When a dog loves a woman

The happy and sad story of Goofy, a dog rescued from Greece, who took over Belinda Harley’s life.

If you enjoyed story of Goofy’s rescue, look for the book, “Marley and Me”. It’s a lovely story, and you’d need to have a hard heart not to shed a tear by the end of it.

The only time that Mark Birley, that quintessentially reserved Englishman and ruler of the nightclub Annabel’s, sent me a love letter, it began: “Darling Belinda, I know I only saw you last night, and will see you again in a few days, but there is something I wanted to put in writing. I want to tell you how much I love and admire you” (here, I caught my breath) “for rescuing that divine dog.”

The rest of the letter was not about me at all. It was all about Goofy, the mixture of spaniel and scamp with the wonderful, intelligent eyes that I had brought home, after nightmarish battles with official-dom, from the Greek island of Paxos.

Tweet Tweet 0.1 for WordPress

I’m a big fan of Twitter. It serves as a useful tool connecting people who might never meet, and also as a vital means of communication for those who work at home or in solitary conditions.

The one huge and uncomfortable problem I see with Twitter is, “What happens to the conversation if Twitter fails?” What will you do if Twitter goes out of business tomorrow? Where will all your conversations, all the links you posted, and received from your friends be? That’s why I wrote Tweet Tweet.

Tweet Tweet is a plugin for WordPress that will archive your tweets, and the tweets of everyone you follow, plus replies you receive from strangers, and direct messages too. All these tweets will be stored safely in your database.

There is a simple “review pane” where you can see the latest tweets and go back in history but it’s very basic. The primary aim of this plugin is to ensure that your conversations are safe.

Tweet Tweet

The plugin has been tested by a number of users, but it uses jQuery and AJAX techniques for the review pane so I’d love to hear if it works for you.

Please, do not hack the plugin to poll Twitter more than once every 90 seconds. Unless you follow thousands of others, 90 seconds will be fine. I have mine set to 180 seconds and it picks up every single tweet.

Update! I just tagged version 0.2 which adds a better hover for the review pane (and makes it IE6 compatible), and also adds a search form to make it easier to navigate your Tweet archive.

How to watch DVDs on your Wii

Speculation on fan blogs about an upgrade to play DVDs on the Wii Console has been persistent for as long as I’ve been reading them, but it seems doubtful Nintendo will ever add this ability.

What are we to do? If you can’t get official support for something that the hardware can probably do, why not code it yourself? The Wii is a closed platform, but that hasn’t stopped enterprising developers taking a peek under the covers. That’s exactly what Erant did with his libdl and DVDX installer!

He created a dvd access library for the Wii Console, added the Mplayer media player and hey presto! DVD playback on the Wii. Mplayer also plays practically any video format under the sun so it’s even better than a DVD player.

Our DVD player is stuck in a cupboard under the television where the baby can’t get it (and requires untying of handles for an adult to get to) while the Wii is on a shelf in easy reach. I think this may be the project that gets me to try out Wii Homebrew using the new Twilight hack.

Once you’ve done that, you can enjoy the splendor of mplayer. That what started out as a simple proof of concept has rapidly turned into a full-featured media player, under the nourishing hands of dhewg. The main aim of the mplayer project was to get DVDVideo going, but it also supports reading video files off the SD card. (Experimental).

Nintendo Wii fanboy has a simple guide to getting everything running, from installing the Homebrew channel to running Mplayer. Nice.

Mplayer playing DVD on Wii Console

WordPress at No. 10

You may have heard that the official site of the British Prime Minister’s Office at number10.gov.uk launched earlier today. The great news is that it’s running WordPress, but what really excited me is the fact that the site is also using WP Super Cache.

The site was initially very slow, but once the cached static files were in place, it just zipped along! Three cheers for caching and everyone who has contributed to WP Cache and WP Super Cache! 🙂

I wonder if Gordon Brown will be looking at his Dashboard? *Wave*

WordPress MU Domain Mapping 0.1

A long sought after feature in WordPress MU is domain mapping. That’s where a blog on a WordPress MU site can be “mapped” to a new domain. WordPress.com has an advanced domain mapping feature that has proved to be very popular with users even though it’s a paid-for upgrade.

This domain mapping plugin isn’t quite as powerful and still requires plenty of testing. So, while domains and “sub domains” or hostnames can be mapped to individual blogs, there are a number of caveats:

  1. Remote login does not work. It’s possible to be logged in on the main site, logged in on the domain mapped blog as a different user or not logged in at all there!
  2. It only works if your WordPress MU site is using sub domains.
  3. It’s the 0.1 0.2 release. It’s basic.

Here’s the plugin page, and the download page. I’d like to hear how well it works for you.

I’m submitting this plugin to the WordPress MU plugin competition. There are only 2 other entries so the odds on my winning are pretty good!

I should have a Sitewide Tags update later this week, with thanks to Thomas Schneider who came on board last week to help and has done some super work!

Ron and Andrea found a bug in pre release testing that I forgot to fix in 0.1, so grab 0.2 if you were (un)lucky enough to grab the first release! Thanks Trent for testing too. Follow me on Twitter to get the inside scoop on my WordPress plugins, including a sort of super secret Twitter plugin..

WordPress MU is the multi blog version of WordPress that runs on WordPress.com and many other sites.

Gravatar enabled WordCamp Badges

Andy has the very exciting news that Gravatar icons will be printed on attendee’s WordCamp San Francisco badges this year!

gravatar badge

On supporting websites, Gravatars have become a de-facto identity for comment threads and discussions so to carry through the identity to the conference floor is just a logical conclusion.

