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.
15 comments Print Version 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 Print Version 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 Print Version 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.
7 comments Print Version May 16th, 2008
Edel McClean offers these reflections:
Readings: James 1:1-11, Psalm 118, Mark 8:11-13
The liturgical title for today is Monday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time. A quick look at ordinary in the dictionary tells us ‘unexceptional, plain, uninteresting’. It seems a little like what the Pharisees are accusing Jesus of in our gospel today. They seem to think he’s a little too ordinary and they come demanding a sign. Prove to us that you’re exceptional. Give us something remarkable. Do something out of the ordinary. And then we’ll believe you.
Of course, what the Pharisees were getting was anything but ordinary. They were getting a sign. They had Jesus. Standing slap bang in front of them. Not just any old preacher, but, if we follow Mark’s gospel, a man who had just healed a young child, made a deaf man hear, and fed four thousand people. And still the Pharisees say, we want more. They’re unable to see the sign right there in front of them.
5 comments Print Version May 12th, 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 Print Version 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 Print Version May 7th, 2008
It’s not as if you do anything to make it happen but all of a sudden here it is — 50!
So far the day is turning out a lot of fun…
4 comments Print Version April 30th, 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 Print Version April 19th, 2008
Rob Marsh, SJ is a Jesuit interested in theology, spirituality, computers and the web. Here you'll find homilies, reflections, essays on theology and spirituality, and the odd bit of code. more...