Bar!, the dirified version would be foo_baz_is_bar.
Yes—that’s what I wanted, but without the underscores, and usable for much longer blocks of text.
Fortunately Adam Kalsey and Crys Clouse had written code to improve the dirify feature, and using that as a starting point I made the changes to create the new global filter I needed. Something that would convert the high-ASCII characters down to low-ASCII, and strip out all the extra characters and line-breaks I didn’t need.
Lowdown.pl
Version 1.0
Lowdown removes extra information to displays plain text in Movable Type. It converts certain high-ASCII characters (accented characters, etc) to low-ASCII characters, strips HTML tags, and changes line breaks to spaces.
Installation: save Lowdown.txt as Lowdown.pl and upload it to your Movable Type ‘plugins’ directory
Usage Example: < $MTEntryBody lowdown="1"$>
This can be helpful when generating some types of feeds (eg. iCAL, RSS). If anyone is interested, I could also post the iCAL template for Movable Type that I developed that uses the Lowdown plugin.
Update
You can now get the lowdown directly from Six Apart’s Plugin Directory.
Wordpress is a great tool for blogging—it’s easy to setup, the interface makes it easy to use, and there are tons of plugins you can download to add new features. Unfortunately when you’re just getting started with Wordpress, the sheer number of plugins can make it hard to know which ones to start with.
After more than a little trial and error and a lot of looking at discussions of other people’s favourite plugins, I’ve found 11 that seem to stand above the rest. Here are my suggestions for the 11 plugins you should consider adding to your blog.
I updated the blog to Wordpress 2.0 today. I have to say that while I like the list of improvments, the upgrade process was missing an important step: put a temporary index.php file in place during the upgrade with a “Back in 5 minutes” message.
Following the Upgrade Instructions you need to delete your old Worpress files… which leaves you with a broken website for 5 minutes or so while you upload the new files and run the update script. I guess 5 minutes isn’t that bad, but it didn’t feel like a very smooth upgrade.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I really do like the new admin interface—it’s a big improvement over the last version, with all sorts of AJAX goodness. The more I work with it, the more I’m liking it. Definitely worth the upgrade—just remember your back in 5 minutes sign.
copyright © 2001-2008 Stuart Robertson Some Rights Reserved Hosted by Dreamhost 