It seems, reading the news, that nuclear proliferation will be the end of the world. For a WordPress developer, on the other hand, poor plugin programming seems likely be the end of the world. I rarely take shots at other people online (it seems rather trollish to me), but the sheer horror of Fire Studio’s Wordpress Plugin Templates compel me to say something.
Continue reading ‘Poor Programming Proliferation’
Archive for the 'Ramblings' Category
With several major features now in µAudio 0.7, I wanted to preview what’s coming up.
1) Static JavaScript. Instead of using the *.js.php which I have been using, javascript templates are being parsed by a small JS templating engine and stored as static files. This should significantly cut down on the amount of time spent processing php. Each file is stored as filename-hashcode.js.
2) Bootstrapper. People have told me a) They don’t think it’s fair to count the size without jQuery (it probably isn’t) and b) They don’t want to load jQuery on every pageload. To that end, the default install will now include a tiny bootstrapper (hopefully under 200 Bytes) that doesn’t load the player until and unless someone actually wants to use them.
3) Single audio player. For legacy browsers, there will only be one player, the awesome Sound Manager 2 player. User interface will be provided via jQuery based controls. Using a single “invisible” player allows a consistent JavaScript interface for all the players, and, should help to
4) <audio> tag based player. This will probably be beta only in 0.7, but I want to move towards using the native browser implementation instead of flash. Using a javascript interface and sound manager means it should be a seamless user experience, and the only difference is whether the JavaScript is calling the sound manager js or the <audio> tag.
I’ll be at WordCamp in San Francisco this weekend, anyone who wants to bend my ear about a feature can do so. Twitter at jwriteclub to get together.
I am happy to announce the release of a new plugin today: µMint. Like my other µ plugins, it’s a small, lightweight plugin to (hopefully) do something useful. In this case, µMint allows you to painlessly integrate Shaun Inman’s Mint into Wordpress. Unlike the currently existent solution, µMint does not make use of iframes. Instead, µMint is designed to work with both the Exposé API, by Adam Livesley as well as the included API, µAPI for Mint. Furthermore, there is a development version of a connector whcih allows Wordpress to directly query Mint, when the two share a database.
µAPI does more than just get your stats, it displays them for you. You can have your choice of a sidebar widget, a dashboard widget, or both. And, in the µ plugin philosophy, stats are cached periodically to reduce the number of API calls required.
I think that µAPI neatly bridges the gap between Mint and Wordpress, and I hope you’ll give it a try.
µMint for Wordpress Dashboard
It is with great fanfare — and a comic book — that Google released their new Chrome browser public beta.
Although it has been generally well received, there is some controversy surrounding Chrome. Initial concerns hinged on the End User License Agreement — or EULA — specifically, terms it contains regarding the user’s intellectual property. In addition, there are serious questions about how much information Chrome collects and what, if any, anonomizations are made to the data before Google logs it. Continue reading ‘Google Chrome: Not Evil?’
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