I’m working on a lot of changes for this site, which will be happening shortly, as well as a few announcements related to some new projects I’m involved in, so stay tuned.

On another note, wordcamp Kelowna is shaping up nicely for September 11th, just a little more than a month away, and I’ll be saying more about that on here too as the time approaches.

function get_ID_by_slug($page_slug) {
   $page = get_page_by_path($page_slug);
   if ($page) {
      return $page->ID;
   } else {
      return null;
   }
}

So for example, you could then do a query like this in your sidebar:

$querystr = "SELECT wposts.* FROM $wpdb->posts wposts WHERE wposts.post_parent = '".get_ID_by_slug("white-papers")."' AND wposts.post_status = 'publish' AND wposts.post_type = 'page'";

And you would get all pages that are children of “white-papers”, it’s basic I know, but it works, and has a few other uses than just where I used it.

One function that works, is to do a check like this:

function parent_category( $cats, $_post = null ){
     if( is_string($cats) )   $cats = get_cat_ID($cats);
     foreach ( (array) $cats as $cat ) {
          $descendants = get_term_children( (int) $cat, 'category');
          if ( $descendants && in_category( $descendants, $_id ) ) return true;
     }
     return false;
}

WordPress published a similar function on their site, but it used the actual category ID in the function. I found it easier to let you enter the slug instead.

Now, when you want to check if a post is in a category that is a child, you can do a check like this:

<?php
if(in_category('recipes') || parent_category('recipes') ):
     // display this post as a recipe
else:
     // display this post as a normal post
endif;
?>

This can be adapted to almost any type of similar treatment, I just used recipes above as an example since it’s where I just used this function.

FoodJumper.com is the end result of a month of planning, before even starting down the road of adding recipes and posts.

To put it simply, it’s a foodie blog, similar to foodizu.com, but different in that, this one is just me and also contains posts and videos, etc, whereas foodizu is a community of people adding recipes.

Why make another foodie site? Well, to put it simply, because I love food, so why not?

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*iPad.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://ipad.yourdomain.com [R=301]

This will redirect iPad users to a URL you specify.

I wanted to offer a site that would text you if you got a new mention on twitter, pretty simple process, and one that has uses for people monitoring their username mentions.

I decided to once again use the SMS API form twilio.com as a starting point since I’ve been using it quite a lot in recent projects, and then used YQL to perform twitter searches on usernames that are added.

The end result is that every 15 minutes, it does a check, and if there is a recent mention of your name, then you get sent text message saying “you have [insert number here] new mentions for @[insert your name here]“.

I used the YUI framework to quickly throw together the site design, and it’s been working well.

∞

The ad appears like this:

The code for it is pretty straight forward, and can also be used to display a copyright message linking to your site, or anything along those lines. Place the following code in your theme’s functions.php file:

function insertAds($content) {
  if(is_feed()) {
    srand((float) microtime() * 10000000);
    $banners = array();
    $banners[] = 'Banner number 1. <a href="http://www.somerandomsite/" target="_blank">Some more banner text</a>';
    $banners[] = 'Banner number 2. <a href="http://www.somerandomsite/" target="_blank">Some more banner text</a>';
    $banners[] = 'Banner number 3. <a href="http://www.somerandomsite/" target="_blank">Some more banner text</a>';
    $banners[] = 'Banner number 4. <a href="http://www.somerandomsite/" target="_blank">Some more banner text</a>';
    $rn = array_rand($banners);
    $content = $content.'
<hr />'.$banners[$rn];
  }
  return $content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'insertAds');
add_filter('the_content', 'insertAds');

You could also replace this with banner images. Anyway, what this does is randomly select which text to display on your rss feed items. So for each article, you could have a different ad appearing.

If you wanted to use this to display only one message (like a copyright), you’d use this version:

function insertMsg($content) {
  if(is_feed()) {
    $banner = 'You are reading my blog. <a href="http://www.linktoblog/" target="_blank">Name of your blog</a>';
    $content = $content.'
<hr />'.$banner;
  }
  return $content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'insertMsg');
add_filter('the_content', 'insertMsg');

That’s it, like I said, it’s a quick function, but it serves it’s purpose.

The method used was one where you entered your phone number, and provider and it would send you an SMS-email message. It worked but it wasn’t a method I was happy with, and eventually removed it.

Thanks to Twilio.com and their SMS gateway, we’ve now integrated a new solution to receiving SMS notifications.

When you create or edit a table, you now have the option to select to received text messages when someone fills out a form on your site (or where ever you’ve placed a form).

This works well for people on the go who still want to get notified when someone fills out a form, either for a support request, article submission, events, you name it.

This is also the first of several new updates DBStract will be receiving in the new little while, which I’m pretty happy about.

Even without the contest, I would have done it anyway, but it just provided a good incentive to do it now.

Once you sign up, you have two ways of setting reminders, either from your account, or from your phone by sending a text message in the appropriate format.

There’s still a little work to do, but it’s been sending me proper reminders for a couple days so that works for me