My work
Improving Coding4Fun’s AboutPrompt
Feb 4th
While creating the Windows Phone7 version of my Master Thesis project, I needed to show some custom dialogs. Since Coding4Fun has some very nice dialogs, I explored the way that they might be customized to fit my needs. I needed a quick solution to a pressing problem.
I got in touch with this controls through WinPhoneGeek’s article Coding4Fun Toolkit for WP7 Overview and Getting Started, where he presented from the eagle’s eye the controls in the package. I was interested more in AboutPrompt control, but unfortunately he didn’t had it presented in the detail. More >
Adding new Social icons to the Mystique theme
Jan 8th
I use my blog to record and share my knowledge, but also to present to possible employers my skills. I use it like a marketing tool for my persona. For this, I need to make available not only the RSS and Twitter account, but also resume profiles like Xing, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Since I am using WordPress and I know a little bit of PHP and MySQL I wanted to customize my current theme.But some time ago I’ve read that they don’t encourage you to customize directly the chosen theme, but instead create your own child theme, with the desired customizations. This way, when the theme will be updated, you won’t loose neither time nor brains trying to redo all the modifications.
7 easy steps to use Webmatrix and WordPress local development
Jan 6th
Almost all good developers that I know have some kind of repository of their code. Mine is my blog, this blog. Stay with me and you’ll find out how to easily be able to create your local version of WordPress, customize and test your plugins.
For´this you’ll need to follow the next steps:
- Go to Webmatrix official website and download the Web Platform Installer which will install for you not only Webmatrix itself, but also a lot of useful tools like an integrated webserver, Internet Information Services Express, PHP interpretor and its connectors just to name a few. But you can also use it to add new features like ASP .Net MVC3! More >
How to add Syntax Highlight to WordPress
Jul 2nd
I wrote quite a while ago about How to implement Syntax Highlight in your WordPress blog. It used an forward, yet permanent approach: modify you’re theme’s header.php. But is it enough?
Lately, I wanted to update my blog’s theme to the newest version. But hey! I had a lot of modifications such the one above that kept me from doing a smooth update: BNR Slider, custom images for RSS and Twitter, hints, Syntax Highlight and so on.
The newest solution that I come up with is using a child theme, feature provided by WordPress engine. Basically, you have a theme applied to you blog that you like. Instead of modifying it, you create a new folder in theme’s directory with a special name who’ll be applied OVER your base theme, customizing only the aspects you need. Assuming that your theme’s name is MyFavoriteTheme, you’ll have to create the child theme as MyFavoriteTheme-child.
In order to use your new theme, you’ll have to create in the MyFavoriteTheme-child folder two files:
- styles.css – required – who’ll mark your folder as a child theme
- functions.php – optional – for our example is required, as we’ll write code inside of it
Add Silverlight to WordPress
Jun 4th
As I presented earlier, you can easily create a Silverlight video player and you can see it working pretty nice. Not to mention that it can play a lot of formats and it is only 344 kb in size! Now let’s see how this is possible and how can one do it on his website.
From the start, Silverlight was meant to be as easiest as possible to develop and deploy. Also, the cross browser (running on all major browsers) and cross platform (running on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows) was a requirement. But more than this, not to depend on the server side on .Net framework was also important. So you can deploy and run (only for running you’ll need the Silverlight Runtime installed) your app no matter the OS (Operating System).
This is why we discuss today on adding Silverlight to WordPress and not on How to deploy Silverlight on Linux. From the server’s OS point of view, Silverlight is just another file so you don’t need any plugin nor installs on the server side. It is on the client side where it is downloaded, setup with parameters and processed and here you need to install the Silverlight runtime – a mere of 4 Mb. If you’ve developed prior Adobe Flash application, you’ll feel very natural on the process. So let’s begin our ride to add your Silverlight application to WordPress.
Step 1.
Develop your Silverlight application. You should have a .xap file built in order to go further.
Silverlight VideoPlayer for RailsCasts
Jun 1st
I am and will be a Microsoft Developer. While working for convenience with other tools, I love strong type languages. I don’t want to ship products because I saved once and hit “s” one more time, so my product will be shipped with that small, human and yet unpardonable error in code.
How many times did you loose your time and effort with PHP in order to find a small mistake like this?
