Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Blog Archives

SimpleBits switches to WordPress

Oct232009

Dan Cedarholm, web design guru extraordinaire, has switched his SimpleBits blog to WordPress. Well, after 6+ years on an ancient and highly customized install of Movable Type 3.15, and 4+ years on various homegrown CMS solutions, I’ve finally upgraded the guts of this site. I chose WordPress. Sure, there are several other excellent options out there to power the blogs of 2010 and beyond, but the familarity of WP, its plugins, pricetag and other factors … Continue reading →

WordPress 2.9 Media Embedding

Oct202009

As promised in my previous post on WordPress 2.9 features, this post will be a demonstration of the super easy media embeds coming in WordPress 2.9. What I find particularly interesting and useful about the new embedding feature, and oEmbed in particular, is that it is truly multimedia. It’s not just about embedding videos. You can embed images, audio, slideshows, or even HTML. Anything that could possibly be included in a web page can be … Continue reading →

WordPress 2.9 Features

Oct162009

This site is now running on WordPress 2.9-rare (which is our “pre-alpha” designation, for those of you who don’t know). WP 2.9 is in “feature freeze”, which means no new features will be considered for this version, and the developers will concentrate on finishing up the existing new features and any outstanding bugs. So far, it appears that all of my plugins are working just fine. The main new features I’ve actually seen so far … Continue reading →

WordCamp Birmingham 2009 Recap

Oct122009

This post is about two weeks late, but I still wanted to share my notes about WordCamp Birmingham 2009. Short version — it was awesome! As mentioned previously, I gave a presentation on Jumping into WordPress Plugin Development. When I arrived in Birmingham on Friday night, I still only had a little over half of my presentation notes done, and the rest was still just an outline. I stayed up all night finishing my notes … Continue reading →

Jumping into WordPress Plugin Development presentation

Sep262009

Despite an extreme lack of sleep, I managed to make it through my WordCamp Birmingham presentation this morning on Jumping into WordPress Plugin Programming. I didn’t feel as prepared as I wanted to be, but several people gave me some kind comments, so I guess it must have gone okay. Here is the slideshow I used, which I’ve uploaded to SlideShare (where you can also find my presentation from last year). Obviously, with the slideshow, … Continue reading →

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 →