A quick update has been released that fixes this. The new safe release is now 0.2.2, which should be available from the WordPress plugin repository shortly.

The cause for this problem is the fact that PHP 4 can have mbstring enabled, but not support all its functions. Ironically.

By the way, this would be a good time to urge your host to update PHP. The version 4 releases are all historical now.

What new features are included?

Well, most importantly, multi-byte character support. The plugin has received a lot of attention on the Asian side of the world (judging from the pingbacks), but unfortunately it fails with Chinese, Japanese and a whole host of other character sets. Betty was the first to report this problem and kindly helped me solve it. The plugin now supports multi-byte character sets.

I should point out, though, that it will only work when the mbstring PHP extension is enabled on the host. Furthermore, using UTF-8 on your blog is the safest way to make everything work.

People who don’t have the mbstring extension need not worry, the plugin will continue to work but with multi-byte character support disabled.

Another effort to internationalise the plugin includes the support for translations. The plugin now comes with a language file that can be used for translation. The only languages that are currently available are English and Dutch, but additional translations can be made using the PO file. If you want to translate, but don’t know how: stay tuned, there will be a post on that shortly.

Many people have been complaining about the problematic implementation of the Advanced Excerpt plugin in templates (using $advancedexcerpt->filter()). Admittedly, this was a confusing method and besides, the plugin FAQ was slightly incorrect. Sorry to all users who have been trying to get this work for so long.

This problem should be solved with the new release, which introduces the_advanced_excerpt() function. Using advanced excerpts in your template is now as easy as using any of WordPress’ default template tags. Usage details can be found in the plugin FAQ.

One final new addition to the feature set is the ability to ignore custom excerpts (you know, the ones you can write manually for every post you publish). The default behaviour is to always use custom excerpts, but for some reason a blogger might change his mind. One setting changes the behaviour.

Other updates include consistency of the options page with the rest of the new WordPress 2.7 admin interface as well as a compatibility check (which was by far the least work).

So, go ahead and update the plugin and enjoy the new features! Also, feel free to inform me of problems or features you would like to see in a next version in the comments section.

Thanks to a number of useful tutorials over at gotoAndLearn() I was introduced to sound spectrums, bitmap filters and creating packages/classes in AS3.0. Of course I had to test myself to see if I had actually learned something. A music visualisation was the result!

Here is what it looks like (if the SWF file is buggy, please tell me how much I suck).

(Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)

What it does is actually quite simple (once you’ve completed the previously mentioned tutorials, that is). Every time a frame is rendered it computes the sound spectrum. Flash has a function that does the comlicated stuff and then returns a set of values which describe how the sound is distributed in the frequency spectrum. Basically the same thing as those ‘jumping bars’ in your media player (or stereo). The visualisation plots this data on a bitmap object, which is then blurred and scrolled up depending on the overall volume. The process repeats itself over and over, which results in a smoke effect. Variations in volume usually create nice puffs of smoke.

I thought this was quite an interesting little project, so I created an ActionScript class which makes the visualisation easy to reuse in other Flash applications. Admittedly, this is my first well-structured ActionScript code ever. Please have a look at it and then proceed to critise my attempt at programming in the comments.

If you happen to like my creation and want to put it to good use, you can download the AS3.0 package. You are free to use and modify it without any limitations, but please let me know in case it’s a public project.

The music in the demo was made by PriZm at OC ReMix. A great website by the way.

But don’t worry, the good news is that the new verification method doesn’t conflict with your webhost’s protection techniques!

To everybody who uses this plugin: it will not work in WP 2.5. If it worked for you in previous version, then you will likely not need it in WP 2.5.

The solution I offered solves the problem in most cases, but it wasn’t really good. Main reason: I provided a patch for a pluggable function! Secondly, the solution was less secure than the original.

However, I have returned to this issue to come up with a better solution. Behold, a plugin to fix this problem! No need to modify any WordPress files (now we can upgrade like any other WordPress user ), just upload the plugin and activate it.