In my pursue on Microsoft tools path I started enjoying the Silverlight technology. Who might not know, Silverlight is a competitor to Flash. By now, on its 4th version, is way above Adobe Flash in almost all areas (I actually worked with Flex and Flash recently, so I really know what I’m talking about):
- Easy to develop : the C# language is a world class, easy to write in, with good compiler, a lot of resources and a VERY good IDE (try to write code and animations in same time in that Flash IDE and you’ll see what I mean)
- Supports Full HD (there are examples on the net with 2 or 3 full HD movies playing), while Flash just tries to get HD with lots of CPU used.
- The model of development is the same for in Browser and Out of Browser – you don’t need to change the tool from Flash to Flex in order to have same product for Desktop and Web.
Railscasts Silverlight video player
May 31st
This is my second shot to create a better player for Railcasts. As you can see, it goes better and better. Who knows what might be next?
- How and why I choose the Silverlight platform
- How to integrate your Silverlight content with your WordPress blog (and presumable all blog systems who allow you to add JavaScript)
Create a simple HTML .MOV player
May 26th
As a Ruby developer, I work quite a lot with their “special” plugins called gems. The nice fact about the gems is that they bring lots of functionality. By example, there’s a gem for paginating a collection who takes just few parameters and not only that finds out how many objects the collection has, but also how to split them, generating the corresponding links and serving to the original container (that used to show the entire collection) only the collection part that is representative in the context of current page and items per page.
Before someone new to a specific gem starts thinking to implement it, usually searches on the net for examples. The most important gems are described and exemplified in Railscasts.com. The content is excelent, the quality is good, sound is nice but the format chosen for movies is Apple’s .MOV proprietary format. There are few plugins to install for playing the files with MediaPlayer, but frankly I wanted a quicker solution than go on some obscure websites and getting from there a creepy .exe installer.
So I’ve created a simple .mov player that will replace the 33 MB of useless QuickTime Player (if you’re a Mac user, you have already this installed so you’ll not need my hack).
So let’s see some code!
First, I decided to use the Object method in order to play mov files. Apple provides a .cab file, who is able to play this files in browser. More documentation on its parameters you can find in their Embedding tutorial.
Don’t forget to add a link to JQuery library!
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
The html code is shown below and it is pretty straight forward:
<body>
<div class="media">
<div class="navigationTabs">
<input type="text" id="txtURL" style="width:75%"/>
<input type="button" id="btnPlayMov" value="Play"/>
<input type="button" id="btnClearMov" value="Clear"/>
</div>
<div id="divPlayer">
http://media.railscasts.com/videos/188_declarative_authorization.mov
</div>
</div>
</body>
The JavaScript is a little bit trickier as it involves JQuery. For a newbie, it is pretty hard to debug, but after a while you’ll just feel it:
$(function() {
// bind an onClick event for this second Flash container
$("#btnPlayMov").click(function() {
var _height = "306px";
var _width = "400px";
var _movie = $('#txtURL').val();
var _html = '';
$("#divPlayer").html(_html);
});
$("#btnClearMov").click(function() {
$("#divPlayer").html("http://media.railscasts.com/videos/188_declarative_authorization.mov");
})
})
Not to mention that it works in all major browsers (IE 8, FireFox 3.6 and Chrome) !
How to add ui-icons to JQuery tabs
May 25th
While working in UniBonn, I have a lot of contact with Ruby on Rails and JQuery; I actually started loving its interactivity and stability. But lately I encountered a small situation with the tabs object that they offer.
This is their default view, with Redmond theme applied. Nice and clean, you might say. But what’s missing? These tabs don’t support images. So you’ll not be able to show an image to specify, let’s say, that this tab has some updated information or a warning that something important is inside that tab.
I wanted to have some kind of control on specifying how the tab should look when I wanted my users to understand that something important is inside and requires their immediate attention.
As I searched through the website, I found the mentions of how to change the tab looks into an “error” style, so that it will attract attention no matter how tired the users are. In the Theming area of JQuery UI website, I found the help for Layout Helpers. Basically, you can specify additional classes who can override the theming of an element. Under Interaction cues, you’ll find all you need to set your elements style to highlighting, error, disable etc.
