Monthly Archives: February 2007

Catch it if you can! WordPress mu 1.1.1 escaped!

Despite my best efforts to put off releasing WordPress mu 1.1.1 for another day it slipped through my fingers, tarred and zipped itself into neat bundles on the download page and screamed at all and sundry that it was free.

So, go on! Download and enjoy. As always, try it on your development servers before pushing it live, just to make sure it doesn’t conflict with anything else you’ve installed. We’re tracking the development version of WordPress itself so any new features that you see there will be in WordPress mu too. And if you haven’t looked before, the mu timeline will give you a good idea of what’s changed recently.

Some highlights:

  • PHPMailer is now used for email delivery. Once you configure it to use a local smtp server email literally flies out the door.
  • “No Options” are saved. Well, WPMU already had something like this for storing false option values but now it’s much better. Thanks Ryan for fixing that in MU.
  • Ryan’s In The Trunk post has a pretty good list of the new features you can expect in this release.

WP plugin: Flickr Blog This to draft post

Have you ever been annoyed when you blog a photo from Flickr and you wished the post had been saved as a draft instead of being published?

I’ve used Flickr to host the images on my photoblog from the first post there but this plugin should make it easier and less stressful to use. Every time I publish a photo through Flickr I have to rush to resave the post as a draft post before anyone notices all the extra line breaks or broken links. Add to that, I tag and categorise the post and it’s a frantic few minutes of editing.

The Flickr Blog This to Draft plugin for WordPress simply stops the publishing of blog posts from Flickr and saves them as draft posts.

Irish WordPress powered companies and a free iPod

Matt started the “company website run on WordPress” theme by posting that moo.com runs on WordPress, so here are two Irish companies that use WordPress to run their websites:

  1. Segala, a company involved in website accessability and trust. They have rather an interesting idea about content labeling. Paul Walsh, their CEO, “is Segala’s W3C advisory committee representative”. Keep an eye on them. You’ll be hearing more about them I’m sure! Oh, and if you leave a comment here, it may be entered into a link bait competition Paul’s running. He’s giving away an iPod on March 2nd. If he picks you, I’ll email you with Paul’s email address.
  2. The second website I will mention is one outside of the usual web 2.0 zone. It’s Harrington Estates, an estate agent in West Cork, Ireland. Houses are listed in posts, and interested buyers can leave a comment using the standard comment form. Thanks to the SEO friendly nature of WordPress, the site also appears on the front page of Google for related search terms! Thanks Frank for that info!

Are there any more Irish companies using WordPress that I can profile in a future post?

Update – the winner has been announced! Competition closed!

How to edit a cell in Excel or Openoffice

This was one of those things that bugged me for ages but because I wasn’t sure of the terminology I could never find an answer for it. How do I edit a cell in Openoffice without doing either of the following?

  1. Double clicking on the cell.
  2. Clicking on the cell, then clicking on the edit bar at the top of the window.

The answer is quite simple, and it’s probably in some FAQ somewhere but each time I had a want to find it, I would have been up to my eyeballs in receipts working on my VAT return. Luckily, Lifehacker linked to this Excel keystrokes post which has a couple of magic key combos but look in the comments for the real meat.

How do I edit a cell in my spreadsheet? Hit F2.

F2 F2 F2 F2

Hit the F2 key to edit a cell. When I first discovered this keystroke, it was like the clouds parted and the light of God beamed down on my keyboard. Give it a shot right now if you haven’t used the F2 key before. (Hint: it will allow you to edit the data in the selected cell)

The Silent City

Remember Fifty Percent Grey? I briefly mentioned it a couple of years back, little knowing that it’s creator, Ruairi Robinson, would be nominated for an Oscar for his work on that short film.

Ruairi’s back, and thanks to Ruairi Roddy I found out about his new production. This time it’s a very cool short film called “The Silent City”. Ruairi (Roddy) likens it to Starship Troopers but I think it’s more evil than that, maybe not as blood thirsty, but I’d love to see what happens after the film ends. Who or what answers the call for help?