There is one caveat. Gravatars can now be up to 512×512 pixels. The bigger they are, the better they’ll print. If your Gravatar is a measly 32×32 pixels it’s going to look like a dirty smudge next to the shiny badges of the big boys. Andy has created a handy form for checking if your image is the right size. If not, please upload a new Gravatar before August 14th!

I won’t be at WordCamp this year but after seeing the line up of speakers I’m looking forward to seeing the blog coverage afterwards.

PS. Andy has a new post showing how to create those badges with the help of a PDF library.

WordPress MU 2.6

Version 2.6 of WordPress MU is now out! WordPress MU is the multi blog version of the popular blogging software WordPress. It’s the engine behind WordPress.com and many other blogging sites.

This version of WordPress MU is based on WordPress 2.6. There’s a long and interesting WordPress.org post on the new features in 2.6 so get over there to read up on post revisions, “Press This!”, Gears, Theme Previews, and the long list of developers who helped make this release a reality.

Some of the new features in this release of MU:

  1. Version number is 2.6 rather than 1.6 because it just makes sense to synchronise the major version numbers.
  2. Signup page now has a nonce which should help in the fight against spammers, for a short while anyway.
  3. Redirecting to the signup page for 404s and for unknown blogs is not enabled by default. Check out wp-config-sample.php for instructions.
  4. “allowed_themes” filter, much like the plugins filtered added previously.
  5. New functions: get_id_from_blogname(), is_main_blog().
  6. get_blog_details() can now take a blogname as well as a blog_id.
  7. Custom first posts didn’t always work. Now they do.
  8. Blognames in the “Add blog” form in wpmu-blogs.php are now sanitized.
  9. Added “pre_site_option_*” and “site_option_*” filters like the similar option filters.
  10. Meta fields will be passed on signup again.
  11. Added an “admin_header_navigation” filter so the top right navigation in the backend can be customised.
  12. The signup page uses “blogname” instead of “blog_id” to avoid confusion with the global variable of the same name. Plugins will break if not updated!

That last change is quite a major one. If you have any plugins that interact with the signup form they will need to be updated!

This release also addresses some security issues spotted by Alexander Concha and Juan Galiana. Thank you both for alerting us and for your patience while this release was prepared!

When will my broadband be upgraded?

Here in Ireland one company owns (almost?) all the local phone lines, Eircom. Just about every other company who provides a DSL service has to rent from them (anyone remember Smart?). The result of which is very similar pricing from every single broadband provider.

There is a silver lining of sorts. Eircom promised that they would upgrade all exchanges to support higher speeds by the end of July. We’re getting perilously close to that deadline and still no sign of upgrades for many. I received an email from BT yesterday giving this upgrade time page where I typed my phone number in and found out,

Your line will be upgraded on the weekend of the 26th July

Good news for me then. My 2Mb line becomes a 3Mb one. The upload rate remains at 256Kb unfortunately.

I twittered that url yesterday and others found out they’ll have to wait until August 9th. The page above works even if you’re not using BT’s service. When will your broadband be upgraded?

The Commodore 64 Book – 1982 to 199x

Several months ago my old C64 buddy, Andrew Fisher, emailed me to tell me about his new book, The Commodore 64 Book – 1982 to 199x. At the time his email fell through the cracks in the Thunderbird inbox and was destined to remain unanswered until I received a reply from another friend, Iain Black, curator of The Def Guide to Zzap!64 to a recent email I sent him. He asked if I had heard from Andrew so I went digging and found Andrew’s correspondence.

I’m glad I did. I just visited his site and ordered my copy of his book. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it and poring over all the reviews and little nuggets of retro goodness. If you were ever a fan of the C64, I think you owe it to yourself to splash out the couple of quid this books costs so you can bore the pants off your significant other, your work colleagues or friends with hopelessly antiquated nonsense from 20-30 years ago!

For the Speccy fans, there was The ZX Spectrum Book – 1982 to 199x but unfortunately only 1000 were ever printed and it’s sold out.

c64 golden years

In 1982, the Commodore computer company launched its new machine – the Commodore 64.

Twenty five years later, that machine is still going strong with new games and thousands of users worldwide.
To tell the story of the best-selling home computer of the 1980’s, writer and Commodore 64 fan Andrew Fisher looks back at around two hundred of the top games and how the industry has changed. From the pioneering third party companies like Electronic Arts and Melbourne House, to the homebrew software of the new millennium, the story of an 8-bit computer (and its remarkable sound chip) is a nostalgia trip for games fans.

Yes, difficult as it may seem, but people are still coding on the C64. I presume most of them work on emulators and I remember reading a forum post from a young guy who had never owned the machine but wanted to learn 6502 assembler. The C64 Scene Database lists almost every single demo produced and new ones are being added all the time. Not bad for such an old machine eh?

Sitewide tags pages for WordPress MU

For WordPress MU only. My latest plugin is the sitewide tags pages plugin.

This is the initial release of a plugin that creates a set of pages like the WordPress.com Hot Topics pages. It’s a lot more simplistic, but by feeding posts into one blog it also creates a sitewide feed of all posts plus feeds of any tags and categories too.


Sitewide Tags Options

WordPress MU is a multi blog version of WordPress that runs on WordPress.com. If you use the regular version of WordPress this plugin is not for you and you can ignore this post.

PS. In other MU news. Raanan has a new post on the Publisher Blog about Nationen! blog, a new Danish blog site based on WordPress MU that looks rather nice!
The site was developed by Incsub who are also the guys behind wpmu.org where you’ll probably find all sorts of useful nuggets of MU goodness on a regular basis!

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