Of course, thus is the nature of open source software. I’m just surprised this was committed into core given all the other changes happening.

I was wondering where you would put this in the functions.php file and would the add filter line need to be right next to the query code you put?

Cheers

Paul

I use the “+” and “.” tricks a lot, and I also find that some sites don’t allow the “+” they consider it not valid, even though it is.

Oscar.

First, ASP.NET has its own Ajax Toolkit. The toolkit itself has some design decisions that I disagree with but it also integrates very well with ASP.NET. For any user that is coding in ASP.NET and wants to AJAX-up their website I would recommend starting with ASP.NET.

Also, using the toolkit described about, it would be better to create a JSON control that would handle the situation you described about, if you really wanted JSON. This control would handle all the weird logic that would be associated with the JSON response and abstract it from using it all over the place.

Finally, the solution you describe is not very RESTful. I know that this is hard to do in ASP.NET and don’t know off the top of my head a good solution to it, which leads to my final point..

I love C# and .NET. But ASP.NET is a real-world example of a hack-and-slash framework. It’s useful for the time being and provides a lot of functionality. However, I would recommend shying away from the framework and work toward a Ruby on Rails, Django, Cappuccino, etc. solution. ASP.NET 4.0 seems to be lackluster, too.

Good thing that you’re looking into a bunch of solutions for these things though!

P.S. Add OpenID to your blog so I don’t have to sign in

However, I can’t think of a single reason this would be useful outside of what I was using it for, which was using a single wordpress admin panel to manage a collection of remote wordpress installs. It was a fun exercise regardless.

As for the particular project I mentioned, it looks like it’s not going to do the trick – however, I’m experimenting with the idea of switching the $table_prefix on the post_save hook, running wp_insert_post(), and switching it back when it’s done, because I need to duplicate posts in certain situations.

If anything interesting comes of it, I’ll let you know.

Changing a setting variable in the middle of the request seems like it could cause more trouble than it’d be worth.

I’ve been toying with the idea of one interface to make posts to multiple bogs, and, while I haven’t been able to come up with anything useful, you can get some really interesting results if you change the $table_prefix value later in the load series – like at the plugins_loaded action.

I haven’t taken the time to really figure out what is happening, but if you change it there, you’ll get a blog with settings that match the tables from the prefix in wp_config, but posts from the prefix that you set at plugins_loaded. It’s almost eerie how you can get the info from 2 places, but everything still works. Even the front end will pull from the second tables, and load properly.

As with so many of the other things I discover, I haven’t found anything useful to do with it yet – but it’s a fun experiment anyway.

$option = get_option( 'Option Name' );
if( false === $option ) {
$option = 'My real option value.';
}

I do agree, though, that the improved get_option available with WP 2.7 makes things simpler. No more checking for false.

I changed it slightly so that the CURRENT page, is no longer hyperlinked:

foreach ( $trail as $page){
// print the link to the current page in the foreach
if ($page->ID==$post->ID) {
echo “ID}’ >$separator{$page->post_title}\n”;
} else {
echo “ID}’ >$separatorID ) . “‘>{$page->post_title}\n”;
}
}

Can you elaborate on how and where to include this? What files?

Thanks,

Matt

I figured that I should start out charging a lower rate since I’m still trying to build a customer base, but I hadn’t thought about how that might appear. I’m certainly happy to raise my rates

I have to say you’ve been a bit of an inspiration for doing this. Even if things don’t turn out as well as I hope (which I don’t plan on happening) this has already been a great experience, so thanks!

1. Your rates are really low. Are you offering professional level services? If so, you should be charging professional level rates. Salary.com says a Entry Level PHP Developer makes an average of $65k a year which is about $35/hr. Raise your rates to give the appearance of value.
2. Don’t give a detailed rate breakdown by the type of project. Clients often have no idea how complex a project will be and can be mislead to believe that their project will be 2 hours when it will actually be 25.
3. Have a dedicated quote style form like the one here: http://plugin-developer.com
4. Start running Adwords campaigns that target “Terre Haute web developer” “Vigo county web developer” and substitute web with PHP and other variations like that. You’ll get more business for very little out of pocket cost.
5. Register as an LLC for liability benefits and to give the appearance of increased professionalism (even if you never look to grow beyond your current one man shop approach)
6. List your open source plugins in your portfolio.
7. Remove latest news from the home page… you have a dedicated news page and there’s no reason to clutter the home page. What you have above that is awesome, though.

