Others
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 generate image_src for Facebook links in WordPress theme
Feb 18th
Sharing your article for free advertisement on Facebook is a fact. While using different Social Networks sharing tools I had a problem when sharing my articles on Facebook: sometimes the image that I intended to use to represent the article wouldn’t show in the list of the images who can be chosen. Why is that?
It bothered me some while I got the some free time to actually look into this, between exams, work and master research. After some wandering on the internet, I found here the correct directions. What I learnt: Always search for the API!
In order to make sure that the preview is always correctly populated, you should add the tags shown below to the <head> element in your HTML code. If you don’t tag your page, Facebook Share will grab the title of your page as specified in the <title> tag, and will create a summary description from the first text that appears in the body of your page. A list of thumbnails will all be selected from available images on your page.
You can control the exact title, description, and thumbnail that Facebook Share uses by adding the following meta tags to the <head> element in your page:
<meta name="title" content="title" /> <meta name="description" content="description " /> <link rel="image_src" href="thumbnail_image" / >
Add SyntaxHighlight to Windows Live Writer in Preview mode
Feb 7th
Windows Live Writer (shorter: WLW) is one of the most popular blog authoring tool that I also happen to like and use. And I say this because of its features – I especially enjoy the Preview tab. But what it really lacks is previewing the ENTIRE page – it will get only the html and some css. So no Syntax Highlighting of my code? Let me tell you how I solved this issue.
As a blog writer I searched for something that could allow me to write the articles offline and then upload them in WordPress. I also tried WordPress built-in editor, but the editing box is so small that I couldn’t use it too much.
The most important feature for me is that it retrieves the blog theme and has a preview function that provide you the same look on editor window. So you will be able to write a post with a preview. But when having a more complex theme, using JQuery or Prototype, you will discover that you don’t get any more the same look and feel as in the blog. This is partially ok for editing, but sometimes it is really bad – especially if you’re a programmer and add a lot of code in your page. On blogs there is a solution to show the code with syntax color, but in the Windows Live Writer I couldn’t find one suitable plug-in that does this.
Import CSV file and query it with LINQ
Feb 4th
Assume that you have an plain text, old Comma Separated Values file filled with your precious export from a legacy system. How can you process it easily now? The first answer that comes to mind is to parse it and load it into a datatable and later process it by using DataTable.Select() method. But this approach has some limitations – like splitting data into several tables and then join them.
One would imagine that parsing CSV files is a straightforward and boring task, given that it is quite a while since CSV is around. Some of them are correct – in the sense that many implementations merely use some splitting method like String.Split(). Some don’t even offer the specification of the values splitting character – so your file wouldn’t be parsed correctly if instead of , you have ; as separator – yet another thing to modify if you’re lucky enough to have the sources. Others will not handle properly field values with commas because the simple split method of the String class. But there are better implementations that take care about escaped quotes, trimming spaces before and after fields and other small and useful details, but very few that I found did it all as I liked it – and at least as importantly, in a fast and efficient manner.
