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.

Yarrr! It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Once again, we have arrived on Talk Like a Pirate Day. I had been hoping that I would be able to find time to upgrade my Text Filter Suite plugin for WordPress (which includes my Pirate filter for posts and comments), but I’ve just been too busy. Maybe I can get it re-worked for next year. I already know what I want to do with it: Consolidate all of the filter code, maybe re-do things … Continue reading

WordPress 2.6.2 Release

As most of you have probably already seen in your Dashboard, yesterday afternoon saw the official WordPress 2.6.2 Release. And as mentioned in the comments on my intitial news break on the 2.6.2 Beta, the focus is on two security patches to cover weaknesses in PHP’s random number generation (which affects password encryption strength), and in MySQL’s field length checking. These weren’t (technically) security bugs in WordPress, per se, but in the underlying PHP/MySQL stack. … Continue reading

WordCamp Birmingham

If you haven’t already heard, WordCamp Birmingham is coming up on September 27 & 28, 2008. And for those of you not in the States, that’s Birmingham, Alabama, not England. If you are in, or can travel to, the Southeast U.S., you won’t want to miss the first WordCamp in the Deep South! And besides the great tech stuff at WordCamp, there are other fun events in Birmingham that weekend, too. Oh, and did I … Continue reading

WordPress 2.6.2-beta1

It looks like there’s going to be another point-release of WordPress coming soon. WordPress version 2.6.2-beta1 was just branded in svn a short while ago. Looking over the logs, I don’t see anything major — a fix for the Textpattern importer, a bug fix that prevents an attempt to make a revision of a revision, a new ‘login_redirect’ filter, a new ‘wp_rand()’ function, and a handful of other minor bugfixes. I’m kind of wondering if … Continue reading

XCache Object Cache Plugin for WordPress 2.5+

This is another one of those articles that will be of interest to a minority of WordPress users. In particular, if you use the XCache PHP opcode cache and Neosmart’s XCache object-cache plugin for WordPress. For those of you who don’t know what the heck I’m babbling about, a PHP opcode cache is a bit of software which helps your web server do less work when turning all your PHP code into web pages that … Continue reading

Knee Update – Week 7

It’s been seven weeks since my knee surgery. I can now officially put my full weight on my right leg. Unofficially, I’ve already been walking around without crutches for most of the past week. When I had my six-week checkup with the surgeon, I asked when I could drive a car on my own instead of having to get my family members to drive me to appointments. He said “whenever you feel like you can,” … Continue reading

Macbook + Coffee = Bad

Everybody knows that you shouldn’t keep beverages too close to the computer, right? The reason is because eventually, your toddler is going to run up to give you a big hug before she leaves for daycare, and is going to bump your leg. Your leg, in turn, is going to bump the TV tray where you set your coffee cup. The cup is going to tip over and spill several ounces of coffee directly onto … Continue reading

WordPress 2.6.1-beta1

I’m surprised that I haven’t seen mention of this from other channels yet (official or unofficial), but two days ago, SVN revision 8561 of the WordPress 2.6 branch was labled as WordPress version 2.6.1-beta1. The log messages reveal that most changes since the 2.6 release are minor bug and typo fixes. A few of the more interesting bits that jump out at me are: Allow disabling password reset per-user. Query functions now allow a comma-separated … Continue reading

Wanted: Cross-platform mobile shopping list app

Okay Lazyweb, help me find what I’m looking for. I want a mobile shopping/todo list app that my wife and I can both use to keep shared lists. I’ve got an iPhone, Susan has a Blackberry Curve — it should be easy to use on either of those devices. And of course, we’d want to be able to edit our lists via our desktop web browsers, as well. It should: support multiple lists support sharing … Continue reading

Knee Update – Day 5

I think I’m in the “it gets worse before it gets better” phase of recovery from my knee surgery. Maybe I just overdid things yesterday (visited our chiropractor and went out to a restaurant for dinner). Today I had a headache all day and my stomach has felt just a little off — not naseous, but not hungry. Of course, part of my trouble might be lack of sleep. I can’t move around like normal, … Continue reading