cdcstudios.com | portfolio v8.1 » plugin

A WordPress Plugin a day for 30 days

Chris — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 02:45:27 +0000

WordPress is one of the greatest blogging if not full fledged CMS tools you can find, it’s greatest strength is the ease of adding new functions via a plugin. Once I hit a list of 30 plugins I’m going to try and release a plugin a day every day for a month. Every day an unreleased plugin that tweaks your site in a variety of different ways. Whether you want to be a better admin, better with social media, or to provide cooler functions for your readers there should be a plugin you’ll want.

My current idea list:

refresh comments admin dashboard
A simple idea that adds “refresh me” to the recent comments widget on the dashboard, and uses ajax to only refresh that widget.
feedburner widget for dashboard
Integrated dashboard widget that shows the summary of feed data.
plugin compatibility checker
The idea is when you try and add a new plugin it will check your plugin list against the plugin compatibility checker to see if it will fail. This one is likely to not be done by me lol.
mint stats dashboard widget
I love Mint stats so much. I just don’t love always opening an external page to see it. Giving me my stats via the dashboard in widget form is a no brainer.
social media welcome mat with follow me message.
If people are referred by twitter the header would say “Welcome twitter users, Like what you see? Consider adding to get updated on new posts” or whatever the user decides to have the message say.
Referrer widget for dashboard
show your readers where the most recent hits came from.
WPMU plugin installer permissions
allow users to only install admin approved plugins from wordpress.org/extend/plugins gives users flexibility but protects your WPMU site (Not even sure if this one is possible or worthwhile)

Obviously this is just a very rough list and I’d love more input and more importantly feedback about what functions you want new plugins to serve. So take a moment and suggest something you’d like me to try and build.

Not my picture (again courtesy of the tagaroo plugin and Flickr).

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Week 1 review of being a dad of 2 little boys

Chris — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:31:34 +0000

So far so good. We’re doing an alright job of adjusting to life with 2 boys. Many of you are probably thinking “pshaw, how hard can two boys be”. To you I say, you’re either not parents or else you’ve forgotten the difficulties of mixing newborns with big boys:

Diaper changes with a newborn can quickly turn into a chain reaction (you’re midway through the change when they poop again).
15 month old boys demand far greater attention because they are constantly trying to give hugs, toys and food to the newborn.
Sleep schedules being completely alien to anything remotely normal.

Due to our own bad planning (with the greatest of intentions of course) I am now sleeping on the queen size bed in our oldest’s room (still really not used to saying “our oldest”), while the wife is sleeping in the big comfy king in our room. It wasn’t the original plan but it tends to keep us both a little more on the sane side. I do have to say that it’s nice going to bed before 10pm again. I’d forgotten how well rested you can feel even when you wake up at 8am on a Sunday.

Next weekend ought to be interesting since we’re taking the boys to the tricities for a week (the wife will be staying there too) so I can clean the house, get the car fixed (there was some damage to it Thursday when I had to choose between hitting a teen or a wall, obviously I picked the wall) and then get some work done on a few projects I have in my head like:

Portlanddreams.com – Yeah it’s high time I got the work I have completed uploaded and prepped for the rest of the dev team to finish up in time for the rolling beta in 2 weeks.
The tech tutorial/widget/plugin sharing site I have yet to name – I don’t want to spoil things with this one yet but suffice to say I think it’ll be fun.
WP-Ubercomments – The widget I told Rick Turoczy I’d write for him
Finally migrate from my aging unstable p4 to the shiny quad core sitting gathering dust in my living room
Rearrange some things and clean up my workspace at home to provide a better more productive environment
Continue tweaking this site as well as getting a little bit of work done on the new theme I’m considering deploying

Oh sorry for not posting new pictures. Some asshat stole my Mother In Law’s camera before she had a chance to get the pictures uploaded. There will be a bunch coming soon.

Sometime in the next two weeks I’ll also have posts up on:

Part two of my post on Thunderbird
A review and getting started guide for Tiny Tiny RSS
A huge collection of sprays for Team Fortress 2 (and other Steam games)

In closing I’d just like to say congrats to Demonoid.com to their reopening as a torrent site. A lot of us missed you guys. Also congrats to Dawn Foster for launching Portland is Awesome!

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iPhone Webclip plugin now available

Chris — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:08:20 +0000

Late Saturday night I decided it was high time to finally make a webclip icon for cdcstudios. It was a total piece of cake and shortly thereafter I made another one, this time for the folks over at Silicon Florist. For those not in the know, a webclip icon is the iPhone or iPod Touch desktop bookmark icon. They’re really easy to make and quite useful as displayed in the pic above.

With this plugin you can make a custom icon for your wordpress site or your wordpress multiuser site (yep this plugin will allow each individual WPMU blog to have full support for custom webclips). Head to the plugin page to get it or if you have any questions about it.

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