August 29, 2008 – 12:23 pm
This is another one of those articles that will be of interest to a minority of WordPress users. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in Plugins, Tech, WordPress
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Also tagged .net, cache, caching, Development, object-cache, opcode cache, PHP, plugin, Plugins, Programming, WordPress, xcache
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December 18, 2007 – 12:26 pm
I get to unwrap one of my presents early this year, and it ranks up there with some of the best — a new job! I’ll be working with Alex King and the other fine folks at Crowd Favorite. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to work with this crew to tackle some great projects.
Four years ago, when I joined in on the development of WordPress, it was just a fun thing to do on the side. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in CrowdFavorite, Personal, WordPress, Work
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Also tagged app, CrowdFavorite, Development, Jobs, PHP, Programming, Web, WordPress, Work
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WordPress 2.2.1 is now available. Most of the changes are minor bug fixes, however there are some security fixes as well. We can’t stress enough how important it is to upgrade your sites and keep them current so that you aren’t open to attacks. Many people see these “minor” version updates and assume that they don’t need to install them. Mainly it seems to be folks who worry about an upgrade breaking their theme or their plugins. But if the themes and plugins are written properly, this won’t normally be a problem. [...]
Say we’re writing a program in Perl, and we need to pass a lot of data back and forth between subroutines. Using global variables is bad practice, and we often use the slightly-less-bad method of passing around a big hash variable. But it’s a pain to always use the values in the hash, so a lot of our code uses individual scalar variables, and stick them into (and pull them out of) the hash as needed. But when you have a lot of values to move around, it’s a pain in the neck. You don’t want a big, ugly block of code like this:
#...assume that we declared %hash,
# $foo, $bar, $baz, etc previously...
$hash{'foo'} = $foo;
$hash{'bar'} = $bar;
$hash{'baz'} = $baz;
# ...ad nauseum...
Surely, there’s a more elegant way to do this, right? Of course there is. [...]
About two weeks ago, I started a new job (which explains at least part of my blogging lull, you see). I’m working on Free IQ, which is a streaming media site for entrepreneurs. There’s more to it than just the streaming media (you can upload video, audio, PDF files, PowerPoint presentations, etc.), but I’m still learning the ins and outs, so I don’t know the full scope yet.
When I interviewed, they were favorably impressed by the fact that I’m a WordPress developer. [...]
Doh. I should have caught up on my wp-hackers reading before I made that last post. It appears that we’re going to delay the tags support until version 2.3 in order to have more time to flesh out all the details properly. Instead, it appears that sidebar widgets may become an official core addition in WP 2.2. Stay tuned for more details…
September 18, 2006 – 4:41 pm
For quite a while, I had considered nuking Windows from my laptop and starting fresh. A few weeks ago, I finally took the plunge. I started with a full backup (two, actually — a file-by-file backup, and a partition image). I toyed with the idea of dual-booting, but finally decided that I’d try to go completely non-Windows, and see how well I could get by.
After hearing one of my co-workers rave about how impressed he was with Fedora Core, I was going to give that a try. But the DVD he burned for me wouldn’t install for some reason. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in Browsers, Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Tech
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Also tagged Firefox, InternetExplorer, Laptops, Microsoft, PHP, Ruby, Ubuntu, Unix, Windows
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I know, I know… I haven’t been very active on the blogging front lately. Once again I’ve been sucked into a swirling vortex of job and home projects, with little-to-no time for participating in blogdom. I’ve managed to keep up with most of the latest memes, and I’ve added a few new del.icio.us bookmarks, but there’s been no opportunity to develop any nifty code or write about the subject of the day.
I’ve got eight draft posts in my queue, and three of those are no longer timely, and so I’ll probably end up deleting them. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in Blogs, Family, Holidays, Personal, WordPress, Work
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Also tagged dom, plugin, Plugins, this-site, Web, WordPress
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October 31, 2005 – 10:29 am
Phil Ringnalda’s site is now powered by WordPress.
But, I’m never again going to see my weblog software returning Perl’s infuriatingly common response to any problem, “Internal Server Error. Check the error log for a message that’s no more help than this.†And I don’t think you can imagine just how happy that makes me. Freedom 0? I’m down with that. A vibrant, independent and free community? Cool. But I just wanted out from under the bloody Perl. [...]
October 27, 2005 – 5:21 pm
I had recently been using Alex Robinson’s 3-column CSS technique called “ordered columns, float-margin/float-margin” for some website designs. But he has superceded that with the One True Layout. OTL combines methods for source-ordered columns, techniques for equal-height columns, and “vertical grids” to provide a flexible method of creating complex page layouts, while maintaining a minimum of markup clutter. [...]
