Programming | WP Plugins
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.
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May 16th, 2008
Homilies | Loyola Hall
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.
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May 12th, 2008
Programming | WP Plugins
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.
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May 11th, 2008
Programming | WP Plugins
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.
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May 7th, 2008
Thoughts
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…
April 30th, 2008
Thoughts
Wooo hoooo!
April 29th, 2008
Programming | WP Plugins
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.
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April 19th, 2008
Thoughts
I’ve just published version 2.5b15 of the post plugins: Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments. Thank you to all who have found bugs and especially for those who have tested and re-tested when I couldn’t reproduce the bug myself.
There have been particular problems with the installation of Similar Posts on some systems and with the behaviour of Random Posts as a widget (seems to be a language issue). If anyone has difficulties with these or any other bugs please contact me. The best way is via the Bug Report screen in the plugins’ options/settings pages but a comment or email will do if you remember to give me enough information about your setup to help me debug.
April 8th, 2008
Programming | WP Plugins
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…)
March 27th, 2008
Programming | WP Plugins
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:
- When they say that you should name your tags/releases using only numbers and periods they mean it. I was using 2.5 bxx not thinking a space would cause an issue but of course it did when the automatic updater kept giving up on the zip files it downloaded. From now on, 2.5bxx until I can drop the beta designation.
- That stray space thing managed to keep hidden for a few days because I couldn’t even get that far. I’ve been grumbling that my installation instructions were not showing correctly and trying, in vain, to get help… well, a little while ago as I was poring over the readme.txt for the umpteenth time I was struck by lightning (OK I’m exaggerating) and thought to check the encoding of the file. I don’t know how but the readme.txt files I’d uploaded were encoded as utf-8. The Readme Validator hadn’t caught the problem but it was enough to make the directory ignore the files.
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March 25th, 2008
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All Things Seen and Unseen?
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...
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