Freedom Software, Competition, and WordPress Plugins

A Tech article with View Comments posted 13 January 2010.
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You’ve done something noteworthy when people are willing to tell you publicly that they don’t like it. Such is the case with my Wordpress plugin, jQuery Table of Contents. Zoran at Hackadelic, author of a similar plugin, Hackadelic SEO Table of Contents, likes the clean code but could do without the Javascript.
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WordPress jQuery Table of Contents plugin

A Tech article with View Comments posted 10 January 2010.
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I’m proud to announce my first WordPress plugin, “jQuery Table of Contents,” which inserts the lovely little table of contents you see on many of the pages of my website. It uses jQuery to inspect the content of your post or page and generate table of contents links based on the header tags. It’s easy, SEO friendly, and highly customizable.

Download

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CROP Hunger Walk a success

A Church article with View Comments posted 26 October 2009.
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I had the opportunity this year to serve as Co-Coordinator of the Twin Cities CROP Hunger Walk in Sterling and Rock Falls, IL. The walk was last Sunday, October 18, and I’m pleased to report that it was a smashing success!

  • More than 110 walkers particpated.
  • We raised over $6,700 for Church World Service.
  • The stage is set for more successful walks in the year to come.

[I haven't been adding pictures to my blog in the last few weeks because Wordpress 2.9 is coming soon, which will feature much better media management built-in. So watch for CROP Walk pictures in the coming weeks after it is released. Until then, the pictures are up on Facebook.]

Wordpress 2.9 Features Poll

A Tech article with View Comments posted 7 July 2009.
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I was excited to see in my reader this morning that the poll for Wordpress 2.9 features is focused almost entirely on media. I’m looking forward to being able to keep my photos in albums in Core Wordpress, and I can’t wait for 2.9 to come out. If you’re a Wordpress user, go vote!

WP Greet Box is Great

A Tech article with View Comments posted 4 July 2009.
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I just installed a new Wordpress plugin called WP Greet Box. It’s responsible for the nifty little “Welcome, X user!” (for values of X that include Google, Bing, Facebook, etc.) that you see when you visit my website. I had been wanting something like this for a while, and long-time readers might remember that I had a very ugly, homemade version that ran on certain posts for while that I finally got rid of when I upgraded to my current Wordpress theme.

I did consider an alternative, Referrer Detector. WP Greet Box appears to be more friendly to my caching plugin, and is Javascript/AJAX based so that it doesn’t slow down page generation times. Referrer Detector also appears to have a few more rough edges just based on the comments and changelog information I was able to find.

Usually, though, I want to choose the plugin that has the biggest community because that plugin will be more likely to be around for the long haul – and on this account, WP Greet Box wins handily with nearly 40,000 downloads. Referrer Detector’s 5,000 was nothing to sneeze at, but the community’s vote seems to be squarely with WP Greet Box. So far, I’ve been very happy with it.

Clash of categories

A Tech article with View Comments posted 26 February 2009.
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So, dear readers (and I’m looking especially at your, RSS subscribers), I have a question for you.

I have begun (and will happily continue) violating one of the cardinal rules of blogging: keep your blog to a single topic. As I figure it, there are at least five different things I post about on this website:

  • Computers and Technology
  • Free/dom Software
  • The Church
  • Politics
  • My Family

Often times these categories overlap. For instance:

  • Computers + The Church = Use of Technology in Ministry.
  • Freedom Software + The Church = Use of Freedom Software in the Church.
  • The Church + Politics = Denominational Politics in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
  • Politics + My Family = Why My Parents Were Silly For Voting For Barack Obama. (I haven’t actually written anything about this yet, but let me tell you…!)

So my question for you, dear readers, is this: what have you come here to see? Are you here for one or two of those particular categories, or are you looking for that particular blend of craftiness that is (ontologically speaking) Ted Carnahan? If you just want a category or two (e.g. Politics), do you care that other stuff (e.g. Sermons) is in the same feed, or would you actually switch to a category feed? Is this all so-much-naval-gazing, or does anyone actually care?

I’m serious – let me know what you think in the comments.

Viola! New Theme!

A Tech article with View Comments posted 8 January 2009.
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I just got done implementing the Vigilance theme for my blog. I had started out working on my own theme, but I am a terrible designer and my site was very… iffy. With a very few minor modifications, though, Vigilance is working great. I blame Dean for the idea.

Rather than tossing all my ideas and starting over, though, I was able to easily pull in some of the key features I wanted to keep. You’ll notice below this post is a blue bar and no title. That used to be a full post under my old design, but it was always intended to be an “Aside” – a quick, one-off comment like you might find on Twitter or another microblogging service.

It was also easy to modify the template to do away with categories. With the advent of native “tags” in Wordpress, I began to feel like there were two overlapping systems of navigation imposed on the site. “Hmm… I might write about this again. Do I make this a tag? A category?” The only compelling argument I could think of for retaining categories was that categories would allow users to subscribe to subsets of my site through RSS feeds. However, almost nobody who reads my site did that, and I didn’t want the hassle. I decided to ditch the categories and stick with tags, as they give a little more freedom and granularity.

Other than a few tweaks to my widget bar, a few color changes, and some custom images for the site, little has changed on the inside. But it sure is a lot shinier, and I think it’s a good platform for working on new stuff in the future. I also got a chance to play with the git version control system, which is slowly enticing me away from Subversion. Thanks to Jestro for the excellent, open source, freedom software theme.

Introducing ClothesOn

A Tech article with View Comments posted 12 December 2008.
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This summer I experienced a sudden, inexplicable drop in visits to my website. I later found that it was due to a spammer hacking my site and changing my Wordpress template to include spammy links. I cleared that up (see “Does your website sell Viagra too?“) and moved on with life. But I began thinking: it has taken me months to recover from the lost traffic. How can I prevent this in the future.

Well, the first step is obvious – keep up to date on the latest Wordpress releases will prevent a lot of these problems. My site’s defacement could have been prevented.

Nevertheless, seeing the opportunity to procrastinate on my end-of-semester studies (I’m looking at you, Lutheran Confessions paper) I decided to code up a quick, simple keyword scanner that will check any webpage you want, once per day, and email you if something is amiss. I call it ClothesOn.

Give it a shot and let me know what you think in the comments.

Update 29 Dec 2009: Well, turns out that only two people ever tried this out, so I shut it down. Oh well.

Liturgical Wordpress, part deux

A Church article with View Comments posted 2 December 2008.
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Speaking of changing the color of your website based on the liturgical calendar, Scott Lenger has up on his site a Wordpress plugin to do exactly that. I can’t decide if that’s good or bad.

I’ve been thinking of a site re-design for a while, and I blame Dean for getting me started on it again. This is not what I needed to get my final papers completed this semester.

RefTagger Plugin for Bible References in Wordpress

A Tech article with View Comments posted 21 October 2008.
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Logos, the people behind the Libronix Digital Library System, have come out with a plugin for Wordpress called RefTagger. It’s not a new idea – Scripturizer has been around for years – but it seemed good to me to try a new thing.

So now I can type John 3.16 or even Acts 3.1-4.31 (which I just got done doing a 14 page paper on for Educational Ministry) and everything should just work. Now if only I didn’t have to use the English Standard Version on my website – NRSV, anyone?

Also: check out the Semantic Bible project – especially the “BibleRef” microformat. Hat tip to Thomas Keene at Nerdlets.