Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Yearly Archives: 2009

Jumping Into WordPress Plugin Programming

Aug162009

In a few weeks, I will be a presenter at WordCamp Birmingham 2009 (that’s Birmingham, Alabama, not England, by the way). Last year, I did a presentation on “The Future of WordPress“, shortly before the release of version 2.7. I briefly considered doing the same thing this year, updated with speculation about the upcoming versions 2.9 and 3.0, but that seemed like a cop-out. I wanted to do something a little deeper. One of the … Continue reading →

Analytics Observations

Aug112009

Over the years, I’ve variously either obsessed over or ignored my site stats. I’ve always found website analytics interesting, but since I’m not selling anything here, I don’t have a lot of motivation to really dig in and try to make sweeping changes for the sake of increasing clicks or search engine rankings. Oh, I have dabbled with things here and there — related posts links, the SEO Super Comments plugin, etc. — but my … Continue reading →

WordPress Webhooks Plugin

Aug102009

Check out this demo video of a new plugin by mitcho, called HookPress. HookPress adds the ability to use webhooks as WordPress actions and filters. Since webhooks run from a web server (not directly inside WordPress), this means that you could, for example, use scripts in python, perl, ruby, or whatever to extend WordPress. How’s that for nifty? And what’s extra nice is that the user interface for it on the WordPress side looks super … Continue reading →

Time for Redesign

Aug052009

I’ve been threatening to do it for years, but I think it’s really time — time to redesign this site, for real. If what I have now (or will accomplish in the end) can be called ‘design’. Maybe it would be better to say ‘re-theme‘, so as to avoid ridicule from actual designers. And speaking of which, I’ll happily accept any design advice along the way! So. Time to start over. I’m really going to … Continue reading →