I’ve released a new plugin, Image Shadow, which creates soft, realistic drop-shadows (frames too) for the jpeg images in your posts.
Thanks to David at PhotoLinkLove for the inspiration. You can see the plugin in action with the beautiful photographs on his blog.
5 comments June 28th, 2008
I’ve just posted new releases (v. 2.5.0.10) of the various post plugins. There are some bug fixes and several developments to Similar Posts including an optional new algorithm for choosing key terms to match and the ability to override automatic matching by making manual links between posts. I’ve also taken account of the new post-versioning system in WordPress 2.6.
Add comment June 28th, 2008
I’m realising how differently plugin development goes when my plugins are hosted with WordPress Extend. Having the SVN repository has really simplified some things and made maintenance a lot less time consuming but I’m finding a big downside. My plugins seem to be perpetually in beta! I guess before I could upload a new feature or a bug fix and, if there was a problem with it, I could sort it out before more than a handful of users had been inconvenienced. Now, however, every new version gets wide distribution and every error has a wide public.
Yesterday, for example, I was puzzling over one person’s problem installing Similar Posts. It seemed the plugin activation code wasn’t working. I couldn’t see why until I noticed he was using WordPress 2.0. I installed the same version locally and quickly discovered the problem was with the function ‘plugin_basename’. Apparently it didn’t work correctly on Windows servers until WordPress 2.2. So I thought ‘Easy! I’ll create my own version that does work’.
1 comment June 4th, 2008
Why does this release of Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts and Recent Comments get a clean new number instead of being called a beta? I guess it’s arbitrary! I can’t stop tinkering so in a sense the plugins are perpetually in beta but on the other hand bug reports are drying up (apart from the ones I keep introducing!).
I want to concentrate some more on Similar Posts for a while and try out some ideas that have emerged from reading on the subject. It is a challenge to find good matching algorithms that can be made speedy enough in PHP and not too demanding in memory usage. A few months ago I had a great system running but had to drop it when I moved from my local development server to my live hosted server which immediately froze from lack of memory.
3 comments May 16th, 2008
Similar Posts v.2.5b28 has just been posted.
Working on Similar Posts I have learned more than I care to know about the vagaries of MySQL, PHP, and Unicode. One particular issue that has so far resisted my attempts has been the satisfactory handling of content in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese (CJK).
Similar Posts uses the full-text indexes provided by MySQL to compare one post with another and the MySQL index is word-based. The CJK languages (I am told) are not based on discrete words — at least not words delimited by ‘white space’ — so they pose a big problem to full-text indexing.
2 comments May 11th, 2008
Since bug reports for the post plugins have dwindled to a slow drip I thought I ought to make some substantial changes in the latest version (2.5b25) and get the flow going again…
In previous versions the {image} tag did its resizing just by changing the <img> tag’s width and height attributes. Now, in addition, it serves properly resized thumbnails.
Add comment May 7th, 2008
The latest beta (2.5b22) attempts to address some of the issues users have been running into when upgrading. It fixes various conflicts with various configurations and tries to be give the upgrader as little work as possible. I will be very interested to hear whether the attempt has worked! If you run into problems (new or ones or old) please use the bug report screen under settings | similar posts to let me know.
One issue that I have addressed concerned indexing the blog. In an attempt to simplify matters I have made the initial indexing on first activation automatic and I have brought the index management under the settings subpages as some users found the separate Manage page complicated things.
Add comment April 19th, 2008
While rebuilding the posts plugins for WordPress 2.5 I became frustrated by the excessive length of their settings pages and more than a little envious of other plugins which managed to split their settings into subpages accessible from a submenu.
I pored through more opaque code than is comfortable and eventually decided I should try and build an easy, reusable solution. Here’s the end result (download code): (more…)
Add comment March 27th, 2008
As I’ve said I’ve been wrestling with the plugin directory and, as I suspected, the trouble is down to my lack of smarts. Two things to be aware of if you are wanting to host your plugins at the official site:
2 comments March 25th, 2008
I haven’t got a response from the official WordPress plugin directory to work out why the proper instructions are not displaying and meanwhile I am getting a lot of folks wondering what on earth is going on and why the post plugins are no longer working.
Here are some emergency directions for the interim…
First follow these links to download the latest versions of Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, or Recent Comments. You will also need a new copy of the Post Plugin Library which is now configured as a plugin.
Load stuff up to the plugins directory (you will notice that some of the folder names have been changed to accommodate the requirements of the WordPress folks) and activate as normal. The library should be automatically activated when any of the other plugins is activated.
Hopefully after all this hullabaloo future updating will happen smoothly and automatically (wishful thinking!).
Please get in touch if you are still having problems. The report-a-bug option under the settings menu is a helpful way of doing so … or just leave a comment.
Add comment March 24th, 2008
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