Shortcode Shortcomings
This post requires a certain degree of technical savvyness.
When experimenting with various shortcode locations in the post content, I noticed that under some conditions the shortcode behaved a bit strange with regard to paragraph arrangement. So I implemented a couple of “diagnostic” shortcodes and filters to further investigate the problem. But before I go into that, follow me on a short tour through what the Shortcode API is. Read more >>
A Little Weekend Zen
How long should you stay at something?
However long it takes to get what you came for.
How do you decide what you came for?
You don’t, you discover it.
How do you discover it?
You notice what isn’t there anymore when you feel like leaving.
Sliding Notes HowTo – Centered Button With 1.0 Series
Dan asked me today how to accomplish a centered slider button/title, while keeping the note content left-aligned. While I try to work out a neater solution, I’d like to present to the impatient a way to do it right away, with the current version of Sliding Notes (1.0rc5), taking Dan’s example as a foundation. It’s a bit involved in the sense that it takes editing some HTML first, but it’s a feasible way to go nonetheless (and after setting up the HTML structure, the visual editor can be used as well).
Sliding Notes – Scriptaculous Caveats
Last Tuesday, Jörg reported a problem where Sliding Notes didn’t work on hist site. It turned out quickly that the problem was not with Sliding Notes, but due to a javascript exception thrown when jQuery was loaded. I analyzed the effect nonetheless, and I’d like to share my insights with you, as I believe they might be of general interest.
Sliding Notes use the jQuery javascript library. There are known conflicts between jQuery and Scriptaculous, another widespread javascript library. The conflicts are particularly dramatic with older Scriptaculous versions (1.7 and less).1. Scriptaculous versions 1.8.0 and later2 still have some conflicts with jQuery, but not at a scale that they would stop each other from functioning. Read more >>
- See for ex. this google group discussion or this post [↩]
- 1.8.2 is the current Scriptaculous version as of this writing [↩]
Sliding Notes – 8 Bits Full Of Downloads
Last night I noticed that the number of downloads of my Hackadelic Sliding Notes has reached 256.
To a software engineer, it is one of the “magic” numbers. It corresponds to 28 (2 to the power of 8), and is the first number whose memory representation exceeds the size of a single byte.
From now on, it’ll take at least 2 bytes to count the downloads.
O.K., this might not be as big an achievement as the moonlanding, but hey! – Why miss an oportunity to celebrate?1 😉
- Besides, the next byte boundary crossing is at 65’536 downloads, so I’ve probably got a planty of time until the next such occasion. [↩]
Freedom Must Always Be Conquered
… a fact that can hardly be better illustrated then in this cartoon by Bruno Bozzetto, the Italian master of satirical animation:
Post-Columbian Project Management By Dummies
Some time ago, I wrote about John, the fictive trekking leader, who came to fame and glory out of ignorance, and drew parallels to project management today. As it turns out, I didn’t have to invent a fictive story to illustrate the situation – there is an astounding historical example that backs it up 100%.
On this terrific Wikipedia page about common misconceptions, I found this: Read more >>
Sliding Notes Plugin Is Here
After some warm-up time with WordPress, I decided it’s about time to write a WordPress plug-in.
Not that I’ve been keen to program in another half-backed spawn of C++ (the mother of all programming language abominations ;-))1 with all the curly braces and clumsy syntax. But, the itching in my fingers was stronger then that.
So here it is! Ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present: The Slider Shortcode! An easy way to add sliding notes» to your WordPress content!
Read the whole story on the plugin homepage.2
- As a former expert C/C++ programmer, I’m allowed to say that. Simply because… Well, simply because I know what I’m talking about. 🙂 [↩]
- Note that comments are closed on this post in favor of the plugin homepage. [↩]
This note is shown when the slider is clicked open.
Lorem ipsum usu quas tibique ne, no vim dicant diceret consequat, modo debet voluptatibus vis an. Erant omnium volutpat eum ut, his diam scaevola eu. Qui id tota utamur torquatos, nec eleifend hendrerit ad, ut per dicit laboramus efficiantur. Et his kasd homero maiestatis, an malorum accumsan mel. Quo ad zzril oporteat assueverit, et mea munere persius intellegat. Vis tation fuisset disputando et, vel sale eripuit erroribus ei.
Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5Evolution And Project Management
In “The Costs Of Not Doing Something Else“, I made the aside conclusion that John’s trek only needed to meet some minimum criteria in order to be considered a success. That is an inherent property of what can be called an uncompetitive system.1
Coming back from treks to projects, I state:
Read more >>
- An uncompetitive system is a system lacking comparison to other systems of a kind. [↩]
The Costs Of Not Doing Something Else
I finished my last article on the project management topic with the thought:
It is common to measure the cost of what we do. But how do we measure the cost of what we don’t do, or don’t do differently?
In essence, it’s a question of how to measure the relative advantage or disadvantage of doing things one way or another.
To exemplify, I’d like to metaphorically use the notion of a trekking leader. (In many ways, a trekking leader is a good metaphor for a project manager, I believe.)