I wrote/directed/edited/storyboard this and did 95% of the visual effects myself. The film stars Don Wycherley (Batchelors Walk), Cillian Murphy (28Days/Later/Sunshine/Batman Begins/Breakfast on Pluto) and Garvan Mcgrath.

This is the film that finally got me an agent in Hollywood, where an Oscar nomination failed, and hopefully might help me secure one of those “career” things I keep hearing people talking about. I’ve had many many feature film scripts sent to me in the last couple of months from big fancy hollywood studios, which is utterly fantastic (but would be nice to be able to pay my goddamn rent in the meantime, before I get ahead of myself) so a big thanks to me in the past for finishing the film. I couldn’t have done it without past me. Future me, you better not fucking fail present me in my hour of need. Kudos to Nick Ryan too, for producing the thing for me. And the cast/rest of crew of course. I owe a lot of favours that I hope to *actually* repay some day.

Continue reading “The Silent City”

Writing Perl, the Vista way

Perl is complicated enough as there are a half dozen ways of doing any one operation, but what if you used Microsoft Vista’s speech recognition to type? I was only watching and wanted to stop the movie after 32 seconds, I don’t know how he kept going for 10 minutes! I dare you to watch this and not laugh! I wonder how well Vim would work? (via Richard)

PS. Richard increased the Linux userbase by 1 by converting one of his coworkers using the Ubuntu live CD. I used that CD last week and it’s really impressive. A bit strange when the live desktop appears, but the Install icon makes things obvious. Grab the latest Ubuntu live CD and give it a whirl if you’ve never used Linux. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Self diagnose with Google

Everybody and anybody who has an illness, a pain in the leg, a hurt somewhere, will use Google to find out what ails them. There is an inherent danger in that, but if you use a search engine that way, and believe the first result, then good luck to you, The Darwin Awards may need another category.

The rest of us go to the doctor, the dentist, or whatever health professional is appropriate. What if your company health plan depended on using Google to diagnose? That’s what Catbert, the evil director of Human Resources did today in this Dilbert cartoon. Arc Welder anyone?

If by chance you do suffer a tooth ache, then a Google Search could pay dividends, at least for short term relief. My toothache post has been insanely popular for a couple of years now and a few people have learned something about dealing with the pain. I found that swishing Vodka around in my mouth helped a lot. It says it on the Internet, it must be true!

I wonder what Britney Spears Googled that told her to shave her hair off? Poor girl.

Find new stuff with the image wall

While everyone seems to be running to the new kid on the block, Google Reader, I stuck with Bloglines because I prefer the old-style interface and the sorting options over the new fangled web 2.0ish Google upstart.

At the same time, I’ve lusted after some of the new features of Google Reader but Bloglines have been busy with a new feature I quite like called the Image Wall. The wall is basically a collection of images grabbed from the latest posts that Bloglines sees. The wall refreshes continuously bringing in new content as you’re watching. Clicking on an image leads to the Bloglines preview of that post where you can then click through to the actual post.

It’s not perfect. The images don’t always fade in correctly, sometimes stuttering or suddenly appearing or changing for some reason. That’s only a minor problem compared to the big one. When you hover an image, a popup appears with a large verson of that image, and allows you to mark offensive images. Unfortunately to get to an image in the middle of the wall you have to move your cursor over other images, thus suffering more popups. If you haven’t tried it, image what it would be like to mouse over a Snap Preview powered page full of closely formatted links. Ugh.

Besides that problem I really like the idea. I found a blog with an hour’s worth of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody remakes yesterday because they included a screen grab from that song’s video. Unfortunately my browser crashed shortly afterwards so I can’t share it with you. I can see you’re disappointed.

Just in case you’re worried about such things, you have to click through the following disclaimer each time you activate the wall.

The Image Wall is comprised of dynamically generated images from user feeds and may contain material of an explicit sexual nature or other adult content.

You do read the small print don’t you? Don’t go complaining that you weren’t warned!

bloglines-imagewall.jpg

Edit: Looks like Bloglines have listened to the complaints and have responded.

Effective today, Bloglines will move the Image Wall to its own, new domain at http://www.bloglinesimagewall.com. Now, any school, library, parent/guardian or third party filtering service can add this full domain to their list of restricted domains to be blocked.

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