There’s more things, but I feel like I’m starting to get out of control so I’m going to stop now. If you need advice, hit me up at my personal address listed with this comment. I’ve been doing the business thing for a while, now, so i may have the answers you need (and I may need your services, before long).

I think I heard about Litmus somewhere, but I had forgotten about it. Sounds like a pretty neat tool.

Also, I just found Litmus which seems pretty neat and definitely worth it for a web professional.

The “variable variables” must be interpolated by the PHP interpreter in order to get the correct results and that causes the interpreter to take a while to do what it needs to do (although a “while” might be just extra milliseconds depending on the size of the array, you’d have to profile to be sure.

As for plans for 2009, I’m hoping to (and already working at) getting more involved in the WordPress community. My goal is for this to lead to more WordPress related jobs in the future.

I’ve also got a couple of other projects I’m working on, but I don’t want to say too much about them until I get closer to finishing them. I will say though, that I’m hoping one of them will be ready for prime time by the end of January (of course this will depend on how much extra time I have between school and work).

How about you? “Tomorrow” came and went and you still haven’t posted anything about your goals for 2009 Have anything interesting planned?

What are your plans for 2009? Any big goals?

You have a good point there. The reason I would still use IndexIgnore though is that it’s just a little bit more friendly (doesn’t contain the word “Error” )

Of course if you were to create a custom error page with something like this in your .htaccess:

ErrorDocument 403 /errors/forbid.php

Then you just place a helpful message in /errors/forbid.php. Make sure you actually change the status to 200 as well or browsers like IE and Chrome won’t display the page.

< ?php
header("HTTP/1.0 200 OK");
?>

Cheers!

If someone does try to look at the contents of a directory by going to http://www.domain.tld/foldername/, they are presented with a 403-Forbidden error.

Good question. If you look at my wp-admin/css folder you can see that no files are listed.

http://itsananderson.com/blog/wp-admin/css/

I didn’t even know that there was no index.php file there until you pointed it out, but the .htaccess trick took care of things for me

Cheers!

wp-admin/css folder has no index.php file in it

Thanks for the comment (and for the plugins!).

I looked at the pageMash plugin, but while it does what I was talking about, it also seems less responsive than My Page Order, so definitely don’t let your plugin die yet

I’m actually also using My Link Order on the same website and I’m hoping to also do a review of it at some point soon (thanks for the reminder).

I’ve not used My Category Order yet because I’ve not had a need for it, but if I do ever need custom ordering of categories I’ll definitely check it out.

Along the way I had to make compromises like keeping unpublished pages in the list and subpage dropdown.

There’s actually a patch that has been submitted to the development trunk to allow drag and drop ordering/restructuring on the page list but it hasn’t been incorporated yet.

I’ll point you towards pageMash, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pagemash/, it does the restructuring as well as ordering. I’d be happy to let my plugin die if a better solution like pageMash becomes more popular, but I’ll keep supporting mine as long as people use it.

I’ll plug my 2 other plugins, My Link Order and My Category Order, that provide functionality missing from WP completely. It might be janky, but you can specify an order for pages, the same can’t be done for post categories and links and their categories.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-link-order/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-category-order/

By the way, here is an example of what I had in mind for showing the whole page structure. The interface needs to be a LOT better, but the general idea is what I’m aiming for.

http://www.swartzfager.org/blog/dspNestedList.cfm

I think I might have a couple more pictures from the bonfire. Unfortunately the quality isn’t very good since I took them with my phone, but if I can dig them up, I’ll pass them on.

Thanks,

Will

I don’t really want to branch the project since it’s still active, but perhaps I could work in the changes and submit them to the author. If he’s not willing incorporate the changes, then I might branch.

I agree that you should be able to move children between parents, but that would be a little more difficult to do, I would think. The best thing about this, though, is that you can modify it and release the result (the wonders of the GPL). I encourage you to take a stab and do it. All you need to do is add a little bit of JavaScript and make page parent changes wherever page order is being modified.

Also, pretty much all software that I know of runs on Vista by now, especially anything you’re going to use. I think the only thing I had problems with was Maple (9) but you can use Windows terminal services on campus for that.

I’m guessing you’re using Firefox with Ad Block Plus installed correct? That’s probably why you don’t see the ad. I’d actually not taken that into consideration, but visitors who use Firefox will actually have to be considered as a separate case (since it’s hard to tell whether a visitor has Ad Block Plus installed). Anyway, thanks for pointing that out and for sharing your thoughts on sites that use AdSense. That’s exactly what I’m looking for.

Will

I don’t see any ad. If I did see it, it probably wouldn’t affect me, I think. Although, generally I tend to think that sites with a bunch of adsense ads are cheap, like they can’t even afford webspace, and they cut up the content.

Stephen

The version number is something I found interesting as well. Reports from Matt (Mullenweg) say that they’re not doing version number jumps anymore. They jumped from 2.3 to 2.5, but they won’t be jumping to 3.0 until after 2.9. That means we could have a few major iterations and then see another new admin interface at 3.2-3.3.

The usability testing they did with the new WordPress admin included some pretty extensive stuff. If I remember correctly, they actually did some laser eye tracking, which is pretty awesome.

The most complaint/argument I’ve seen over 2.7 has to do with its version number (many argued that it should be 3.0 since it incorporated so many changes to the admin interface). I found it pretty funny how much people seemed to be bothered by that.

It was interesting listening to Jane Wells talk about some of the usability enhancements made in 2.7 in the Weblog Tools Collection Podcast a month or so back. It helped me appreciate some of the features I might not have noticed otherwise.

Some of the features that I find the most appealing are:

Improved admin design
Threaded comments (often requested feature by clients)
Quick post/page edit
Mass post/page edit

I’m currently running a plugin I wrote for the contacts in the sidebar. That used to be hard coded into the template, but I created a widget to replace it so that it could be updated without editing any code. I’ve also got an analytics plugin running as well as “My-Page-Order” to allow drag and drop page ordering (though I don’t really care for the way it does this, and I hope to create an improved replacement at some point). I’m also testing some navigation plugins and a page specific custom widget plugin I’ve been working on, but those aren’t running on the main site currently.

Thanks for the post suggestion. That could be fun! I think maybe I’ll contrast the plugins I’m using on my site versus the ones I’ve installed on the IRPA site.

What have you found are the most useful WP plugins you’ve used for the RHIT site? You should do a post on it.

I sent you a response.

Thanks,

Will

This is ashley from TCBOTB. I noticed your comment in our blog community. I was wondering what more information you could give me on converting these templates to WP themes? Please send me an email to [email removed to prevent spam] and hopefully we can work something out.

Ashley – TCBOTB

Will

In case you wondered, “Shiny Guy” is Daniel Sing, a grad student.

Nice website you got going on here, by the way.

God bless…
Caleb

I can see what you are saying about the ad, and I’m not arguing over whether religious fanatics CAN do crazy things. The problem was that I felt they were saying that all who are religious are automatically fanatics who might do crazy things. Perhaps they weren’t trying to say that, but that’s the message that came across to me.

When I made a distinction between freedom OF religion and freedom FROM religion, I was certainly not saying that everyone must be religious. What I got from the ad was the idea that freedom from religion meant it’s absence (just as freedom from slavery means slavery (in the US) is gone). Everyone has the legal right to choose a religion (or lack thereof). But it’s just as wrong to say that religion should not be allowed as it is to say that having no religion should not be allowed.

Having not gathered the statistics on prisons myself, I’m not able to really verify their validity. Unfortunately, it’s hard to verify the validity of any statistic (including those of secular programs). I was only pointing out prison ministries as an example of what faith based ministries are doing, not as sole proof of why they are a good thing for society.

Again, thank you for comments. You raised some important issues which I hope have helped me to clarify what I’m trying to say.

Will

As for freedom OF religion, that actually does imply freedom FROM religion as well, since by adopting Religion A you are almost always REJECTING Religions B thru Z. Freethinkers and humanists are simply rejecting one more than you do. And under our constitution, we all have the right to do this. Religious freedom is really freedom of conscience, which includes the right to choose “none of the above.”

As for “which part of the faith based prisons” we humanists and freethinkers might have issues with, there are many, given that their statistics are skewed by the fact that only certain participants are allowed in and those who drop out often aren’t counted as a failure of the effort. Put simply, those who run such programs often cook the books to get their wonderful success statistics. Moreover, secular prison programs based on literature and philosophy, and which don’t use suspicious statistics, have a very high success rate. See “Prison Inmates Meet Socrates” in the May/June 2000 issue of the Humanist magazine ( http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_/ai_62111876?tag=artBody;col1 ).

Fred Edwords, director of communications
American Humanist Association

You’re working at Noble Romans? You are crazy!

That computer sounds really cool. I can’t say that I would mind having one of those myself.

Stephen

Will

cool theme

hakhak

elyens

XXXxx

Thanks Kevin,

Will