Please redesign me!

Are you a designer? Do you fancy making this blog look less rubbish? If so please get in touch.

Siftware is already in the process of getting re-done so I figured my personal site should get updated at the same time.

Ideally we’ll do a trade on services, e.g. I’ll provide some dev time to you, but if that doesn’t work then I’m happy to pay going rates.

Rough brief is:

  • 2/3 column layout
  • Deliver layered PSD ready for me to mark-up
  • Must be able to cope with largish posted images, swathes of example code and a bunch of widgets
  • There’ll be a lot of text

I’ll provide more should we agree terms.

Update: I’ve come to an agreement with somebody now thanks, more in due course.

Bealers.com has moved

I physically moved Bealers.com last night as well as pointing it to new nameservers. I was getting reports of the odd DNS error where it was previously.

It’s a big site > 2GB of photos and a modified WordPress/Gallery install so if you get the odd problem then I’d appreciate a quick email: bealers@gmail.com.

I know that the photos are currently broken.

Performancing: The perfect Blogging Firefox extension?

I’ve been playing with my Firefox extensions this morning as I recently re-installed windows at home and wanted to make sure that it had all of the essentials that I use at work. So this led me to ‘waste’ 15 mins browsing the Extensions repository and I came up with a real find, Performancing:

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox

  • Works with all major blog software
  • Easy WYSIWYG Editing
  • Trackback, Technorati and Del.icio.us support

Once installed, just hit F8 or click the little
pencil icon at the bottom right of your browser window to bring up the
blog editor and easily post to your WordPress, MovableType or Blogger
blogs.

As the text says I have a blog editor in my browser that I can tap away at whilst surfing using the same window.

It also allows one to drag and drop formatted text or images from the browser window above or there is the fallback option to selct text, right-click and ‘Blog this page’ from the relevant context menu.

Set-up was a doddle I just selected ‘Custom blog’ then ‘WordPress’ and I then had to specify the URL to the XML-RPC script that comes with WordPress. As a nice touch it prefilled this with a default URL example for WordPress which saved me having to look-up what the page was called. Other than that I simply specified my username and password and here I am writing my first entry.

It’s hard to fault quality software like this but a few niggles were:

  • There is a, beta admitedly, spellchecker (Yay!) but I couldn’t get it to work, probably my fault;
  • The cursor keys didn’t always work in the editor window, up and down would scroll the browser pane above (and the editor window *definitely* had focus);
  • There is superbly thought out ‘upload image’ option for inserting images and unfortunately it doesn’t support scp

Here’s a screenshot:

That URL again: http://performancing.com/firefox

WordPress spam plugin

After getting over 200 comment spams in 2 days I decided to implement an automatic spam blacklist system as manual parsing wasn’t cutting it any more.

Akismet seems good:

We can’t stand spam.

Who can? You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

http://akismet.com/

WordPress Widgets

I’m a developer, I don’t mind – in fact, no, I *like* – coding but when it comes to doing stuff on my own site I’m rather hesitant and I prefer things that Just Work out of the box.

I installed a new theme K2 last night and whilst it looks good I did have to tinker with a few files, mostly sidebar.php to get things how I liked them and it left feeling ever-so-slightly that it’d be better if layout control was dealt with using the admin GUI rather than code.

This morning I found this on the WP dev site:
http://wordpress.org/development/2006/03/widgets-plugin/

Widgets are an easy way for you to arrange and rearrange your sidebar to your hearts content without touching a line of code. We first launched WordPress Widgets (WPW) it on WordPress.com a month ago and the response was great. Now we’re ready to release the plugin to the world. If adoption goes well, we’ll consider rolling it into the next version of WordPress.

You can find out more information and download the plugin on the new Widgets page.

That was enough for me. I downloaded it, unpacked to wp-content/plugins and then went to the admin area and enabled it. Now under Presentation I have a Sidebar Widgets option where I can drag and drop the out-of-the-box widgets onto the sidebar.

Even better, each WP theme needs minimal code alteration to enable Widgets (a few lines) but K2 already had the hooks built in so I didn’t need to do anything else!

Related:
Download WordPress Widgets
K2 WordPress theme

WordPress PHP syntax highlighting

I’ve been writing code in my spare time again and have been wanting to blog little snippets but WordPress munges any code that I add into the post body. I googled for wordpress plugins and most didn’t support WP 2 or were a bit tame but then look what I found.

The iG:Syntax Hiliter by Amit Gupta. Just download, extract, upload to your wp-content/plugins folder, enable within the admin screen and Bob’s your mum’s brother.

Let’s try it out:

[php]$animals = array( “cow” => “moo”, “sheep” => “baa”, “dog” => “woof”);

foreach ($animals as $animal => $noise)
{
print “I am a ” . $animal . ” and I make a ” . $noise . ” noisen”;
}[/php]

[mysql]

CREATE TABLE `Instance` (
`ID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`Site` varchar(255) NOT NULL default ”,
`App` varchar(255) NOT NULL default ”,
`Passwd` varchar(32) default NULL,
`Expires` int(11) default NULL,
`Archive` tinyint(1) default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`ID`),
UNIQUE KEY `instance_site_app_uniq` (`Site`,`App`)
) TYPE=InnoDB;[/mysql]

[css]body {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
font-size: 68%; /* Resets 1em to 10px */
font-family: ‘Lucida Grande’, Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
background-color: #CCC;
color: #333;
}

#page {
background-color: white;
border: 1px solid #959596;
margin: 20px auto;
padding: 0;
}

[/css]

[html]


[/html]

[perl]#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $dumpDir = “/export/backup”;
my $mysqlBin = “/usr/bin”;
my $mysqlPassword = “foo”;

foreach (`ls -F /usr/local/mysql/var`)
{
if (///)
{
chomp;
s//$//; # remove the trailing / now
my $dumpFile = “$dumpDir/$_.sql”;
my $dumpCommand = “$mysqlBin/mysqldump -celqF –password=$mysqlPassword $_ > $dumpFile”;
system $dumpCommand; # or warn “mysqlDump of $_ failed”;
}
}[/perl]

As a nice value-add (like it needed to do any more) he’s also included the relevant code to add buttons to the content addition textarea (assuming you’ve disabled the dynamic one) so it surrounds your code with the relevant markers.

What a great plug-in.

Related: