robot with a heart

wordpress development

April 16, 2009, 3:28 pm

work has been pretty slow for the last few weeks. i’ve spent most of my time at work reading blogs, catching up on tv shows and helping herman get some things running on doobybrain.

i think this would be my first time taking a dive into actual wordpress development. in the past i’ve only helped people style their blogs or do css tweaks and random javascripting… all stuff dealing with presentation, but nothing really with function. those of you who actually come to this site (instead of just seeing this in your reader) may have noticed i started using this plugin that looks like this:

sexybookmarks_screenshot

it’s a plugin called SexyBookmarks… i know… i didn’t name it. it’s not the first result in a google search. but i thought it to be a pretty well made plugin; designed rather nicely and cleanly and more or less functions like it’s supposed to. when herman had some issues w/ the plugin a few days ago i started looking into it and got in touch w/ the developer, josh jones to propose some fixes. he seems like a really nice guy and even gave me some credit for some of the patches i made that made it in:

sexybookmarks_credit

i’m still in contact w/ him hoping to get a few more changes in if they get accepted. doing wordpress dev on this plugin has kinda got my feet wet and i wanna work on some plugins of my own so maybe soon this site will have a section of my plugins.

i think the first plugin i work on will be to make a “via” plugin to give credits to artists/blogs herman’s been asking for this functionality for a while. maybe there’s a plugin for it already… i didn’t search. in any case, i figure it should be a pretty easy plugin to start on. after i think i’ll make my own facebook connect plugin because the ones i see out there don’t work out of the box that well and i think there must be an easier way!

wordpress users out there… any plugin you want me to try to create?

i’m looking for ideas. we’ll see how long this run goes or how long this slowness at work lasts.

low resolution screens

February 6, 2009, 4:07 pm

i’ve been using a laptop with a low resolution screen and it makes me nuts.

i don’t understand how people work or worked EVER with XGA (1024×768) or WXGA (1366×768) screens. how do you do it?

nerd post: languages in a dorm

October 17, 2008, 11:21 am

i was chatting with a friend today who’s not a programmer and at some point we started talking about work and she started asking about different programming languages that i know and how theyre different. i tried to explain the diff between PHP, Perl and Python which can ultimately all do the same thing. so to help understanding, i made them people in a dorm.

from the chat:

perl is great that there are like 67123718931289031 ways to do something but its also bad for the very same reason

python is a pretty neat language.its a very very structured language
like… if you dont indent your code in python, it will hate you

if python perl and php shared a townhouse, perl would make the mess. php would stay in his room and python would be the ocd-cleaning-crazy one.

and because she’s columbia, we all know townhouses have 6 people so she asked me to add three more, just for fun.

you’d have C, and he would be the older wiser guy who does things in old-fashioned ways. they work, but theyre slow. it’s like… watching someone use a mouse to click the “copy” and “paste” buttons instead of CTRL-C and CTRL-V. but everyone knows C has wisdom and experience so they learn from him.

then there’s Java
Java is the guy who tries to be cool
and he makes it for a little while
but in the end, no one thinks he’s that interesting anymore and he’s just normal.

last “language” i’ll add in is HTML
he’s the nice guy
gets along w/ everybody
even those that don’t treat him that well
but some people treat him well and mr HTML really shines
sometimes they don’t and he just seems mediocre
he’s easy to get along with

this was fun. i’m a nerd.