Austin Matzko's Blog » filosofo

New Plugin: WordPress Appearance Date

filosofo — Thu, 20 May 2010 02:55:57 +0000

I created this plugin because I needed a way to show posts earlier than their scheduled publish date. The client wanted posts to be scheduled for March, with everything that entails: March dates, appearing the March archives, etc., except appearing a week earlier.

WP Appearance Date lets you set arbitrary dates for your posts to appear, whether early or late.

New Plugin: WP Delayed Email

filosofo — Fri, 14 May 2010 16:03:30 +0000

I needed a way to send an email in the future, so I came up with WP Delayed Email. Activate the plugin, and you can call wp_delayed_mail() just like you would wp_mail(), except that you pass a timestamp argument for the time you want the email to be sent.

Middle Tennessee Flooding

filosofo — Sun, 02 May 2010 00:39:28 +0000

We’ve had a crazy amount of rain today. Here are a few pictures from the interstate traffic camera just a few miles from our house.

We live on a hill, and still there’s some water coming up through cracks in the basement floor and flowing through the garage.

New WordPress Plugin: Custom Image Sizes

filosofo — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:29:22 +0000

I make a lot of WordPress themes, and frequently clients want to associate a particular size of image with a post. You can do this easily with WordPress by using add_image_size() to define an image and then by calling wp_get_attachment_image() later to print the markup for that image.

So for example, if I have an attachment image of ID number 123, I might do something like the following:


add_image_size( 'my-custom-size', 220, 180, true );
...
echo wp_get_attachment_image( 123, 'my-custom-size' );

Here, add_image_size() defines the custom thumbnail (in this example the arguments tell add_image_size() to make it 220 pixels wide, 180 high, and cropped), and

echo wp_get_attachment_image()

prints the markup of the image itself, element and everything.

The Problem

This works great; WordPress even creates thumbnails in this size from now on. The problem is that it doesn’t apply to pre-existing thumbnails. And if people change their minds about what sizes they want their thumbnails to be (clients sometimes change their minds) you’re stuck with existing thumbnails of the wrong size.

In addition, if you call wp_get_attachment_image( 123, 'my-custom-size' ); and that size doesn’t exist, WordPress just scales down the larger-sized original image, which might cause some performance issues.

Solution: Custom Image Sizes

My solution is the Custom Image Sizes plugin. You activate it, and if you call wp_get_attachment_image() and related functions for an attachment that doesn’t have that size, WordPress will create it on demand.

As a bonus, if you pass a width and height of the desired image to wp_get_attachment_image() (and related functions), you can create any size image. So for example I could create a thumbnail 50 pixels wide by 40 high of attachment 123 with the following code, where '50x40' is '[width]x[height]':



echo wp_get_attachment_image( 123, '50x40' );

Download
You can download the Custom Image Sizes plugin here.



Welcome, Benjamin!
filosofo — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:19:02 +0000
My second son, Benjamin Eliot, was born today at 3:19 CDT, weighing 8lbs. 15oz. and 21 inches long.  Like his older sister he was born VBAC, and like his older brother he has a full head of hair. 











Counterexample
filosofo — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:29:05 +0000
From Scientific American:
Researchers insist they can tell someone’s politlcal affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Messy? You’re a lefty. A neatnik? Welcome to the Right.
According to a controversial new study, set to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, the bedrooms and offices of liberals, who are generally thought of as open, tend to be colorful and awash in books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia.
Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials in their personal spaces, according to the study. Their bedrooms and offices are well-lighted and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flagsâespecially American ones.
[...]
“It’s pleasurable for liberals to think more. They gravitate toward art, to things that are not as concrete,” says Carney. “Conservatives have a need for order, for there not to be ambiguity. There you see that expressed by being more orderly, having more cleaning supplies, needing to have everything lined up and organized so that one feels one’s environment is predictable and therefore safe.”

So how do they explain this?




I Am an Official Regex Day Winner
filosofo — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 03:38:34 +0000
Ben Nadel declared June 1, 2008 the first National Regular Expression Day, and to celebrate he hosted a giveaway of regex-related prizes, including Jeffrey Friedl’s Mastering Regular Expressions.  As you can see, I won the book and got it in the mail yesterday. I use regular expressions all the time—in PHP, JavaScript, Perl, sed, grep, and vi—and they’re so essential to my work that I can’t wait to “master” them.  
I think I may have sunk to new lows of geekiness. 




Webmonkey.com Returns
filosofo — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:04:17 +0000
When I was first learning web development about ten years ago, I frequently consulted Webmonkey.com for tutorials about how to do all things “DHTML.”  I still remember how an article comparing frames to a cafeteria tray made it all click for me, for some reason. I also picked up some bad habits that I had to unlearn later, such as using table elements for page layout. But that’s no slam against Webmonkey: they were just explaining the common web practices of the day.
Webmonkey stopped producing new content in the early 2000s and was sold by Wired to Lycos, I think, but much of the old content remained, such as the special characters reference, which I consult occasionally.     Now the site has been re-purchased by Wired, which has decided to re-publish the tutorials on a wiki.  That’s probably the best approach if you can’t spare the staff to manage the old content, but the historian in me is bothered that Thau’s JavaScript tutorial is gone, replaced by something generic.  Why couldn’t Webmonkey have kept the old articles intact, perhaps with a notice suggesting that a piece might be outdated and a link to the new wiki?  That’s sort of what PPK does at Quirksmode; he separates articles into “active” and “archived.”  I’m sure we can live without knowing how to code for Netscape Navigator 4, but it’s good to remember where we’ve come from, to remember how and why things have changed since then.  
However, Webmonkey promises to start creating new content relevant to today’s web, and that will be good news for those starting into web development.



What Motivates Islamic Radicals
filosofo — Tue, 20 May 2008 10:58:04 +0000
A friend and I keep having different permutations of the same conversation, which revolves around this question: what is the essential explanation for Islamic terrorism?  My friend’s answer is that it’s primarily religious; in other words, that something intrinsic to Islam spurs on suicide bombers and the like.  I disagree for a number of reasons: the vast majority of Muslims do not support terrorism; suicide bombings are a modern phenomenon, etc.  I’ve been arguing that the moving cause is largely political and economic.
A new Gallup poll (HT: Tempus Fugit) suggests that we’re both wrong to a degree: Islamic radicals don’t cite religious motivations, but they’re not economically downtrodden, either. 



OpenID Servers: Allow Redundant Means of Access
filosofo — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:43:57 +0000
That’s the lesson I take from Kyle Neath’s critique of OpenID  (HT: Ma.tt),  from his first point, the one that I think has the most traction.  OpenID servers should allow users to associate their account with several OpenID providers, if they want, and/or an email address.