planetOzh

Some House Cleaning

Ozh — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:32:55 +0000

I’ve updated my Projects page, which was missing quite some works. It should now be up to date with all the stuff I’ve coded in the past few years. Hey, this page is starting to give me a little warm feeling of pride ;)

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Egometrics Of The Day

Ozh — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:30:12 +0000

My most popular stuff on del.icio.us just got past 1000 bookmarks, and my feed reader count is now just above 500. I love you all!

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Give your Admin Area Some Colorful Love

Ozh — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:15:19 +0000

Two months ago, I wrote an article about per-user admin color schemes that WordPress 2.5 brought in its bag of new features. A few days laters, I received an email from COLOURlovers‘ chief lover, Darius, letting me know about the API they were about to release (and did released since, of course)

At this time, I had no spare time to work on it but the idea grew in my mind, and a few weeks ago I started coding something really fun. You might have seen the teasing earlier this month, and if not, skip it, my screencasting skills have dramatically improved since ;)

Here it goes: I’m pleased to introduce the Admin CSS Designer, a plugin that lets you design and tweak real time your admin color scheme. It fetches colorful palettes from COLOURlovers, make a CSS of it, then lets you edit and modify colors without coding anything or refreshing the page. Once you’re pleased with the result, save it as a standalone and reusable CSS.

I made a 3 minutes demonstration video along with a few sexy screenshots, so what are you waiting for? The Admin CSS Designer is waiting for your love!

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How to Find a WordPress Job

Ozh — Sun, 11 May 2008 17:27:19 +0000

If you’re a WordPress freelancer, or if you are just looking for some pocket change earned thanks to your WordPress hacking skills, how are you supposed to get some homework to do? How to find your daily WordPress job?

The mandatory thing to do is to subscribe to the wp-pro mailing list. A few times a day, people are posting in there seeking for assistance in various fields (coding, theme designing, installing…)

The official WordPress Jobs covers also a wide variety of topics: you can post and look for job offers regarding Programming, Designing, or even Blogging.

WordPress Job is a website that WordPress freelancers are going to follow: it’s aggregating WordPress job offers (several every day) from the main freelancers’ sites such as ScriptLance, RentACoder, GetAFreeLancer. Be warned though, competition there is really harsh and bids outrageously low :)

General job listing sites can be efficient, too. Simply Hired returns quite some results when looking for “wordpress”, mostly coming from Elance and oDesk.

What else? Do you know or use another source for WordPress job offers?
(Photo credits: Daniel Starrason)

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It’s Still Cooking… And It’s Hot!

Ozh — Thu, 01 May 2008 23:12:46 +0000

I’ve been a Colour Lover since a few years, I love that site. A few weeks ago, they sent me an email telling that they were about to release an API to play with colors and palettes created by other color lovers, so what could I do? A WordPress plugin, obviously. Warning: this is going to be TAFW (Too Addictive For Work).

(Feed readers: in case you miss it, here goes a video)

If you still have no clue : this plugin fetches color palettes from ColourLovers and lets you play with the generated CSS real time, till you make something cool so you can save it as a standalone reusable CSS. How super cool is this, seriously ? :)

ETA: a few days. Stay tuned !

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Baltic Amber + Admin Drop Down Menu = Cool

Ozh — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:47:48 +0000

Kaspars updated is fun plugin Baltic Amber (bringing some refreshing change in the WordPress backend with a set of new stylesheets) to make it fully compatible with my own Admin Drop Down Menu. He threw in some really nice subtle tweaks (see screenshot) that make the two plugins coexist very harmoniously. Good job Kaspars! :)

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Javascript basename() and dirname()

Ozh — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 20:09:21 +0000

For my next stuff I needed the Javascript equivalents of PHP functions basename() and dirname(). Nothing genius:

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

function basename(path) {
return path.replace(/\\/g,'/').replace( /.*\//, '' );
}
function dirname(path) {
return path.replace(/\\/g,'/').replace(/\/[^\/]*$/, '');;
}

It obviously supports paths like /home/ozh/stuff.php, http://site.com/file.ext or double backslashed Win32 paths such as C:\\dir\\document.txt.

Edit: Mister Ze in comments points out to PHP.JS, an ongoing project aiming to port PHP to Javascript. Some really neat stuff there.

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Ugliest (and Dumbest) Tatoo Ever

Ozh — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:39:10 +0000

This tatoo doesn't even validate, duh! (via the always entertaining pics.reddit)

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FeedBurner and Netvibes: Doing It Wrong

Ozh — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:16:33 +0000

Something seems to be broken between Feedburner and Netvibes. Yesterday, Planet WordPress was showing off a cool 1050 feed readers, and today the counter has dropped down to 267. After logging in Feedburner's control panel to check some stats, I found out that:

Netvibes users are not counted any longer
Netvibes user count used to be... odd. Stats from last month show that nearly 75%! of Planet WordPress readers where Netvibes users, and this seems to be really improbable.

Anyone else notices a feed reader drop because of this? I hope things are not that broken with Netvibes. I was pretty happy of the nice constant raise of Planet WordPress's feed reader count, I'd be quite disappointed to see it deflate :)

Edit: feed reader count back to 1050, with the unbelievable share of Netvibes users at 72%. Go figure.

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ShareWP : Digg for WordPress

Ozh — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:44:54 +0000

ShareWP is a digg-like site (using Pligg I think) dedicated solely to, obviously, WordPress. It seems fairly new (domain registered a few months ago, only a handful or registered users) and I think it has some potential: overall it's nicely done, and well focused on WordPress, a topic that other socialish sites such as Reddit or Digg seem to neglect.

You can submit articles, themes or plugins, with a few predefined categories as well as, of course, the tags you'd like. The process of submitting an article is pretty much what you expect from a Digg clone, with all the spell check and preview and everything.

The sites comes with the mandatory tools (bookmarklet and "Vote It" one-click submit button) but, quite oddly I'd say, doesn't provide their own... WordPress plugin that would add the Vote button at the end of each article? (To be fair, explanations are given on how to integrate this button to your theme template, but I think a plugin would make newbies' day)

Last question, that will remain unanswered for now, will be: will there be any SharedWP effect killing poor websites and bringing servers knees down? Vote for this article and we all find out :)
Edit: ~~Guess we won't be finding out immediately, since all I get when clicking on the "Vote" badge is a 404. The story still shows up on front page though. Hopefully fixed soon!~~ Fixed! :)

Edit: Launchus interruptus! The site has been (temporarily we hope) taken down because it was not completely ready. Stay tuned!

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