Author Archives

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.

Calendar Software Recommendation?

May242005

A friend of mine is looking for a web-based events calendar. He’s got a pretty big list of needs and wants, but here are some of the main ones: Ability to integrate into existing web site (look & feel, events lists on various pages, maybe unified logins, too). Single events, recurring events and floating events (same weekend each year type) plus multiple categories Separate yearly, monthly, biweekly, weekly, and daily calendar views for each calendar … Continue reading →

Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith

May232005

Big family day yesterday. Susan, I, our two kids, Susan’s parents, our friend Kenn and two of his daughters, all went to see Revenge of the Sith (Kenn’s wife, Amanda, and their youngest daughter visited relatives). Due to the size of our group, and the size of the rest of the audience, we wound up sitting about three or four rows from the front of the theater. Not the optimal viewing position, but it worked … Continue reading →

Musical Baton

May192005

Thanks to the magic of Technorati and a little bit of ego surfing, I discovered that Mike Papageorge of Fiftyfoureleven passed me a musical baton a couple of days ago, but I missed it until now. I’m not sure how, because I keep up with that site… So, two days late, here are my answers: Total volume of music files on my computer: 5.6GB. Yes, that’s miniscule, but a lot of my CDs are still … Continue reading →

WordPress 1.5.1.1 Released

May192005

There’s a new minor bugfix release of WordPress, which brings us up to version 1.5.1.1. Update: In our effort to optimize we made two mistakes in 1.5.1, one related to feeds and one related to trackbacks and pingbacks. Weâ€™ve updated the download with 1.5.1.1 which corrects these bugs and a few others. Visit the WordPress Downloads page for the freshest code.

SpamValve Testers Wanted

May182005

I think I’m almost ready to let some other people bang on SpamValve. I want to get a closed group of users to try it out and give me some feedback before I release it to the general public. If you’re interested in testing it, and meet the requirements below, contact me. Requirements: Requires root access on your server. Currently requires the ‘ipfw’ firewall system (I’m on FreeBSD). But if you think you can modify … Continue reading →

Find cheap gas

May172005

What do you get if you combine Google Maps and GasBuddy? CheapGas. (via: Make)

Reinvigorate me

May162005

In less than 90 minutes, reinvigorate.net will start accepting signups for the closed beta soft re-launch of their web site stats system. On the one hand, I don’t obsess too much over my stats. But I do like keeping a finger on the pulse of my site. I want to know if my readership is waxing or waning. I want to know what my most popular posts are. I want to know where my hits … Continue reading →

Google Sightseeing

May112005

Google Sightseeing is an index of interesting sites (sights?) around the world, as seen by the satellites that Google Maps uses. For example, places like The Grand Canyon, Niagra Falls, or the St. Louis Arch. Oh yeah, and did I mention that the site is running WordPress?

WordPress 1.5.1 Released

May092005

Hot off the presses is the release of WordPress 1.5.1. There is a Changelog available on the Codex which gives some highlights, a full list of submitted bugfixes on the mosquito bug tracker, and even more pedantic changeset details in the repository. Here are some of the main new features/fixes that matter to me: Database query optimizations Improved Conditional GET support (I lobbied a lot for this) Fixes for plugin menu hooks Admin UI improvements … Continue reading →

SpamValve update

May062005

I’ve been pretty busy at work, so I haven’t done much more work on my auto-firewall code in the past couple of days. But it seems to be holding its own pretty well. Normally, over the course of a few days, my comments database accumulates a couple thousand spams (I check it using Chris Davis’ Spam Nuke plugin). But since activating my new system, the spam comments are down to a trickle, maybe 10% of … Continue reading →