lifebsideben

It really annoys me that the WordPress plugin administration page lists the plugins in a seemingly random order. Upon closer inspection, it’s actually the order they are discovered on disk, which isn’t necessarily the most useful, especially if you have a lot installed (like I do) and are scanning the list for something to activate/deactivate/etc. On my server, the list is essentially sorted in case-sensitive alpha order. I just wanted this to be sorted case-insensitively sorted.

So, I made a quick tweak to the plugins.php page to do this. Here’s the changes, if you’d like to do the same:

Right around line 73 of wp-admin/plugins.php (immediately following the call to get_plugins()), I added:

[code lang="php"]function iksort($a,$b) { return strcasecmp($a,$b); }
uksort($plugins, ‘iksort’);
[/code]

Next step: sorting the list of configurable plugins in the submenu under ‘Options’!

I really wanted to try out this WordPress plugin called ImageHeadlines that created images of your title headlines from any TrueType font. It’s a neat idea, and you can make your headlines really look cool with dropshadows, etc. One not-so-minor problem: my PHP install doesn’t have a working FreeType installation. “Well, time to fix that,” I figured. Read more »

Tags: freetype, linux, php, plugins, wordpress

I was consistently getting 30-second load times for the WordPress admin ‘dashboard’, which is totally unacceptable. I decided to actually try and fix this, first by searching around a bit, and found for example this thread which is other users complaining as well, but mostly about WP1.5. After some experimentation (about 5 minutes at most), I discovered it was the “Planet WordPress” RSS feed pulling that was causing the big delay. Commenting that out gets me consistently sub-100ms for rendering (I’m assuming the other feeds it pulls are cached at that point.) Nice. Anyhow, if you want to do the same thing, there’s two ways to do it that are fairly simple with quick changes to wp-admin/index.php:

1. Comment out the line (#146 in mine) that reads $rss = @fetch_rss(’http://planet.wordpress.org/feed/’);or
2. (This works better, IMO, even thought the code looks like it should work fine with #1 above) Comment out the entire section for Planet WordPress updates. I.e., stick a “/*” at line 146, and a “*/” around line 165 (just after the closing curly brace).

Absolutely, positively, in 2.x of WP, I’d love to see the dashboard content be controllable by options in the admin section.

Tags: wordpress

The new WordPress 2 codebase is supposedly a completely new backend, but my upgrade last night went without a hitch. Impressive. I guess this is largely in part due to my installation being pretty much stock, but even so, nice. I do slightly wonder if I’m missing an index on some of the tables in the DB though, not necessarily from WP2 but even before, my “admin dashboard” has been painfully slow to load. A problem for another day, however.

I’m sort of digging the new TinyMCE wysiwyg editor integration, although I must admit I was also getting pretty used to the Xinha Here! functionality. Not sure I’m totally ready to switch yet, but I’m giving it a try. I love the dhtml sections in the ‘write’ screen, so I can close the ones I don’t usually use, and reorder them to reflect my priorities. Nice work! Also, the new preview mode, while not critical for me and my simplistic theme, is nice to have. I’m definitely liking the better media upload/browse widget, although it’s vaguely unintuitive at first, and I wish it browsed all of the images in my assets folder, not just the newly-uploaded one(s). Also, I’d really like to see you able to put in a URL to an image and have it suck that down… sure there’s potential for copyright infringement, but for stuff like the logo above, I’d rather not deep link to their image, and I doubt they mind me copying it! Maybe an enhancement coming in the future, though.

Overall… so far, so good! Nice work, guys!

Tags: wordpress, wysiwyg

So recently my team built this tool which essentially enables ‘experts’ to blog for Yahoo (unlike 360, there’s editorial workflow, fine-grained access control, etc.). The first folks to launch with it were Health. One of the most popular blogs for them is named “Real and Revealing” (or as I simply call it, “the sex blog”). Recently there was an entry about Female Orgasms. (Insert your own joke about there’s-no-such-thing-as-female-orgasms here.) Anyhow, the best part was one of the comments:

its very hard for me to have an orgasm. the sex would just feel sweet and it makes me want more and sometime dont want to stop. i have never expierence an oral some say it feel damn great to be honest i would like to explore that part of sex but not to return favour. sometime i really think my boyfriend realy suck at making love and he is not very romantic.
Posted by whilybo_2 on Tue, Jun 28, 2005, 10:30 am PDT

Nothing like complaining about your sex life, your boyfriend, and highlighting your lack of willingness to reciprocate all at once… what are you, Republican?

Tony Tam posted about Loving Y!. Tony works on the News team, and has been impressed with Yahoo since 1997. I was even more impressed with Y! after interviewing here, because I realized just how few engineers were behind some of the properties, like News. I was amazed. Now that I’ve been at Y for just over a year, I still think it’s a great place to work, but I definitely realize it’s not all type-A strivers cranking useful apps day in, day out.

