Chillez.com » Gilles

Fully operational again

Gilles — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:29:16 +0000

Finally the problems with my site are solved! My hosting provider discovered that the problem was caused by their firewall settings. Fortunately they were able – and willing – to make the necessary configuration changes. It was an awkward situation that my own plugin was no longer working on my own website. I’m glad it is all resolved now.

However, the event painfully pointed out that I should invest some time to investigate how I can rewrite the plugin to use the API instead of the RSS feed. Maybe in the near future…

Small bug in Mobypicture plugin v1.2.1

Gilles — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:49:42 +0000

Today I received a note via Twitter about little bug in the Mobypicture plugin. It appears that the option ‘Use linked images’ is only working when the option ‘Use cropped image’ is selected as well. I hope to be able to fix this soon. Thanks for letting me know Coen.

Please do not hesitate to report bugs or submit your feature requests either via a comment or Twitter (@Chillez73).

Mobypicture v1.2.1 uploaded

Gilles — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 23:22:37 +0000

I just uploaded a new version of the Mobypicture plugin to the WordPress Plugin Directory. Version 1.2.1 now allows the usage of an optional PHP string that only retrieves the ‘raw’ images from Mobypicture.com and let the image formatting being set by your theme stylesheet style.css

Note that I decided to change the image class name in the final version 1.2.1 so those of you who installed v1.2.1 beta and upgrade to 1.2.1 will have to make a small change to their style.css

v1.2.1 beta used class ‘img.mobypic’ while v1.2.1 uses class ‘img.mobypicture_raw’. This is more logical as now the PHP string and image class have the same name. (BTW this also counts for the images displayed by the widget and non-raw code, these images have a class=”mobypicture”.) See also plugin installation notes.

Mobypicture plugin v1.2.1 beta

Gilles — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:49:19 +0000

One of the comments received on the Mobypicture plugin is that it ignores the image style settings included the WP theme style.css that is being used. I have extended the plugin with an additional function that only retrieves the images from Mobypicture.com and does not include any formatting. You will have to include img.mobypic with the desired settings in your style.css

Installation

1. As always download the plugin and put contents in your wp-content/plugins folder and activate the plugin.

2. Open the theme style.css and include the class img.mobypic in the image handling section (if you have one ). I used these settings for my test:

img.mobypic img.mobypicture_raw{
padding: 2px;
margin: 0 2px 3px 0;
border: 1px solid #2772B3;
width: 50px;
height: 50px;
}

3. Next, open the file sidebar.php in your favorite editor and include the following code at the desired location. Don’t forget to change the username. Of course you can change the other settings to your liking as well:

Mobypicture_raw Test

That’s it!
Download version 1.2.1 beta here. Public release v1.2.1 now available here.

Logo doodle

Gilles — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:29:35 +0000

This site is lacking a decent logo but I have not yet found enough inspiration for a logo. A few minutes toying around resulted in this doodle. Nah, guess this will not be the one

Mobypicture v1.2 uploaded

Gilles — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:22:19 +0000

I just uploaded a new version of the Mobypicture plugin to the WordPress Plugin Directory. Major enhancements in v1.2 are:

Added group support
Added public timeline support
Added display of Mobypicture image title on mouseover
Added optional use of square images (cropped copy from Mobypicture.com)

Note: v1.2 is not compatible with v1.2 beta code, please replace with new code (see plugin installation notes)

Rewriting the plugin including support for multiple widget instances appeared to be more difficult than anticipated. Therefore I decided to release this version prior version 2.0

Next step will be figuring out to use the API instead of the RSS feed and, of course, add support for multiple widget instances.

Get version 1.2 here
Check plugin history here

Mobypicture plugin v2

Gilles — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:30:22 +0000

Working on a major update of my Mobypicture WP plugin. The previous versions were based on the code of the My Twitpics plugin but for this version I am coding it from scratch. Things that will be new in v2.0 compared to version 1.1:

Mobypicture image title will be shown on mouse over (done);
Support for multiple instances of the widget (done);
Support for user and group media streams (work in progress)

The source of the data will still be derived from the Mobypicture RSS feed. Once I get this version working I will start looking into a way to use the API instead of RSS to get the source data.

Fixed broken RSS feed

Gilles — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:00:38 +0000

After checking the status of chillez.com on the ismyblogworking.com website it reported blog ‘broken’. Shoot! It appeared that my RSS feed returned an error. First hit in Yahoo (yeah not Google – that’s whole different story) prompted a link to a WordPress Support topic hinting to the solution: blank lines before or after .

So I installed the WordPress plugin ‘Fix RSS Feed’ and let it do it’s thing. It returned a huge list of files containing blanks at the top or bottom of the file and fixed them all. This was kind of scary but apparently it did not break anything. It does backup all the files it is going to change as a .bak file, I have to clean this mess once I am convinced the backups are no longer required.

Damn, still errors, but now referring to a XML error. This time I noticed the output of ismyblogworking.com suggested to have my RSS feed validated by FEED Validator. Yes! Validation pinpointed the error; the little bugger appeared to be a blank in the theme functions.php. The blank was not found by the Fix RSS Feed plugin because it was in the middle of the file, right above the code I inserted to show a menu-link. Mystery solved!

Mobypicture plugin v1.2beta

Gilles — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 22:58:06 +0000

Today I received the request from Mathys whether I could include support for Mobypicture groups in the plugin. I have been toying around in the code and got a working version. I am not yet satisfied about the way I achieved this but hey it is a start. Check it out here.

To-do wishlist – Update

Gilles — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:29:26 +0000

As previous visitors might have noticed I switched from the 2-column dark theme to a 3-column light theme. The dark theme is still a beautiful theme but it had a kind of ‘warez-look’. This light Child Theme Byty is based on the Thematic framework. I will use this one to further develop my site.

Regarding my to-do list, a few items are resolved now that I have changed the WordPress theme:

Shorten the height of the header. Don’t know why a lot of themes (and website) use such a large header. I agree you need some space to show off your logo and flashy site/brand name but it doesn’t mean you have to spoil valuable pixels. E.g looking at a site on the smallest Macbook or any netbook with a browser which has the adress toolbar and tab-browsing enabled, only has so many pixels available for showing content…
Add second sidebar and maybe even make the width dynamic instead of fixed.
Replace the ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ page indicators with real page number (already experimented with 2 plugins but they require some tweaks to fit my theme.
LifeStream plugin works nicely with auto-grouping of events but somehow it does not display the events in a group in chronological order. Weird but true. Have to look into that and try to fix it. Maybe even going to try to have the event timestamp displayed when showing details.
Add search. The build in WP search widget looks ugly in my theme.
Add About page and/or show ‘About-info’ on homepage. I tried the WP build in free-text widget but didn’t like the outcome.
And looking at a preview of this list; ad color to the bullets or something else to juice up a list.
…

To be continued.