Here are the sites:

Basikneads Catering, a catering company out in Virginia - www.basikneads.com

Services provided include HTML / CSS / JS design integration, WordPress setup and customizations. Design was provided by Openbox9, a creative company out in Washington DC. Some behind the scenes highlights (which will probably only interest other developers):

• Homepage slideshow — images load via a delayed ajax request, so as to not bog down the initial page load.
• JavaScript / Canvas based font replacement — The headings are rendered with the Typeface.js library, a pretty neat font replacement library that doesn’t require the use of any flash. If browsers don’t support it, then it’ll get downgraded to a close serif font.

Before Project, non-profit organization dealing with conflict prevention - www.beforeproject.org

Services provided include HTML / CSS / JS design integration, WordPress setup and customizations. Design was also provided by Openbox9. The site is relatively straight forward from a technical perspective, I added a couple WordPress customizations to help manage different elements of the site (eg random facts, customizable sidebar).

Newlife Church, a church in the Seattle area - www.newlifekitsap.com

Services provided include HTML / CSS / JS design integration, WordPress setup and customizations. Design was provided in-house by Newlife. A couple neat features to highlight:

• Rotating homepage features — I used the jQuery library to provide the animation on the front end, and coded a simple admin tool in their WordPress backend to allow them to easily add/replace features.
• JavaScript + Flash media player — A small and simple player on the homepage to allow people to easily play a recent sermon message from one of their church campuses.

That’s all for now!

PS, follow me on Twitter

I’m also working as a freelance contractor now, so if you’re looking to hire someone to help with WordPress customizations, HTML+CSS+JavaScript template integrations (eg turning a PSD into HTML), or some general PHP work, please contact me at joetan54@gmail.com.

Anyways… since I’m making a big move, I’m going to try and sell / unload all the random stuff I’ve collected over the years here… listed below. If you’re in the Washington DC area, and are interested in any of it, let me know. I don’t have a car, so I can’t deliver it!

• Creative I-Trigue L3500 Speakers. 2 speakers and 1 sub-woofer
• Samsung 15″ LCD monitor
• 2004 Gary Fisher 19.5″ Aluminum frame 24 speed bike SOLD!
• Toshiba 27″ Color Stream TV SOLD!
• Black TV Stand SOLD!

A couple languages are not 100% translated yet, so if you would like to help with translating the plugin, either with a new or existing language, or if you see a grammer / typo issue in an existing translation, please see this page for more information on how you can help. 

Download the update >

And here’s a sample screen shot of the plugin localized into the Persian language:

Finally, thanks to:

Søren Siim Nielsen, Wilco Verdoold, Thomas Sturm, Adrianus F. Tumewu, Marco Balzerani, Lindsey Yoo, Hamid Reza, Jonathan Lumb, Guillermo Lopez, and a couple others.

The plugin has already been downloaded ~70,000 times now, so any translation help you provide would be very much appreciated, especially by people who’s blogs are not in English. In return for your help, you’ll get credit for the translation, along with a link to your blog. Thank you!

In related news, the plugin is now at version 1.0.3, and includes some very minor fixes.

Update Sept 21: Thanks everyone who wrote in to help. So far, I’ve got volunteers for French, Mandarin, Spanish, Germen, Swedish, Persian, and Dutch. Thanks, that is so awesome!

Update Sept 22: Got people for Danish, Korean, and Czech.

Update Sept 24: Italian and Bahasa

I sent a request to her on Facebook to change our relationship status, and fortunately, she accepted the change… woohoo! And well yeah, we also went to the sculpture garden before (see long winded version over there) and I guess I did awkwardly ask for her hand in marriage with said ring :)

Some photos from the day:

• Hands free disk management. It’s not quite as cool as what the Drobo can do, but basically when a disk goes bad, just swap in another drive of equal or larger size. You can even hot swap a disk while it’s still turned on. And really, how often am I going to be swapping drives in and out (the part that makes Drobo cool)?
• Future proof. If I need more storage, I can just swap in bigger drives. The only downside is that both disks would need to get swaped, and they can only be swapped one at a time. But this is something that’s unavoidable in a 2 disk RAID configuration.
• A bunch of streaming media servers: iTunes, Slim Server, and UPnP AV. The UPnP AV server is pretty key, since this can stream movies to my XBox 360, as long as the XBox 360 supports the video codec. Nice.
• Supports FTP, HTTP, AFP, SMB, and Rsync out of the box.

