Monthly Archives: January 2009

FancyBox Gallery 0.1

Jan262009

I decided to go ahead a release my FancyBox Gallery plugin as-is. Version 0.1 0.2 is very bare-bones: there are no options that you can set. Once you activate the plugin, thumbnails generated by the standard WordPress gallery shortcode will be handled by FancyBox. This works best if you use the link=’file’ option (see the documentation for more details). I’ll eventually add user-settable options for more control. If you’re interested in trying it out now, … Continue reading →

Plugin preview: FancyBox Gallery

Jan212009

I don’t have it ready for release yet, but I’m working on a new WordPress plugin which will integrate the FancyBox jQuery plugin with WordPress galleries. FancyBox is a “lightbox” plugin for displaying images in a nice overlay. I have the basics working, but I need to add an options screen, and resolve some CSS issues when it’s used with certain themes. I hope to have it ready by next week (depends on how much … Continue reading →

Awesome spam filtering for WordPress

Jan142009

I’ve always felt that Akismet does a pretty good job of filtering out spam. After all, since I started using it, Akismet has caught around 500,000 spam comments for me. But a few months ago, I decided to try out a different anti-spam plugin that caught my eye. And surprisingly enough, it’s my Akismet stats that tell me that the other plugin is doing a great job.

Unit testing in PHP with SimpleTest

Jan132009

I recently worked on a PHP project which required me to write a suite of unit tests to verify that the code worked as expected. While I’ve done unit testing before, and I knew that it was valuable, I have to admit that I’ve only used it very rarely. I’ve only had a few jobs/projects that required it, and most other projects didn’t want to pay for the extra time.

I was Web 2.0 before Web 2.0

Jan122009

Just about 7 years ago, Brent Ashley was experimenting with some dynamic browser/server communications using Javascript and IFRAMEs. This was one of the early techniques would later evolve into what we now call AJAX. Brent used this remote scripting to create a live chat that you could embed in your own blog. Congratulations to Dougal for being the first to publish a new BlogChat. There are others on the way, too. I’ll blog them when … Continue reading →

Book Review Poll

Jan062009

I have some more books available to review, this time, a selection from Apress. I can’t decide which one I want to look at first, so I’m going to leave it up to you, my readers. [poll id=”2″]