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 😉

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. [↩]

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

1. 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. 🙂 [↩]
2. Note that comments are closed on this post in favor of the plugin homepage. [↩]

Reasons To WordPress – The MyCSS Syndrome

When I started setting up WordPress1, I came across the need to adjust the CSS. I felt immediately that messing with the theme’s style.css would be wrong.2 Instead, I felt there should be an extra CSS file for customization separately included via a plug-in.3

I’m a skilled programmer, so I was about to quickly write the plug-in myself (I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to do it). The names that came to my mind were MyCSS for the plug-in, and my.css for the style sheet. But before I set out to coding, I attempted a search for it on wordpress.org.
Read more >>

1. and didn’t have an overview of what plug-ins exist yet [↩]
2. Changing the theme’s style.css complicates theme upgrades. [↩]
3. I explicitly did not want CSS customization through the WP admin interface exclusively, but a file I could edit with any editor, and upload with any FTP client. [↩]