WordPress 3.0, some links, lets exclude people, and more!

June 22nd, 2010

Sooooo….what to talk about. Well, lets start with the WordPress 3.0. Its out, as you all know (unless you are living under a rock), and has a ton of great new features. One of which I can’t wait to see, is the new menu manager. I’d like to try everything really, but I’m scared as hell. I went to the WordPress forum and saw some really scary stuff. “Hey, why is my admin page all white?” or “Where did my blog go?” kind of thing. Most of the problems seem to come from plugin compatibility. That is where I’m nervous. I have some plugins that might not go well with 3.0, and I don’t want to lose them. If anyone has upgraded from 2.9.2, to 3, please take a look at my post about my plugins, and if you know of any that will not work, let me know. I would be most greatful.

Next up, some links. I don’t know why all of a sudden these are popping up now, but apparently people think that code snippet sites are the “bomb.” Why not use Evernote? Do you really have time to go to a site and just browse through snippets that people have come up with? I sure don’t. But if you are indeed one who does, here are two new ones: smipplr, and codesnipp.it. If you would be so kind and let me know if you find sites like these helpful, or if you use them? A small comment review on one would be helpful. I struggle to wrap my mind around the usefulness of these things. Its like they are trying to come up with a social network site for us devs/designers, but this is all they could come up with.

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Testing out jQuery Tools…pure awesome

June 17th, 2010

jQuery Tools 1.2I’ve seen this site before, jQuery Tools – The missing UI Library for the Web, and I got a tweet about it again this morning. I was sick of getting links to it, so I decided what the hell, lets try this thing out and see what it does. It does some cool ass stuff, THAT is what it does!

And to make it even better, it is extremely easy to get things up and running. I tried out the Tabs – UI Tool, and the Tooltip (which you will see on the second pane). I have created a demo just to show you how easy it really is. They have demos of all of their tools on their site, with really easy to follow instructions for each to get them going. Go to the link above to check out all that it has available. But just to show you how freakin’ simple it is, here is a demo I did with the Tabs tool…took me less than 5 minutes.

Click here for the demo.

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I’ll show you my WordPress plugins if you show me yours

June 16th, 2010

I thought sharing what plugins we all use in WordPress would make a good post. So as the title says, I’ll show you my plugins, if you show me yours.

Let’s start with the most important:

Akismet - If you are NOT using this plugin, you are…not…smart. That is the least insulting I can be with that. This thing has caught more spam than you can imagine. I mean a LOT. 488 spam comments to be exact. I’m talking viagra, porn, random crazy…you name it, it has caught it.

WP-Spam Free – Along the same lines as the above. Guess how many this one has caught? 511 as of this post. Insane right? I highly recommend these two more than you can know.

Login LockDown – This is a security plugin. Two things: if you login with admin as the username…you are again, an idiot. Create a new admin account with a different user name, then delete that one. Google it for more info. This plugin adds another step of security. It restricts the number of failed logins that can be attempted from a given IP range. Mine is set very low. I’m paranoid about this kind of thing, but I recommend it.

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Explaining my method of skinning the jQuery

June 15th, 2010

Well, if you haven’t been reading the comments on my last post. We’ve had a nice discussion, which had me misinterpreting what Joseph was saying, not once, but twice. He was NOT planning on writting a plugin, but had to come up with a way to get the delay to work so that it would go in sequence instead of all appearing at the same time. I’ll let him write a post on his blog if he wants, explaining what he did, since he can do a better job of that than I can. But it occurred to me that some developers new to jQuery, might not have understaood what I was doing. Therefore, I will explain it in this one.

Oh and a small rant, too, on some things I’ve been seeing going around the well known blogs…but we’ll save that till the end of the post.

First, onto what the hell I did. If you recall, and you should, since it was in my last post, I was showing that there was more than one way to accomplish a task in jQuery. Again, one of the many things I love about it. But I heavily favor its motto: “Write less, do more.” Here again is the code (if you need to see the html I was using, please refer to the post before this):

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More than one way to skin a jQuery

June 11th, 2010

Joseph McCullough, a frequent and welcomed commenter here, is doing a redesign of his website (which you can view here.). At the moment he has a construction page up that consists of one div, which contains an img, an h1, a p tag, and a link. Those three tags fade in one after another in sequential order. Curious, I checked his source code and looked at the jQuery he wrote to get it to happen. We obviously think differently but both of our approaches got the job done.

UPDATE: Joseph has created a plugin for a sequential fadin, that you can get here.

One of the reasons I love jQuery is the fact that there are many ways to do one thing. You can take ten people, tell them to make a certain thing happen, and you will most likely get ten different pieces of code.

Let me show you exactly what I mean here. So with the above example we have a wrapper div holding three elements.

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