I Heart Milk Carton Designs 0
I just recently launched a new service to complement Milk Carton Designs, called I Heart Milk Carton Designs. It’s a homebrewed solution for testimonials. You can see it in action at iheart.milkcartondesigns.com or on the front page.
It’s been an interesting process. It started with just an image, then grew into a desktop wallpaper, four t-shirts, and a mention on a Technorati Top 100 blog (#64 at the time of this posting). Pretty cool for a form, some CSS, and a few lines of PHP.
Go check it out and leave a nice note.
The Addictive Future 12
The future of Addictions is something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a few days now. There have been many feature requests (by email, IM, and comments on the two posts, and I’d like to thank those who took the time to make such requests), all of which have been generally accepted as additions to Addictions 2.0 (yes, I’m jumping to 2.0 rather than 1.5 or some other BS versioning convention).
Addictions’ original intent, though probably not made as clear as I could have made it, was to provide a way to show the readers of a blog the author’s (intentionally singular, I’ll explain in a moment) current interest in fields of entertainment — those being games, books, movies, and music. Addictions 1.0 (which I’m bumping 1.0-RC2 to) fulfilled this intent with ease, and then some. However, the people request more, and I’m curious to see where this goes, so I’m going to continue building on to it until it becomes unnecessary or futile.
Some things you’ll see in Addictions 2.0 will include:
- Archiving of past Addictions;
- The ability to have multiple Addictions in one field of entertainment (for example, your top 5 books);
- A more uniform way of placing images (especially useful for people who use theme switchers); and
- Interaction with Amazon’s Web Service, so the user doesn’t have to manually input links
Now earlier, I said that the original intent of Addictions was for a singular author blog. At the time, I did not anticipate the use of Addictions in a blog where there are multiple authors, simply because I normally work in a single-user system, and therefore think in those terms. However, following a user’s request for such, I have decided to separately launch work on Addictions MA 1.0. Addictions MA will have the same codebase as Addictions 2.0 (though it may have limited support for some features), but will be more geared towards multi-author systems in features and will be easily labeled as to whose addictions are whose.
Features for Addictions MA will include the codebase and features of Addictions 2.0 (but with some limiting of the multiple addictions feature) while offering individualized addictions and distinct labelling of them, using what is now subtitles in Addictions 1.0.
So, that’s the Addictive future, as I see it. This should all take a few weeks, so keep watch here, it’ll be here before you know it. I’m extremely excited about this, not only because it’s going to test my PHP knowledge, but also because of the great features we’ll be able to enjoy from this update.
Addictions: The Release 13
The long-awaited (by… uh… Anthony and me) release of Addictions is finally upon us.
My first foray into PHP and Wordpress Plugins, Addictions is a little plugin meant to record and store on your sidebar your current favorites (”addictions”) in the areas of books, music, games, and movies, a la Jason Santa Maria’s “Current Leisures” and, of course, my “Addictions.” There’s not much to say about it, it’s very simple. After installation, you just plug in the information in the Options panel and you’re done. That’s it, outside of any styling you may want to do, and with classes put on most everything, you can do that with ease as well. That being said, you can get more info by going to the official doc page, and download links are below. Enjoy.
Update
Addictions has been updated to v1.0-RC2. There was a bug reported by a user that the movie titles and, subsequently, amazon links (since these two are intertwined) weren’t working. This was due to a typo on my part and was also found in the game code, and was fixed. I also took advantage of the time being spent fixing the “bug” to add the console section to the game settings, so enjoy that added feature. The download links above are still the ones to be used :) .
Addictions 34
I’d like to point your attention to the sidebar for a moment, and at this time, you should be seeing a “My Addictions” section (psst… people of the future… if you don’t see it, don’t worry about it… Joey-of-the-Future may take it down or change the title for some unknown reason to Joey-of-the-Present). It’s a nice little addition there, I think… let’s you know what I’m doing, what I like, and what not, inspired by the sidebars of Jason Santa Maria and Jon Hicks. There’s more to this, though.
Being the freeloader I am, I wanted something like this and I wanted something pre-made. However, I could find nothing like it for WordPress (automated at least, there’s always the… hand-coded way *shudders* ). I was bummed about this, but this is my last day of school for 2 weeks until summer school, and I wasn’t about to let my want go to waste. Oh, no, quite the contrary. I decided to make the plugin myself. Yes… Yes, me… the one with little to no PHP experience, but the will to learn. So, I put my nose to the grindstone, and got to it, and with the help of cross-checking with the source of Eric Anderson’s wonderful WPDI.
So… I present to you the output of “Addictions,” the plugin. For now, since it’s in an extreme alpha stage and this is my first foray into both PHP and Wordpress plugins, I won’t be releasing it, but I will continue testing, and adding features, and will have a doc page up very soon. So, expect a beta very soon, and that page.
The official documentation and info. page for Addictions has been created, along with a Plugins page as a placeholder for a listing of created-by-me plugins ;P .
We <3 IBM 5
And IBM seems to <3 us too. Not only are they backing PHP, but maybe they’ll finally get rid of that nuisance that likes to call itself the SCO Group (though the article has nothing to do with the lawsuit). Also in the article, they state that IBM is about to release some thirty-odd number of open-source projects on SourceForge.net, which is good news as well. Read the article. Have fun.
