At last I am putting in some love to All Forces. Today I launch the new design and hope to post more often now that everything is in order. A few thoughts about the redesign. The new design is not a big departure from the previous one, the truth is I liked the old design. But under the hood it was just a hack of the default Kubrick template. So I set out to redesign it from scratch but maintaining it’s elegant simplicity. The goal was to have a wider design, ajaxed comments, search hints, ajax contact form, ajax share functionality and the least amount of plugins possible. This means I had to write a lot of this functionality myself to keep the code clean and fast.

The only plugins I am using now are Akismet for spam, Audio Player for some old posts I have with audio(might get rid of this one soon), HeadSpace2 for Google Analytics and auto-generated meta keywords and meta descriptions, Popularity Contest for generating the top posts on the sidebar, WP-Cache just in case I ever get Dugg, Viper’s Video Quicktags (can’t believe this is not part of wp core) and WP-PageNavi for the paged navigation on posts. The paged navigation in the comments area is made with  JQuery and 1 line of PHP code. Perhaps I’ll do a post on that next. The live search hints is done in a similar way but with the help of a Quicksilver javascript port and the work from John Nunemaker and John Resig. It loads a list of all posts via JQuery after the page is loaded and then filters them as text is entered in the search field.

The Share and Contact functionality is all JQuery and a wonderful PHP class I wrote a while back for sending html emails. The code I hope to release in the near future.

One thing to note, you can now follow just All Forces posts via twitter @allforces or you can get my more frequent, random and personal posts at @melvitax. I would love to hear your thoughts.

Added: It looks like Viper’s Video Quicktags might be  getting rolled into  WordPress 2.9. Oh, and post thumbs as well which I forgot to mention I wrote my own version of.

The job of approving comments sometimes falls on a person who does/should not have access to the WordPress admin. By design WordPress only allows a user with admin privileges to do this job. I wrote an an External Web Interface for approving pending WordPress comments via XMLRPC.

Check it out, it is open source on google code:
code.google.com/p/wordpress-comments

View my “Be Right Back” page

Enough of this blank “Be Right Back” pages we usually throw together when we need to do website updates. It is time for a nicer, more web 2.0 savvy under construction. Next time I do an update to WordPress, I’ll be replacing my index.php file with this one, and then switch back when all is ready to go.

Here’s what I have:

1. Links to my other web sites and web services.

2. Flickr gallery via the flickr.com’s Make a Badge tool

3. Twitter updates via twitter.com’s Make a Badge tool

4. Last.fm gallery via Jeroen’s Last.fm Records standalone version which grabs images from amazon.com. I actually copied the whole script and included it in the PHP file so that it is not dependent in other files. I also disabled album art caching since this page is really going to be up for a few minutes. If you are going to use it for longer, then you should consider enabling caching the images. Consult the original script for more info on this.

To do this yourself:

1. Download my “Be Right Back”. Note, PHP 5 is required for the Last.fm portion to work. 

2. Open it in a file editor and change the following items:

• The page title
• The site links should point to your of course
• The Flickr user number in the Flickr javascript link. It might be best to create your own Flickr badge, grab the javascript and replace this one.
• The Twitter username in the javascript url.
• The last.fm username in the PHP code, right after $lfm->username.
• The footer info.

As some of you know, Apple asked me give a session about WordPress at at their WWDC 07 conference this year. The session was titled “Designing and Extending the Mac OS X Blog Experience” and they gave me an hour to cover how to create a local development system for designing blogs with WordPress and Mac OS X. So I practiced, practiced and practiced my session and had my Steve Jobs moment with Keynote and a huge screen behind me… and I did alright. The video(audio and slides) of the session is now available in the iTunes Store. An Apple Developer account is required but you can get that at no cost.

Link: ADC in iTunes Store (Link Updated)
Look for it under WWDC 2007 Sessions > Content and Media – Video

I’m flying out tomorrow to San Francisco to speak at Apple’s WWDC conference. My session is titled Designing and Extending the Mac OS X Blog Experience and will be on Friday. I will be covering WordPress extensively, it should be fun. If you are at this year’s WWDC, please let me know, I would love to meet.