I’m not a complete subscriber to the “controlled chaos” of Yahoo lore, but I wouldn’t mind if everyone did worry a little more about their reputation as an engineer (notice I didn’t say “coder” or “hacker”), as Tony mentions happened in the old days. There’s the whole gamut from pretty poor, to amazing here, which is doubtless going to be the case when there’s just SO MANY technical folks. I just find myself wishing everyone felt the pain of struggling a little more. I have a young kid, and so true, I don’t want to work 80 hours/week, but I want to work a smart, effective week. I want to really feel I’m producing at least 2X my salary in incremental revenue to Yahoo from when I started. I want to know everyone else shares that desire, too. Funnily enough, it might be just a per-individual trait. Some folks who have been here a long time and certainly don’t need the money, still burn with a passion to make things great, and achieve beyond what is expected. Others think it’s just a job and act accordingly.

I’m going to make it part of my personal challenge to inspire my (new) team to raise the bar… my biggest concern right now though is that there isn’t enough of my team to do anything but deal with the fires burning…

Tags: engineering, Yahoo

GreaseMonkey rocks. But the blog for it is Blogger-ified, and doesn’t seem to have a RSS feed. Huh? You no have RSS feed, you no get my traffic. I’d like to stay up to date on the developments, but bookmarking and revisiting is so 1997. Am I missing something? Is there an elusive RSS feed hidden in the page? Feh.

I’m trying to figure out where to post entries when I do happen to do so, which is a pretty rare event anyhow. Here, or at 360°? WordPress pretty much kicks 360’s ass at the moment when it comes to editing tools, so I suppose I’ll keep posting the majority here. But, 360 is all Yahoorific, and more at my fingertips while working. I guess I shouldn’t blog from work much anyhow

Well, in the meantime, just a few interesting links… Mac serial number decoder–find out when your Mac was made.
As a guy at work would say, this is totally ringing the bell on the nerdometer. Some guy made Mac OS X Engineer Trading Cards. Yeah… but I have to admit his Ajax-style commenting system rocks. Pretty sweet effect, if a tad useless. Well, I like the submit-without-refresh bit, but the live preview bit is not too useful IMO.
One more: dissecting WordPress themes, seems handy.

Tags: apple, blogging, DHTML, wordpress, Yahoo

Well, I really tried to get to the ArtFutura show at CCCB on time today, so I could see the panel discussion on weblogging. I ended up missing almost all of it (thanks Transports Metro Barcelona! Thanks RENFE! I appreciate all your confusing-ass signage and refusal to speak in Spanish, only Catalan!) Anyhow, mostly my fault. Instead of walking 1 mile downhill to the FGC train station and taking a 25 minute ride downtown, it was a 30 minute bus ride, walking uphill 1/2 mile, and then waiting for a big ol’ train, long ride into Barcelona, and then a metro 2 stops to downtown.

SO I finally arrive, and the Q&A session is underway. Anil from TypePad/SixApart is there, as is Meg from Blogger, and a Spanish guy, and someone from BoingBoing. From best I could tell, this is definitely not the author of the stuff I enjoy reading on BoingBoing… but she seemed competent for the few minutes of moderation I saw. Meg was given to rambling, and tried to make some point about linking to sites in different languages that was vaguely incoherent. Anil was well spoken as always (disclaimer: he’s a personal friend so I’m likely biased), but the whole panel looked like they could use a good night’s sleep (and I understand this is the case.) I won’t judge the whole thing on the 10-15 minutes I saw, and much of the audience seemed pretty into it, so I’m guessing the overall S/N ratio was high. Next time I’ll learn to navigate the bus system better, and actually see the whole talk, or something.

Watched the presentation from some guys from the UK who did Bjork’s last video, pretty nifty CG animation. Three young guys, it was depressing a bit. But they seemed geniunely creative, so props to them.

Finished off the night with a good Pakistani meal with Ubaldo and Lisette, yum. That makes the mistaken commute hell almost worth it

Tags: blogging, Spain

Up front: I apologize for the meta entry.

I spent a bunch of my employer’s time reading blogs today. Which is really depressing, because a lot of people either have way more fucking time than I do, are way smarter than me, or both. I won’t start linking it off here, but wow, a lot of intelligent stuff swirling around to be read. Not all of it mind-blowing, but overall, consistently, intelligent. And links aplenty. These folks surf a lot more than I do to find this stuff, or get paid to blog, or ??? One guy wrote that blogging has essentially rekindled his faith in the internet as a medium. I wouldn’t go that far, but it has its compelling aspects. I’m looking forward to seeing Anil (from Six Apart) in 10 days or so when he comes to Barcelona–he always has a thoughtful take on things, and is definitely one of the blogerati (second apology of the post: for writing ‘blogerati’.)

Even people I regard as semi-idiots have a good rant on occasion. Urgh. Maybe it’s just me, today, being in the morass of the disaster which is my workplace situation. I guess this diversionary lack of productivity makes up for (one of?) those late nights fixing stuff that I suppose, as a contractor, I could have billed for but didn’t. Final apology: the self-pity contained herein. I’ll go ingest some sugar or something.

Tags: blogging, work