wordpress « /ev/null

Posts Tagged: wordpress

Projects / Web — View Comments
6
Jun 10

Build Photoblog, Build!

A lot of time has gone by since I first posted my plans to build a photoblogging them, but I finally found the time (and will power) to get building it these last few weeks. You can check it out at http://photos.evansims.com.

I’m actually really pleased with how powerful the system is turning out. I’ve got geolocation support in (manual, or auto if you upload using the official WordPress apps from iPhone, Android etc.), EXIF processing (camera model used, time taken, etc.), “People in this photo” and optional visitor tagging (like Flickr!) and more is already in. It’s also structured entirely in HTML5, uses Canvas to render images smoothly, and uses some neat tricks to protect images from theft and hotlinking.

It’s still a work in progress, but it’s coming along nicely. I need to get the iPhone and Android mobile interfaces polished up, and implement a few more details into the system, but all in all it’s pretty much there.

I’ll take a month or two sampling the dog food here before I push out a beta release of the Theme for everyone to try.

Projects — View Comments
4
Jan 10

Building a Perfect Photoblog Theme

Recently, I began working on a photoblog theme for WordPress. Since my work on Colugo, I started thinking about more elegant ways of locally storing and presenting not just mobile photos, but the archive I’ve amassed on Flickr over the years. Essentially, if I wanted to build a locally installed, Flickr-like photo gallery- what would I want out of it?

I’ve started looking at sites like Deviantart, SmugMug and, as I said, Flickr for inspiration. I intend on using HTML5 for the structure, WordPress for the backend, and CSS3 and the Canvas element for some polish. I want it to be dead simple, but also beautiful — of course, minimalist designs are often the hardest to pull off respectfully.

Here’s some early mock-ups:

So, at this early stage in the design process, I ask you; what photo sharing sites do you love, and why? What elements would you like to see in a photoblog theme? If you built Flickr, what would you change?

Projects — View Comments
31
Jul 08

Brightkite Location v1.0 Beta Released

Decided to release my Brightkite Location plugin for WordPress tonight in beta form. The plugin, which you may have noticed on my homepage, aggregates your Brightkite data, showing your location and your latest note or photo. It even builds a sexy little static Google Map for you, and will refresh your information every 10 minutes.

I haven’t had an opportunity to test this on many environments, but it should work on Apache under Windows or Linux under most circumstances. Has very few system requirements (PHP5 and fsockopen support.)

Give it a download and let me know if you encounter any bugs. Thanks!

Update Beta 2 is now available with a fix for Dreamhost users and new customization options.

Web — View Comments
21
Jul 08

Automattic releases WordPress for iPhone

Guess where I am right now? OK, nowhere exciting, really; but I could blogging from anywhere now, because tonight Automattic- the company responsible for the WordPress blogging platform myself and most of the blogging community uses- has released WordPress for iPhone. It’s free to download from the App Store right now.

WordPress for iPhone isn’t the first method we’ve had for working with our blogs on the mobile device; there are a least a half dozen plugins for creating a more hospitable environment for managing your content on the iPhone, but quite honestly the quality of the ones I’d tried left a lot to be desired.

This app is polished, official and completely native, so you aren’t forced to work on your content from within Safari. Thus far everything I’ve played with has worked flawlessly, and the app is super responsive and smooth, even on very large posts like my previous Gotham Knight review. The app works for iPod Touch and iPhone users alike, but the latter gets several additional bells and whistles, like taking pictures with your phone’s camera and embedding them into new or existing blog entries from the same, integrated UI.

I love this app, and I think a lot if you will too. I believe we’ll be seeing a lot more mobile blogging coming thanks to this, and TypePad’s offering. One feature suggestion foe the next version? Use GPS and include the data as a custom meta variable. We could do all sorts of fun stuff with our archives and Google maps if we had that data inserted automatically for us.

Edit: Here’s an intro video from the website for those who aren’t familiar with the app.

Screenshots

Thoughts — View Comments
17
Jul 08

Everything is so shiny and new

Friends and visitors to my site may have noticed a rather dramatic change this afternoon; I decided to bite the bullet and push my redesign, even though I still have a few things left to tweak and polish. Yeah, I’m really taking a note from MobileMe’s launch on this one.

In any event, there’s nothing revolutionary about this upgrade- it’s really just an evolution of the previous design. My goal from the beginning on this was to clean things up, improve readability and have a more useful sidebar. For readability, I increased the maximum content width, increased the whitespace (particularly in the navigation) and softened the background image. For the sidebar, I’ve added Lijit back for blog search, a Disqus panel for browsing popular threads and seeing who’s active, obviously kept my FriendFeed widget, and slapped together a Brightkite location widget which I’ll be releasing shortly.

As I said, I pushed this out a little early, so I’m sure there will be bugs. If you notice any issues, please feel free to let me know in this entry’s thread. Thanks!

Projects — View Comments
6
Apr 08

FriendFeed Activity Widget Released

The FriendFeed Activity Widget is a simple WordPress widget plugin that pulls your FriendFeed stream, pretties it up a bit and shares it with visitors to your blog. It’s essentially a lifestream plugin that requires just a few steps to set up.

Give it a look.

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26
Feb 08

WP-Sightings Preview

So as you might have noticed, I have a little embedded lifestream on the left hand side of my blog here. It’s still just a mock up, sadly, and doesn’t pull live data. I’m working on changing that, though. Initially I was just going to slap some code together in my usual half assed fashion just to get something working, but I’ve instead decided to try my hand at making a WordPress plugin. So far it’s been surprisingly simple- WP has a fairly idiot proof API.

As of last night I finished the draft module architecture and administration UI, and will be working on the actual data pulling and scraping system today.

Continue reading →

Web — View Comments
26
Feb 08

Video Commenting

So thanks to the hard work of Colin Devroe and the rest of the Viddler gang, WordPress bloggers now have the insanely cool option of letting folks comment on their blogs using video. The plugin, which has been in beta for a few weeks now, is freely available on Viddler’s site, and requires just a few short minutes to get setup. Super simple, incredibly slick.

Nice job guys. I love it!

Web — View Comments
24
Feb 08

Back Online

Whoo, that took quite a bit of work. I established a dedicated server with my good buddy Ryan this last week, which entailed a large migration of wordpress data from across my various sites, among other stuff. A few days later, we’re back up and operational – and with a new design, no less. I’m pretty pleased with it, though I still have to whip together the code to make the ‘Sightings’ sidebar actually work. I’ll get to it this week, anyway.

Reviews / Web — View Comments
25
Sep 07

WordPress 2.3 Impressions

So as many of you are certainly well aware, the long awaited WordPress v2.3 was released today after a long series of betas and release candidates. 2.3 has had the blogging community foaming at the mouth for one reason: tags.

You might ask yourself, if WordPress has had categories since day one, why do we need tags? What’s so swell about ‘em? Well, my dear friend, allow me to enlighten you. Categories and tags, while similar at first glance, help you manage your content much easier than either could do alone. Think of categories like manilla folders, and tags as post-it notes on the folders. Categories help organize posts in a strict structure, but tags help identify the content of posts in those categories.

Take my Web Development category for example. I think it goes without saying- everything in there is somehow related to developing stuff for the web. However, how those posts relate to web development vary wildly. I have topics ranging from writing for APIs to setting up Apache on a Windows box. Tags allow me to mark what kind of content these posts have, and in turn makes it easier for me to identify relationships between topics. From a reader standpoint, it gives everyone a quick, one-click search for finding similar content in my site.