tijs.org

[NEW] PHP bundle: Option-escape will provide completion candidates for the current (partially typed) function name and option-F1 will show a tool-tip with short documentation and call syntax for the current function (press ctrl-H to go to the manual page). All standard functions have been added to the normal completion on escape, allowing you to cycle through them. (Ciarán Walsh)

from the latest Textmate release notes (2007-03-04: REVISION 1368). thank you Ciarán!

Since i moved this blog to wordpress somewhere in 2003 i never had gotten around to adding titles to all the old posts so one could actually click on them in wordpress. Thus this wealth of ancient history has been lost to all for quite some time, horrible! Today i installed a little plugin that lists each and ever post by month and year which was a good excuse to write a little script that cleaned up all the old posts and add titles and post-slugs, behold; Ancient History. Beware though, the page might take a while to load. Eat that Google

I made a simple widget that allows you to show the latest forum posts in widget enabled wordpress templates for our PussyCat Lounge blog. It might be useful to somebody else so download ahead if you use XD Forum:

xdforum.php.zip (version 1.0).

To use it follow the these steps:

1. Download and install the XD Forum plugin and follow the instructions to activate it
2. Make sure you have permalinks enabled and working for the forum
3. Download and unpack my widget
4. Activate the widget plugin if you haven’t already
5. Upload it to the /wp-content/plugins/widgets/ directory
6. Activate the widget in the Admin interface
7. Optional: Edit the title of the widget in your templates widget admin interface

I updated my mother’s portfolio site again. It now uses a new front end for the free Flash based image viewer SimpleViewer and a new admin tool (which is a work in progress). The storage is now purely XML based (no more database) since that is the format SimpleViewer needs anyway. The admin tool edits the XML directly using PHP’s DOM functions while the frontend uses the new SimpleXML functions in PHP5. Once the complete package is ready for prime time i might release the code as an alternative to the current PHP based admin tool for SimpleViewer.

I just upgraded my Plazesmap Wordpress plugin to version 0.4 which upgrades the Google Maps API used to version 2. This will allow better satellite photos and map data where Google started offering these (parts of europe for instance).

Digg PHP’s Scalability and Performance - O’Reilly ONLamp Blog:

Several weeks ago there was a notable bit of controversy over some comments made by James Gosling, father of the Java programming language. He has since addressed the flame war that erupted, but the whole ordeal got me thinking seriously about PHP and its scalability and performance abilities compared to Java. I knew that several hugely popular Web 2.0 applications were written in scripting languages like PHP, so I contacted Owen Byrne - Senior Software Engineer at digg.com to learn how he addressed any problems they encountered during their meteoric growth. This article addresses the all-to-common false assumptions about the cost of scalability and performance in PHP applications.

I just updated my Last.fm plugin. Get the latest version here: Last.fm Recent Tracks Wordpress plugin

The caching behaviour has been changed to account for the fact that Last.fm sends an empty list after an x amount of time in which no new tracks have been added to the Last.fm profile. Default behaviour was to display “no recent tracks” when this happens which i have changed so that it now keeps displaying the cached list of recent tracks until a new list is available from Last.fm. (It will still display “no recent tracks” when your profile was empty to start with or an error prevented the plugin from getting your new profile data.) This seemed to be the preffered behaviour for most people but if lots of people want the old behaviour too i might make it optional (shout if you do). Have fun.

Andrew is calling for a PHP Security Architecture, a single design idea for how PHP should implement security features. His take in short is; make the default basic behaviour the safe behaviour. I think he makes a very good case for his vision, and it seems Rasmus and his troupe are listening.

Oh my. I just released my Plazes meets GoogleMaps plugin which takes your plazes location and displays the nice little Google map you can see here at the top of this blog. Disclaimer: Like the Last.fm plugin it’s very beta so it could very well make your server explode if you install it. Both the Last.fm plugin and this plugin are now available through the source repository over at wp-plugins.org.

Installation instructions:

1. Download the plazesmap zip archive (version 0.4).
2. Unzip it and copy the plazesmap directory over to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory
3. Get a Google Maps API key for your weblog.
4. Edit plazesmap.php and fill in you API key (mine won’t work on your site).
5. Turn on the plugin in your Wordpress admin interface.
6. Call the plugin with your Plazes username and password from somewhere within your templates like so:

<?php current_location('username','password'); ?>

And that’s it!

Todo:

• Add caching of the plazes data

Changelog:

• version 0.4: switched to google maps version 2 (more data & images!)
• version 0.3: fixed Internet Explorer Javascript bug (thnx Andoni)
• version 0.2: added offline and error handling
• version 0.1: initial release

Branches:

• David Linsin created a mapless version that combines Twitter and Plazes, for the XML-RPC stuff he uses PHP, a solution you could use for my version too.

I just finished a first alpha of a Wordpress plugin which integrates my plazes location with Google Maps resulting in the map at the top of this weblog. When i’m online it retrieves my longitude and latitude from the Plazes server and uses that to generate a Google map with a little marker denoting my current location and linking to my Plazes profile.

So useless! so cool!
As soon as i’ve tested it a bit more on my own weblog i’ll release it as an official (beta) Wordpress plugin just like the Last.fm plugin i wrote today.

Todo:

• Replacing the google marker with a plaze marker
• Nicer layout of the popup
• Nicer layout of offline message and error messages