More WordPress Goodies

I’ve been getting about a bit lately — no sarcastic comments please — so thought I’d share the results of my hard work. More WordPress stuff:

Have also got a spin-off of the shortcode tutorial in the works which will enable folks to write their own basic Formspring plugin (to display answered questions on your WP blog). Keep your eyes peeled…

Posted on: March 31, 2011 · Category: Geek, PHP, Work

End of an Era, a New Beginning

Tutorialtastic is closing today. Closing, gone. After 8 years of hardy service to you, the blogger, the developer, the web hobbyist.

Don’t cry, my sweets, for where one door closes another duly opens…

It has taken nearly THREE years to get to this point (albeit delayed due to pregnancy, sickness, babies, life, work, etc). Three years of “keep this? no”, “reword this? yes”, updating links, tweaking text, changing themes, poking PHP. Three years to bring together a mish mash — a collaboration — of two of the best geek-oriented websites in our circle of the blogosphere.

Tutorialtastic meets CodeGrrl. POW! GirlsWhoGeek is born.

Let me know what you think, folks :)

Posted on: March 3, 2011 · Category: Interwebs, Updates

NinjaLinks Feature Requests

I’m being nagged for a NinjaLinks update ;) If you currently use the script and have feature in mind, please add your requests here. Can’t guarantee a date for release (for obvious reasons) but will fit it in when I can.

Posted on: May 8, 2010 · Category: Geek, PHP

On Tumblelogs and Why I Love Habari

For at least 4-5 years I’ve been desperate to turn my blog into a sort of “tumblelog”; that is, a blog that consists of multiple content types that you can easily update with more than just full on text entries. The problem is, at first I lacked the know-how to achieve it — my early blog/CMS was far too primitive and would have been virtually impossible to easily update — and then I flicked back and forth with WordPress which would have required intensive hacking about of an already bloated system.

A few years ago Tumblr came along, providing the theoretical answer to all my prayers… except 3rd party services and I don’t get along. I don’t trust other people to look after my data. (This is why I don’t post anything meaningful to twitter, incidentally.)

Fast-forward to a few months ago, and I was chatting about life streams, tumblelogs, updating websites to the girls on IRC and turns out I wasn’t the only one with this goal in mind. Furthermore, as I’ve converted a few people to Habari lately, we were all singing from the same hymn sheet (what a daft phrase) in terms of CMS, making it easier to come up with a solution that would work for us all.

As it happens, Habari has a content types plugin — created and maintained by the Habari Community, so I know it’s secure — which allows me to create custom content types on my blog to allow me to easily post photos, quotes etc with their own styling. Because of Habari’s fantastic, simple theming system it’s a piece of piss to make it do different things with different post types (no messing with complex PHP, it’s as easy as creating a .php file!) This is why I love Habari.

Posted on: April 26, 2010 · Category: Geek, PHP

Habari and Women in Web Design and Development

Ben just linked me to a noupe article about women in web design (and yes, after their previous fuck up with my details it pains me to link to them) which discusses some well known women on the web, why women are treated like shit in the industry, and some advice for young women.

It’s not a bad read, but the reason why I’m posting is not necessarily to comment on the article — I’ve discussed how I’ve been treated by others relating to IT in the past — but because it occurred to me whilst reading that the most supportive tech community I’ve been involved in since my initiation on the web is that surrounding Habari.

As such, I wanted to big up the Habari project. If you’re looking for dev stuff to get involved in, whether you’re male or female, you could do worse than taking a look at Habari. I have a series of half-finished posts and themes for Habari which had to be put on hold when I went into hospital; nonetheless, even without having contributed, I can always guarantee I can get support from the guys in the Google group or IRC channel.

Now if only they’d hurry up and bring out subpages…

Posted on: April 1, 2010 · Category: Geek, Interwebs