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.

Mac bootup sound ringtone for iPhone

Download: ringtones/MacStartup.m4r Version: 1.0 Updated: November 19, 2008 Size: 0 bytes Powered by Drain Hole This is from an inside joke here at the Microsoft Web Developer Summit, but if you’d like to have the Mac bootup sound as a ringtone on your iPhone, here ya go!

Book Review: WordPress for Business Bloggers

I recently received a copy of the book WordPress for Business Bloggers, by Paul Thewlis, published by Packt Publishing. The preface states, “WordPress for Business Bloggers provides advanced strategies and techniques to take your WordPress business blog from average to extraordinary. Whether you already have a blog, or are still in the planning stages, this book will show you how to use WordPress to create a highly successful blog for your business.” Read on to … Continue reading

WordPress iPhone App beta testing

Do you use WordPress? Do you have an iPhone? Or do you just like beta testing cool apps? You could help beta-test the upcoming WordPress for iPhone 1.2 release. The catch is, you can’t test unreleased apps on an actual iPhone. Instead, you have to download the (free) SDK, and run the code in the iPhone simulator. A lot of work to go through, to be sure, but if you’ve got time on your hands, … Continue reading

Socializing a WordPress site

For this week’s WordPress Wednesday installment, let’s look at a few changes I’ve made here on this site in the past few weeks. As mentioned previously, there were several areas that I knew I wanted to go ahead and improve in the short term, as interim measures until I put a whole new theme in place. One of my primary goals here is gain and retain readers. I want to make the site “sticky” by … Continue reading

WordPress themes for developers

This is the article that I had originally intended to post last week, before I suffered a self-induced glitch which caused me to lose my work-in-progress. Thanks to my friend Geof Morris who prompted me to double-check my database for saved revisions. As it turns out, there was indeed a revision stored there which did not show up in the list of revisions given in the editor. That copy contained a fair amount of the … Continue reading

Auto-fail

This is not the original WordPress Wednesday post that I had intended to make, picking up from last week about changes to my site. It’s not even the backup subject that I started to write about, regarding cool WordPress themes for developers. This is a cautionary tale about saving your work. See, I had originally planned to pick up from my previous post, and write about progress in working on this site. Except that last … Continue reading

WordPress Wednesday Kick Off

This is the first installment of “WordPress Wednesday”, which I mentioned in my previous post about making changes to my site. This first one is going to be a little long, and I’ve been editing the draft off-and-on for over a week. Future articles will probably be shorter, in general, and focus on a particular subject. But let’s start out by looking at the current state of this website. We’ll examine what is good, what … Continue reading

It’s Time for Some Changes

I’ve been saying for years that I want to redesign this site, but I still haven’t made many substantive changes. One of my favorite sayings is, “The cobbler’s children oft go without shoes.” It certainly applies to this site, as I spend a lot of time doing web development, studying programming, CSS techniques, SEO, user interfaces, and many other related disciplines that make up this craft. But my own site rarely changes, and I certainly … Continue reading

Back from WordCamp Birmingham 2008

As mentioned previously, I gave a presentation last weekend at WordCamp Birmingham 2008 on “The Future of WordPress”. My section on “The Past of WordPress” ran a little longer than I had planned, but a lot of people told me that they liked that overview, so I guess it was alright. I was pretty nervous at the beginning, but a couple of minutes after I got started, I settled in a bit, and I felt … Continue reading

WordCamp Birmingham Registration Deadline Approaching

If you have been thinking about attending WordCamp Birmingham 2008, but haven’t committed yet, now is the time. There are only a couple of hours left to sign up. Registration is only $25, and that includes lunch and a tee shirt — talk about a bargain! Register now!