I just uploaded version 1.2.2 of my WordPress Twitter Widget Pro plugin. Since twitter has slowed down, a lot of people (especially on slower servers) have been getting the “Could not connect to Twitter” message when twitter was slow but not down. I’ve added a setting on each widget to specify the number of seconds to wait for Twitter. It still defaults to 2 seconds, but you may have to bump it up. Just remember that when twitter IS down, it will try for that full amount of time to reach them BEFORE your page loads, so don’t set it too high!
Please discuss this plugin on the Wordpress Twitter Widget post.
I just uploaded version 1.2.2 of my WordPress Google Analytics plugin. It squashes one major bug that has been plaguing some users. Those that switch back and forth from visual to HTML editor, will not longer have problems with it getting stuck!
Please discuss this plugin on the WordPress Google Analytics Plugin post.
I just uploaded version 1.2.1 of my WordPress Twitter Widget Pro plugin. It includes the removal of the “friends feed” option, the addition of custom error message setting for when Twitter is down, and optional anonymous statistics collection (more on this in a moment). Unfortunately, the database query that Twitter had to run to retrieve these feeds was contributing to their constant crashes. They have removed this functionality, and have no immediate plans to add it back. If they ever do, I’ll redo the plugin to use it. I’m sorry, but it’s completely out of my hands.
Regarding the anonymous statistics collection, as my plugins are getting more and more popular (1000s of users now), I’m struggling to keep in touch with my plugin users. Gathering some statistics will help me to design my plugins to meet the needs of the users. This is not meant as an invasion of privacy, and you can easily disable it from the options page.
Read the rest of WordPress Twitter Widget Pro 1.2.1 released! »
A quick bugfix on the activation routines that generate the installation ID, released as 1.2.1.
I just uploaded version 1.2.0 of my WordPress Google Analytics plugin. It includes some minor bug fixes, and updated options page, and optional anonymous statistics collection. As my plugins are getting more and more popular (1000s of users now), I’m struggling to keep in touch with my plugin users. Gathering some statistics will help me to design my plugins to meet the needs of the users. This is not meant as an invasion of privacy, and you can easily disable it from the options page.
Read the rest of Google Analytics plugin 1.2.0 released! »
I finally released another one of my plugins. This one is a widget that displays rotating images from a post’s gallery in the sidebar of your site. You just specify the post or page in the widget settings, and it will cycle through all the images from the gallery of that post or page. You can even have as many of them as you want on your site simultaneously! As usual, this plugin requires PHP5, and the latest WordPress (currently 2.5.1).
As many of you may have read, WordPress 2.6 will include another plugin of mine (built into the CORE) to allow you to reorder your images to make them display in whatever order you prefer. Until then, go get my Reorder Gallery plugin! They work great together!
Many of you may have noticed that my responses to comments have slowed, and new plugin releases and updates have slowed as well. I’m sorry for the lag, but I do have some great new stuff in the works! The good thing is, the reason for the delays is that Xavisys has been dealing with a higher than normal work load. Why is this good? Well, because the income from the work is what allows me to continue developing and releasing free stuff!
The work load has actually increased so much, that I’m looking for good, reliable help. I need a developer that I can count on who has knowledge and experience developing PHP. If you have experience with WordPress it’s a plus, but not required. Please contact me if you are interested.
Less than a week ago, I released a new WordPress plugin called “Reorder Gallery” which gave you the ability to change the order of your images when you uploaded them, so that the gallery shortcode would display them in an order of your choosing. Two days later, Matt Mullenweg stopped by to say that it “would be pretty cool functionality for core WP” so I offered to add it in. It’s now done, and you can look forward to seeing it in WordPress 2.6.
Read the rest of Reorder Gallery now in WordPress Core »
Why not? I know, what a cliché response right? The thing is, it really does apply. I’m going to have to make plugins, enhancements, and patches for WordPress for my customers anyway. By releasing these to the community, I can help other developers, companies, users, and even aspiring developers. So I repeat, “Why not?” Why not take the time to raise the quality of life for someone else, when it’s so easy to do. I would say to any developer that uses open source software and does not contribute, “Take stock of what you are doing, and think about the bigger picture, not of software but of humanity.”
How does Open Source raise someone’s quality of life?
It seems like an outrageous claim right? However, you don’t have to completely change someone’s life to raise the quality of it. I’m not claiming that my contributions to open source software are helping someone survive where they otherwise wouldn’t, but I do think that they make a difference.
When I talked about my first impressions of WordPress 2.5 I mentioned the new shortcodes. Then I went more in depth, as I explained exactly what WordPress Shortcodes were, and how they worked. However, neither time did I mention that there is a shortcode that is built into WordPress (no plugin needed). It’s the gallery shortcode. You can upload images to the post, and then choose to “Insert gallery into post” and it will add a [gallery] tag to your post, which will be replaced with the image gallery when people view it. The problem? Images are stuck in whatever order you upload them in.
Read the rest of WordPress Reorder Gallery Plugin »
To be fair, this is actually an “Adobe employee’s personal take” (as Anil Dash pointed out) on this situation. My post is not meant as a slam to Movable Type, I simply found humor in the quote on the Adobe blog.
While helping out in the WordPress IRC channel today, someone sent me a link to an Adobe Blog called Penguin.SWF, which tracks development status and issues regarding the Linux version of Adobe’s Flash Player. In case they change it, this image is from the bottom of the right sidebar. The exact text is “Powered by a blogging system that’s not as good as WordPress but still tries really hard” and “tries really hard” links to MovableType.com.
WordPress and Movable Type are competing platforms, but recently that competition has come to a boil. Anil Dash, Six Apart’s Chief Evangelist, took some shots with a blog post titled A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide where he asserted that Movable Type was the upgrade that WordPress installs needed. Matt Mullenweg, WordPress founder, fired back in a Twitter message that said “six apart is getting desperate, and dirty” to which Anil replied “desperation is resorting to name-calling and slander instead of substance — if there’s a factual error, i’m glad to fix it.”
The barrage went on for weeks, spilling into blogs, forums, and ultimately into the community itself. I’m not going to get into my personal take on the situation right now, that’s for another, much longer, post. Suffice it to say that I develop WordPress sites, write WordPress plugins, and contribute code to WordPress. What I find much more interesting is that someone over at Adobe, on the Linux version of Adobe’s Flash Player, is revolting because they don’t like Movable Type.
