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 … Continue reading
My wife was a Communications major in college. So she often makes observations about how organizations try to get their message out to their audience. One thing she remarked on recently was the decline in the use of musical jingles, as opposed to non-musical slogans, in advertising. Read more in her post, “Ask any mermaid you happen to see…”
If you run a busy WordPress site, or even if your site just has a lot of processor-intensive plugins, then you probably already run the WP-Cache plugin (plugin directory, original announcment, recent security update info). Even though my site isn’t super busy, my server is a little light in the RAM department, and using WP-Cache helps the box keep up with requests better. One minor annoyance, however, is that with WP-Cache enabled, my syndication feeds … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
WordPress 2.2 “Getz” is now official. I’ve listed some of the changes previously, but here’s another quick rundown: Atom feeds updated to Atom 1.0 Preliminary support for Atom Publishing Protocol Widgets are now supported in core Protection against activating broken plugins “Deactivate All Plugins” button. Sadly, my “Reactivate All Plugins” patch didn’t make it into this release. Hopefully you’ll see it in WP 2.3. Improvements to comment management Code optimizations and speedups Future WYSIWYG support … Continue reading
There have been some more bugfixes applied, and there is now a second RC available. Details are in Ryan Boren’s announcement. WordPress 2.2 RC2 — You’re soaking in it! (In other words, I’m running it here 😉 ) By the way, one other change in this version that I don’t think has been mentioned in the previous announcements: In the “Write Post” screen, the post preview is no longer displayed directly in the page. Instead, … Continue reading
Last night, rob1n tagged WordPress 2.2 RC1 in the svn repository, and Ryan Boren posted an announcement on his blog. That means that at this point, there shouldn’t be any major feature changes going into this branch, just bugfixes. It also means that it’s almost ready for official release. If you know what you’re doing, and you are willing to help test for and report bugs, download it from the Release Archives and give it … Continue reading
My brother-in-law, Bob, has been keeping a blog on wordpress.com for a while now called Arcane Code. He mostly writes about software development using Microsoft tools, because that’s what he does for a living. He’s also had some interesting posts lately about installing various flavors of Linux under Virtual PC, and a long series digging deeply into SQL Server. But one of his most recent posts caught my eye and I wanted to share it: … Continue reading
One of the new features in the upcoming WordPress 2.2 release is an option to “Deactivate All Plugins” with one click. Our standard advice is to deactivate all your plugins before upgrading so that out-of-date plugins won’t break your system mid-upgrade. But in the past, you had to deactivate plugins one at a time. Thus the new “Deactivate All Plugins” button to make this easier. While testing some things on my development system, I was … Continue reading
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…