Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

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About Dougal Campbell

Dougal is a web developer, and a "Developer Emeritus" for the WordPress platform. When he's not coding PHP, Perl, CSS, JavaScript, or whatnot, he spends time with his wife, three children, a dog, and a cat in their Atlanta area home.

WordPress 2.2 Delayed

A while back, the WordPress development team decided to aim for date-targeted, quarterly releases, to speed up the development cycle. One of the main things this does is to give more frequent updates, but with fewer “big” new features in each release. The target for WordPress 2.2 was set for around April 23. One of the new features in WordPress 2.2 is ‘tags’. For any of you who still don’t know what tags are, they … Continue reading

Tax Time Tradition

Once again, I’ve upheld my time-honored tradition of getting my taxes in the mail at the last minute. Just like every other year that I’ve promised myself that I’d get them mailed off weeks in advance… Of course, it didn’t help that we had some sort of stomach virus making the rounds in our family over the past several weeks. First Jamie was sick for about a week, then Claire got it the next week, … Continue reading

New WordPress Releases: 2.0.10 and 2.1.3

That’s right, two shiny new bugfix/security updates. One for the 2.0 branch and one for the 2.1 branch. There are some small bugfixes in both of these versions, but the main reason to upgrade is for the security fixes (I’m going to write more on that subject later). List of changes for 2.0.10 List of changes for 2.1.3 Visit the downloads page for version 2.1.3, and the Release Archive for version 2.0.10. Watch later this … Continue reading

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

One of the coolest things about WordPress is the powerful Plugin API which allows us to create add-ons which can radically extend the basic functions of our sites. Most plugins can be used simply by dropping them into your plugins folder and activating them. I don’t use a ton of plugins compared to some people — I can be a bit picky about what I add. And I’m not going to list every plugin that … Continue reading

Ow. Ow. Ow.

I’ve spent years at a desk job and very little in the way of extra-curricular activity, so I’m not in the best shape of my life. In fact, I’m in pretty poor shape. I’m grateful that my doctor was diplomatic about it when I had my 40-year-old physical last week. But I’ve been making somewhat of an effort to get myself into better general health over the last couple of years. If nothing else, I … Continue reading

Customer Service, Bad and Good

This is a little story about customer service. It’s about bad customer service, and it’s about good customer service. It’s about how a customer service rep should make sure that he really knows the answer to a question before spouting off, and if he isn’t sure, he should ask someone else. The dramatis personae in this little skit are Comcast and Tivo. Comcast will be playing the role of bad customer service, and Tivo is … Continue reading

WordPress.com supports OpenID

The word just went out today that the WordPress.com blog hosting service now supports OpenID, both as a server and a consumer. Supporting it as a server means that if you have a blog on WordPress.com, you can use your blog URL as an OpenID. Supporting it as a consumer means that you can use any OpenID to login to your WordPress.com account (once you’ve associated your OpenIDs with your regular login). This means that … Continue reading

Important: Upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2

In the interest of getting the word out as quickly and as widely as possible, a brief word about a new WordPress release: If you recently installed version 2.1.1, you should upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2 immediately. There was a security breach on the server which housed the download archives, and some files in the 2.1.1 download were modified to include a serious security hole. There are more details in the official WordPress Dev Blog announcement. … Continue reading

Alabama Tornadoes

Many of you are probably currently familiar with hearing about the tornado that hit Enterprise, Alabama yesterday. What you might not realize is that my wife and I both graduated from the high school that was leveled in that storm system. Seeing the devastation in our old home town has been very surreal for both of us. Our niece, who is a senior this year, was at the high school when the tornado hit, and … Continue reading