Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

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.

Getting ready for WordCamp Birmingham 2009

Sep252009

In a short while, I’ll be leaving Atlanta, and heading west to Alabama for WordCamp Birmingham 2009. I’m giving a presentation on Saturday morning about Jumping Into WordPress Plugin Programming. Of course, my presentation still isn’t done, so I’ll be burning the midnight oil tonight, finishing up my notes, gathering up my bookmarks, and turning it all into a slideshow. Unfortunately, my presentation is in the first slot of the morning. Fortunately, once that’s over … Continue reading →

Most Useless iPhone 3.0 Feature

Sep062009

In the iPhone OS 3.0 update, there were a lot of nice features added. Some of them are fairly major and useful, like cut-and-paste. Some of them are subtle and useful, like the 30-second rewind button when playing a podcast. But there’s one feature that sticks out to me as totally useless: “Shake to Shuffle”. I guess there’s some tiny “cute-factor” to it. But in practical terms, it’s pretty darned useless. When you’re using your … Continue reading →

W3 Total Cache Plugin

Aug262009

There’s a new WordPress cache plugin in town, and it’s called W3 Total Cache. This plugin is one of the contestants in the 2009 Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition. The W3 Total Cache plugin (W3TC for short) is an advanced cache plugin, and you can only have one of those on your site at once. So if you’re currently using WP Super Cache, you’ll have to disable that first before enabling W3TC. [side note: I … Continue reading →

Retheme: Stage 1

Aug172009

I’ve pulled the trigger on the first stage of my site re-theme. Right now, it’s still a pretty clean slate. I’ve switched over to the Thematic theme (actually a child theme using Thematic as its template), and done just a few quick stylesheet fixes and personal plugin tweaks. Currently, there are still a few warts which I need to iron out (some sidebar styles on sub-pages that need fixing, and such). More major style/branding changes … Continue reading →

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 →