Weblog Tools Collection

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The guys and gals at Automattic have published their Google Summer Of Code 2008 Codex Article which highlights various mentors and ideas. For those of you who don’t know what the Google Summer Of Code Project is all about, here is a brief intro.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together over 1,500 students with over 130 open source projects to create millions of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its fourth year. If are feeling nostalgic or are interested in learning more about the projects we have worked with in the past, check out the 2006 and 2007 program pages.

There are some big names on the mentor list such as Matt Mullenweg, Lloyd Budd, Joseph Scott and newly acquired Andy Peatling with Matt taking on the double duty of being the Mentor’s Mentor. Mentors act as administrators over a particular idea or project that is undertaken by a student.

Some of the ideas that have been proposed for this years GSOC include:

• Performance
• XML-RPC
• Web Forums Export/Import Standard and Tools
• WordPress Import/Export Tuning
• Trac Social Bug Tracking development
• Integrated Caching Solutions
• XHTML validation framework, which helps ensure that all output of WP (including templates) produces valid HTML
• Extending the search system to support more advanced search syntax, relevance, and external APIs like Google or Yahoo’s.
• Batch editing of post and attachment attributes such as categories, tags, author.

As you can see, there is good range of projects for the aspiring coder to participate in. If you are looking to hone your skills and are looking for a challenge, this is a good way for you to test your knowledge.

If you would like to see what was worked on in the previous GSoC, check out the WordPress SOC 2007 Google Group or the article within the Codex.

If you post code on your Wordpress blog, you could use a code beautifier plugin such as syntax highlighter or you could include your code in <pre> tags. They preserve line breaks, multiple blanks, tabs between words and other formatting commonly used in code. However, in some cases, if body of your blog is narrow(er) or your line of code is really long, it will not wrap and will overflow over your sidebar. You can just hide the overflow but that still will look tacky and not very usable. On performing a little search, I discovered that Tyler Longren had already come up with a clever hack to solve the problem. If you add the following code to your stylesheet, it will wrap the long lines of code.

pre {

    white-space: pre-wrap; /* css-3 */

    white-space: -moz-pre-wrap !important; /* Mozilla, since 1999 */

    white-space: -pre-wrap; /* Opera 4-6 */

    white-space: -o-pre-wrap; /* Opera 7 */

    word-wrap: break-word; /* Internet Explorer 5.5+ */

}

via Amit (via Lorelle)

[EDIT] Thanks for the catch, the date was wrong. Links remain same, but the date changed.

10 Rules for your Small Business Website: Having worked for a small business for some time and with Wordpress being such a widely used tool for building small business websites, I think most of these are well thought out and make a lot of sense. My ex-employers website violates almost every rule mentioned.

Spotback provides you with a small script to embed on your posts to provide centralized and socialized ranking for almost anything. Visitors will also receive personalized referrals and recommendations from your site or blog. No Wordpress plugin available but I am sure the plugin programmers out there can whip something up quite easily with the Wordpress hooks available.

Perils of Problogging ia points out the Perils of “Problogging” and when I was notified of the entry, I almost felt like I was being singled out. Food for thought.

JS-Kit is another centralized ratings widget with commenting built in. Not sure how the commenting would help Wordpress bloggers but the ratings widgets are quite nice. However, the commenting/ratings widget might be used for static HTML pages quite conveniently and since JS-Kit uses Akismet to mitigate Spam, comments are bound to be spam free.

Amatomu and Afrigator are Two African blog aggregators with a variety of feed and channel features built in. I was pleasantly surprised to see the volume and quality of blogging activity going on in that subcontinent.

The Simple Ajax Code Kit (SACK) is a javascript library that takes the hassle out of AJAX programming.

This could be especially useful to any WordPress Plugin authors out there that don’t want to spend time messing around with code that isn’t directly to do with their plugin. Implementation is as simple as three lines of code so it makes your code look a lot neater as well.

Key features are:

• Simple and light to implement.
• Addresses security issues that toolkits such as SAJAX have.
• Handles international strings (UTF-8).

Full documentation is available at the link above, and it will soon be part of other plugins such as WordPress: Touched. Enjoy, I hope you find it very useful.

Twilight: Fade Anything is an implementation of the popular, pretty, and generally kick-ass Fade Anything Technique (FAT) for WordPress, basically it allows you to implement this effect simply without editing templates, always useful for anyone who doesn’t want to have to change all the code when they change their look.

Twilight: Fade Anything also adds a pulse effect in addition to the default fade. Implementation is as simple as making sure the element has an id and a class of fade or pulse. A demo is available on the plugin’s homepage.

Hopefully more plugins will start using this useful technique to draw a users attention to something. It is already implemented in Twilight: AutoSave.

WP Plugin Dependency: CMC 1.5: Interesting idea. This developer has built dependancy into their plugin to be forwards compatible with any other “click counter” type plugins that might be developed. I wonder if we could write in some hooks or triggers that would serially list defined functions and classes. Then a plugin developer would just check this list for the function that they want to define, and if not found, redefine/redeclare it. Same could go for variable names, though that could become overwhelming and resource hogging.
[EDIT] On second thought, an easier method would be to check every function/class for pre-definition before declaring/defining it as a rule (which is what I do outside of PHP)

I scratched my head over this for a couple of hours and hope that someone else can benefit from my sore scalp!

Imap mail functions for PHP are very easy to use and are quite quick. They can even be used for normal POP3 connections without certain IMAP functions. I have used them exclusively in a lot of my email scripts. However, almost every installation is different. If you are using imap_open function to open your mailbox, various servers will have different headaches with the function. The one surefire way to get around those headaches (when opening POP3 mailboxes) is to use the code below with your modifications. Basically, you have to specifically request a non-SSL connection everytime or your script MIGHT bork. Also, specifying INBOX saves headaches in many cases.


$mbox = imap_open( "{yourmailserver.com/pop3:110/notls}INBOX", "username", "password" );