Author Archives: Donncha

Ray and Jenny Expecting

Radio DJ, Ray D'Arcy and Jenny Kelly are expecting a baby in a few months time it was revealed yesterday in the Tribune. For those of us who don't buy that fine newspaper, Ian Dempsey announced the news this morning. Ray and co. were inundated with texts this morning congratulating the couple on their good news!

Good luck guys, hope the pregnancy goes well!

The referrers list on In Photos shows the interest people had trying to find photos of the couple. Luckily my US Book photos have always featured highly in Google searches for them! 🙂

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Five common PHP design patterns

Over at IBM Developer Works there's an interesting article on PHP patterns. If you've never come across patterns before it's a good introduction. Just remember that these methods of solving software problems are most useful when you've got lots of code. Using the MVC pattern to print "Hello World!" is probably a little overkill!

For the curious, the patterns covered are: factory, singleton, observer, chain-of-command and strategy.

Elsewhere on dikini.net you can find a collection of design patterns. Vlado updated his collection recently and there's now 20 techniques or patterns. He openly admits that, 'not all can be considered "officially" design patterns, but to be honest I don't really care.' (via)

Holy Shmoly, it lives!

This site has moved. It's now at ocaoimh.ie where I can play with a more up to date version of WordPress.

Upgrading was a breeze:

  1. I dumped the old database tables and copied them over here.
  2. I installed this site with the usual defaults included near-empty tables.
  3. Then I fed my old db tables back in, changed the prefix in wp_config.php to point at those old tables.
  4. I changed the siteurl and home in the options table to point at the new url.
  5. Finally, I visited the upgrade url which magically brought the db up to date!

I decided on using K2, and modified the default theme slightly to match my old theme somewhat. Unfortunately I had to edit index.php so I have to watch out when I'm upgrading.

I decided I needed a related posts plugin as well as one to display the latest comments. Both required a little bit of massaging to work with the development WP 2.1 which I'll update this post with later. Next in line is something to resurrect my "popular posts" list using data from my referrer plugin!

What about my old site? I used some rewrite magic to bring you here didn't I? 🙂

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Damien had a nice lunch, I had sandwiches. Thought you'd like to know!

Cyclists Beware!

I just caught a few minutes of a report on Radio 1 about the dangers cyclists face on the roads and it reminded me of an almost-incident last night.

As the sun set last night, I was driving down an urban road when a girl on a bike drifted out into the middle of the road in front of me. I wasn’t driving too fast thankfully but still had to press on the brakes hard. When I was only a few feet from her she calmly looked back at us and that’s when I spotted the white buds stuck in her ears and the wire going down to her waist.

Cycling is dangerous enough on our crowded streets but why the hell would someone tempt fate and risk their own life by limiting their awareness of their surroundings?

If I had a “stupid things people do” category..

WordPress Gathering in San Francisco!

I’m off to San Francisco at the end of the month! Matt is organising WordCamp, a free WordPress conference on August 5th in San Francisco and I’ll be there along with the rest of the Automattic guys.

I’m really looking forward to it, meeting people I talk to every day online, hacking on WordPress stuff and taking lots and lots of photos. I’m not the only one making the trip across the Atlantic either; Podz is flying over too!

Corporate WordPress support is evil?

Toni announced yesterday the launch of the Automattic Support Network. This has of course attracted the attention of many blogs who have discussed the business implications but Peter Chris wonders if WordPress.org support will suffer. Here’s another post on the same issue but Matt replies with an excellent rebuttal.

I very much doubt the support network will have any immediate effect on the level of support offered to non-paying users. The number of non-paying users will always vastly outnumber those who pay for support. What happens if commercial support adversely affects the time spent on non-paying users? Guess what? There’ll be money in the bank to hire somebody else from the community to help out!

This can only be a win-win situation for all involved.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, then give WordPress MU a spin. It’s come a long way recently, and if you’re looking for more, then visit wpmudev for older releases, some plugins, a theme pack and other stuff.

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