I have also improved the fix: it is now just as secure as the original one. You should check out the code if you want to know why.

It’s called “Advanced Excerpt” and basically it just improves the way excerpts are created. By default, if a post has no explicit excerpt, WordPress creates one by grabbing the post content, stripping all the tags, shortening it to a (hard-coded) length and adding an ellipsis (which is, by the way, also hard-coded). The result: a dull excerpt.

This plugin changes that. The most notable feature is that it keeps your HTML. Furthermore, it allows you to choose the length of the excerpt (using either words or characters) and which character(s) is/are used as an ellipsis. You can even choose which HTML tags are stripped and which are not! It is very useful if your WordPress theme uses excerpts at prominent places (like mine).

There is another plugin that attempts to improve excerpt creation, but I tried it and it just doesn’t work properly (in fact, it inspired me to write a better one). One major problem is that it breaks your HTML. My plugin solves this by counting only the words or characters that are not part of an HTML tag and by properly closing tags that are left open.

If you want to see it in action, just look at my front page, a category or try a search. Of course, you can also download it yourself.

The theme is probably one of my most extensively templated themes yet. It has special templates for single posts, pages, categories, archives and search results. I have also made a template for pages featuring downloadable attachments, which will be useful when I am going to provide files for download.

I have thoroughly tested the theme on my local server. There have been four revisions during that time (5 days) and I have fixed all the issues I found, so I suppose the theme is quite stable now. You never know when you run into something, though, so I am expecting to make some additional revisions (another reason is because I still have a couple of ideas that I want to add to the theme).

The theme is enhanced with a few cool plugins. Not everything I found worked well, so I ended up writing two plugins myself. I will probably release those after I get some more time to test and finish them.

As for the name: I don’t consider myself very skilful at making up names for my themes, but in this case I found that “Restless” would probably be a good choice. I got the idea from a song by The Crystal Method, which was some of the music I listened to while coding. It’s also appropriate, because I tended to work on this theme until (after) midnight.

That’s all for now. I hope you enjoy the new look. Don’t forget to leave a reply telling me what you think and maybe some suggestions as to what I should change in the next revision.

You write:

function foo()
{
   global $var;
}

PHP does:

function foo()
{
   $var =& $GLOBALS['var'];
}

Why does this matter? The manual knows the answer.

On another note: I have been working on a new theme for a while now. It’s probably going to be my best one yet, but I’ll let you judge about that. I am also developing a WordPress plugin at the moment, it will be released when I launch the theme.

You’ll notice that there is a lot of tweaking to be done on the theme, but that’s why you are testing the theme in the first place. However, even after testing it on a local installation of Wordpress, you may discover a few flaws after launching the theme. Apparently, the testing wasn’t thorough enough.

Luckily, we can add dummy content to our (local) Wordpress installation with only a few clicks. You do need a useful data dump from another blog, though. I have found a dump of the dummy content used for the sndbx theme contest, together with some instructions on how to use it. The good thing about it is that it contains a wide variety of content. Not only a lot of common (and less common) HTML elements, but also different types of comments (pingbacks, trackbacks), content (pages, paged posts) and large images that can fubar your layout if you don’t deal with them.

I suppose that if your theme works with this on your local server, it will probably stand a good chance on the ‘Interweb.’ Or can you name a better source for dummy content?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.

Anyway, I have been looking for some cool free tool to do this for me and I have found SlimTimer. This tool is fairly simple, you basically make a todo-list and whenever you start working on something of the list, you click the item and the timer starts running. This all happens in a ‘client’ page, which you can simply bookmark (as a sidebar in Firefox).

On the SlimTimer website, you can view all your tasks and see the total amount of time spent per task (which may have been spread over any amount of time).

My only problem so far was that I had to keep my browser open while timing. Even the sidebar in Firefox is not perfect, because it gets in the way and if I accidentally close the browser it’s gone and the timing is stopped. Luckily, this issue is solved by viewing the page in Bubbles. (I guess there must be a Linux equivalent to Bubbles out there somewhere.)