I have updated Less, my WordPress blog plugin that simplifies WordPress’s “read more” function. The old version of Less will not work in the upcoming WordPress version 2.1, so you should upgrade Less before you upgrade WordPress. Continue reading “Less WordPress plugin version 1.1” →
Top Cat WordPress plugin version 1.2
I have updated Top Cat to version 1.2. Top Cat is a WordPress plugin that allows you to specify a main category for your posts. It also provides template tags for displaying the main category or using it in themes. The canonical example of Top Cat use is my Bennettarium blog. (I wrote Top Cat to help convert the blog over to WordPress.) Continue reading “Top Cat WordPress plugin version 1.2” →
Test-driven development of WordPress plugins
Evermore, one of my WordPress plugins, has been around for a year or so. It’s worked very well, but occasionally I did receive reports of mysterious failures. In an effort to fix it once and for all, I decided to take a new approach. So for the last couple of updates I have used a test-driven development (TDD) approach to iron out all remaining wrinkles. The results were interesting. Continue reading “Test-driven development of WordPress plugins” →
Spring MVC: How it works
If you are interested in the Spring Framework’s MVC packages, this could be helpful. It’s a unified description of the life cycle of a web application or portlet request as handled by Spring Web MVC and Spring Portlet MVC. I created this for two reasons: I wanted a quick reference to the way Spring finds handlers for each stage of the request; and I wanted a unified view so I could see the similarities and differences between Web MVC and Portlet MVC. Continue reading “Spring MVC: How it works” →
Evermore WordPress plugin version 2.2
I have updated Evermore, my WordPress plugin for automatically displaying just the beginning of each post. Recent updates have focused on making it work better; this update improves configuration and problem diagnosis. If you are happily using version 2.1, you don’t need to upgrade. Continue reading “Evermore WordPress plugin version 2.2” →
Search Meter WordPress plugin version 2.1
Search Meter 2.1 is a new version of my WordPress blog search statistics plugin. This version fixes the dreaded “duplicate search” problem that a few people have reported. It’s interesting that there were two causes of this problem — the first was already fixed in version 2.0, but the fix for the second variant was much trickier. Continue reading “Search Meter WordPress plugin version 2.1” →
Nofollow is not as bad as you think
I wrote recently about why the worst thing about nofollow is its name. My response to Maxpower’s thought-provoking comment grew too long for the comments section, so here’s a slightly longer exposition of what’s wrong and right with nofollow. Continue reading “Nofollow is not as bad as you think” →
Evermore WordPress plugin version 2.1
I have updated Evermore, my WordPress plugin for automatically displaying post previews on your homepage. Version 2.1 is better at detecting paragraph boundaries, so it should work even on posts generated by tools like “RSS to Blog” and Postie. Generally, it works more reliably on unusually formatted posts. The Options page is also (slightly) nicer.
You can get full details and download Evermore at the main Evermore page.
Nofollow: good idea, bad name
I have never understood the furore that greeted Google’s introduction of the rel=”nofollow” attribute. It seemed to me to be a perfectly sensible way of specifying the provenance of hyperlinks on a Web page. However, many people took it to be Google’s way of penalising contributors to blogs and other interactive websites. Some even thought that Google was guilty of a blanket attack on all blogs. These accusations aren’t true, but the reasons they came up are interesting: Google gave a spurious justification for nofollow; and the name “nofollow” itself is misleading. Actually there are good reasons to use nofollow, and if it had a better name it would be more widely used and less controversial. Continue reading “Nofollow: good idea, bad name” →
C# documentation comments: useless?
Despite C# being several years old, there’s no official supported tool for generating human-readable documentation from C# programs. Microsoft’s C# specification describes a rather verbose form of documentation comment that programmers are supposed to use in their code, but they don’t supply the tools to do anything useful with these comments. After a bit of searching and quite a few dead ends, I finally found a simple way of generating the documenttion I needed. Here’s the full story. Continue reading “C# documentation comments: useless?” →