It’s a real Casio!

IMG_2153-1Watches do have a a common problem: the good one’s are quite expensive and you don’t want to scratch them during daily handicrafts. The cheap one’s are kaputt after such a short time that buying them isn’t worth it.

This week a big German chain store offered a Casio F91-W for 9,99€. I couldn’t say no to this offer. This type of watch exists since 1991 and that cannot be a coincidence. If the watch is operable for on year I am happy but I hope that it will last longer. Let’s see what happens…

Show your desktop

I know loads of WordPress developers by name and have an idea how they look. What I also find interesting is the way people work. Do they use a laptop, how many monitors do they use and other stuf). Here’s my desktop (I’ve tidied it up before taking the image :-)):

desktop.small.1
Click image to enlarge)

The machine is an “ASRock Z77 Extreme” with an i5 3,4 GHz processor, 8 GB of RAM and a Radeon HD7770 graphics card.
I’ve got two 24″ Benq monitors and yes, that’s a TV on the left side. The keyboard is a good old “Windows Natural Pro” and the mouse an IntelliMouse.

Ramon Fincken (@ramonfincken) kidded me that I have only two monitors and sent me a picture of his setup:

ramonafincken-small

What a desktop! To cite him “if it’s worth doing .. it’s worth overdoing”.

(Update: Ramon tweeted his PC spces: 16GB RAM, AMD FX 8350 8core, 2x 256MB dual output asus video cards)

What does your desktop look like? Take a picture and blog about it!

New ideas for pagebar v3 – Part 2: Customization by Drag’n Drop

Though pagebar is quite customizable you can’t define the overall look. “Previous page” is always on the most left, followed by “First” and so on but maybe you want the elements in a different order. I’m not aware that any of the paging plugins provide this feature, pagebar hopefully will do so in the next major version. Continue reading New ideas for pagebar v3 – Part 2: Customization by Drag’n Drop

Ideas for pagebar v3 – Part 1: Direct page access

It’s time to think about version 3 of pagebar. In this series I try to explain what I am planning for this new major version and invite you to discuss my plans.

Part 1: Direct page access

I always wanted to add a fast and direct page selection. The easiest way would be to add a selection box containing all page numbers. This might work if you’re having about 10 pages but if your blog is really, really large, say about 300 pages, a select box with 300 numbers would be quite clumsy: Continue reading Ideas for pagebar v3 – Part 1: Direct page access

New version of pagebar released (v2.60)

As you can see in the title the new version of pagebar is not version 3.0 that I anticipated to release by this summer. Procrastination at its best!

1.

Instead I created another minor version with some features which are quite easy to implement. First there is a new default theme based on CSS3:

To activate the new layout you have to copy the included file pagebar.css to your current theme.

2.

I took the advice of Pippin and added some actions:

  • pagebar_before/pagebar_after (This action is executed before and after every kind of pagebar)

Additionally every bar has an action of its own:

  • postbar_before/postbar_after, commentbar_before/commentbar_after, multipagebar_before/multipagebar_after

3.

One of the main problems of the automagic insertion of postbbar was a second query in the sidebar displaying “Recent posts” that is used by many themes. Version 3.3 introduced a new function called “is_main_query” which enables the plugins to display the postbar only after the main main query. I hope this works for all themes because @toscho thinks that the function has some issues.

4.

Finally there is a new translation for pagebar: Romanian (ro_RO). I received the translation ages ago, excuses go to Web Geek Science

Links:

WordPress: Publishing posts in the past

There may be situations where you want to publish a post with a date in the past. On first sight WordPress does not have such a function. If you look closer you find on the page “Add new post” in the metabox “Publish” the following entry:

If you click on Edit a field appears in which you can enter the desired publishing date:

You can not only choose a date in the future but also a date in the past. After you have entered the date you should not forget to OK because otherwise the new date isn’t used when you publish the post:

If you press Publish the post will be published with the date set above:

Update: Monika Thon-Soun advised me that this practice may not be suitable if you’re focusing on search engine ranking since the subsequent entry may confuse Google et al.

WordPress: Get IDs of *ALL* post tags

WordPress contains a function for getting the tags associated with a post (get_the_tags) but none for retrieving the IDs of all site wide available tags.

The solution to this problem is quite easy if you remember that post tags are nothing else but pre-defined taxonomies and that you can use the function get_terms to retrieve the terms of a taxonomy:

$tag_ids = get_terms( 'post_tag', array('fields' => 'ids', 'get' => 'all') );

Funny enough there is a function for getting all category IDs (get_all_category_ids).