Software

Bits and pieces

New WordPress plugins appear every day or so it seems. Old ones are improving at a constant rate too. Once in a while I revisit plugin directories to see if anything worth installing or upgrading had appeared. Today I discovered a couple of new plugins that I decided to install.

Rate My Stuff is one of straight forward plugins that add a nice touch to the website. It allows to show those small stars when posting a rating of something. I thought since I have so many movie reviews, it would be a good idea to have the stars added to them. So I installed the plugin, resized the original images to smaller versions (15×15 pixels) and wrote a small perl script (wp-rate.pl; make sure that you have a fresh backup of the databases) to update all movie posts o’mine.
pluginsUsedPlugin does a very simple, but useful job. It tells everyone what plugins are installed and activated for the current WordPress installation. I have added the list of currently active plugins to the About page. The list is dynamic and thus always up to date. All plugins in the list are linked to the appropriate websites where they could be downloaded.

I’ve also found a couple of other plugins that I am planning to install, but they require some work on my behalf and so I left them for after I’ve slept.

Request for an application

I’ve got an idea for an application. If you have nothing to do or looking for an idea to practice your mad programming skills, feel free to use this one.

Flickr is an excellent source of images. Better even, all images are tagged and most are available in different sizes. It would be very nice to have a tool that could use Flickr images as desktop backgrounds (wallpapers). Ideally, I would just specify the tags that I am interested in, such as sports, nature, or landscape, and this tool would get the list of images from Flickr that are available in the resolution that I am using. Images could be random or sorted by some criteria, such as posted date or number of comments. If there would be a preview and an easy way to change to the next image (maybe even automatically based on time period) I’d be totally happy.

I don’t see myself programming this anytime soon as I don’t care much for desktop candy. But if one was available there is a chance that I would use it. I also know of a few people who would simply love something like this.

Progress with the Gallery2

I am satisfied with the process of my migration to Gallery2. Most of the things work already. Here is a brief round-up:

All images and albums are imported, sorted, and thumbnailed.
Few albums are tagged for easier searching.
Old style of URLs is configured and working. All old links should be fine now.
I have familiarized myself with Gallery2 internals a bit. Maybe even more than I intended to.

Continue reading Progress with the Gallery2

WordPress plugins revisited

Since I just upgraded my WordPress installation, I thought it would be a good time to check what’s new in the plugin area. WordPress has a lot of attention recenlty, and thus, all sorts of extensions are flourishing. Here are the plugins that I decided to try out:

AuthorHighlight. The number of comments on my site is slowly rising and I thought that it would be nice to highlight my own comments differnently. I still have to configure the style.
Archives by Year. A really small change that makes a difference. I think archives are easier to use this way. More structure is better.
DoFollow. All comments on this site come pre-moderated and there is no SPAM at all, so there is no good reason not to give linked sites some credit.
List Manager. This is one of the most useful plugins ever! I wonder how come that I never wrote it myself. It allows to manage all sorts of lists through administration interface, rather than edit posts directly. I have switched my wishlist, movies to see, and 200 things to do lists already. While switching, I’ve updated and corrected some.

I’ve also seen a number of plugins that I considered for installation or even tried, but decided to leave out for the time being. If you have nothing better to do, I suggest you check them out once in a while – things grow and expand much faster than I want to follow.

Bumped it up to 1.5.2

I’ve been very lazy with site changes these days. It’s been almost a month since WordPress 1.5.2 was released. I have updated the site only today. There shouldn’t be any visible changes as most of the improvements are under the hood. If you see any problems with the new version – let me know.