Actually now that I think about it, it’s really just a moderately low powered Linux box (and pretty quite too!). There’s no monitor port or keyboard terminal, but you can activate shell and root access over the network, which basically allows you to go in and install / tweak stuff as needed. It’s not an extremely powerful box, but it is decently capable. You can even run Apache, MySQL, PHP to power your blog… but only if you expect to get less than than a dozen or so visitors. And if you buy it from NewEgg (before Aug 1), they’ll throw in a free 500 GB drive combo, no need to send in any rebate forms. So while the ReadyNAS Duo out of the box only comes with one drive (thus not a RAID), NewEgg will make it a RAID for free I heart NewEgg, and now ReadyNAS.

• Paging support for albums with lots of photos. At the moment, this is limited to 30 photos per page.
• Added a “Interestings” tab next to the “Everyone” tab, to help you more easily blog photos that have been tagged as interesting by the Flickr community. A “Groups” tab is coming soon.
• Improved compatibility with different server environments. This addresses a (relatively) common issue where the cURL PHP extensions are not installed on the server. 
• Now compatible with WordPress’ new plugin auto updating feature. If your WordPress blog is configured to allow for auto updates, then this will be the last time you’ll need to manually download, unzip, and install updates. In the future, updating to the latest versions will be possible with just one click. Otherwise, please subscribe to the TanTanToolkit RSS feed to get updated of when new updates are made to the plugin’s I’m working on

Download the update here >

If you need help with using this plugin, please post your questions to the Flickr group and I’ll try to answer your questions there (and if I get to it, hopefully someone else will!).

The Simple Spam Filter for WordPress now includes an additional rule to block any comment that is very similar to a previously posted comment. It uses PHP similar_text() function, and if someone tries to post a comment that is over 75% similar to a previously posted comment, then that person’s comment will be blocked.

And as a (potential) added benefit, this plugin will help reduce the “noise” in your comments, by forcing your visitors to say something new… kinda along the lines of xkcd’s chat moderator bot which helps manage the signal-to-noise ratio in their chat rooms.

This release also includes a small re-organization of files, in order to support WordPress’ new plugin auto-updating feature. Please download the upgrade version if you have a previous version of the plugin installed, otherwise, go grab the 0.6 version here.

As with the previous release, this plugin will work in conjunction with the reCAPTCHA service to help ensure comments that get flagged as spam are really posted by humans (eliminate false positives).

Download the Simple Spam Filter >

Here’s a screen shot of the new filter in action:

Setting up Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes is a free web service that lets you easily create mashups of content on the web. That is, it lets you remix, combine, and manipulate web feeds with a drag and drop interface. In this case, you’ll basically use Yahoo Pipes to pull down all your RSS feeds and combine them up together. Your new pipe will now output a single feed that contains everything, sorted in reverse chronological order. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find that the easiest way to get started is to just clone my pipe, and modify as necessary. Yahoo Pipes makes this a pretty easy process, all you have to do is drag a couple things around and change a couple settings. Once this is done, you’ll be ready for the next step.

The PHP Mojo

Yahoo Pipes now supports serialized PHP output, which basically means it is super easy to use pipe’d data in PHP. So grab the PHP script, the stylesheet, and upload them to your own server. Be sure to modify the life stream URL at the top of the PHP to point to your own source URL. You’ll probably also want to add your own stylesheet and header / footer to match your site. Now all you need to do is to load up the script in your browser. That’s it!

Don’t have access to PHP or your own server? Yahoo Pipes also conveniently supports output in JSON and RSS.