Blog Surfer

Howdy Stranger
It seems as though the word Howdy, is not liked by many people in many places. I’ve been monitoring an ongoing discussion taking place in the WordPress hackers mailing-list about the subject of the word Howdy being used in all instances of WordPress, despite the locality of the end user. The discussions have ranged from […]

It seems as though the word Howdy, is not liked by many people in many places. I’ve been monitoring an ongoing discussion taking place in the WordPress hackers mailing-list about the subject of the word Howdy being used in all instances of WordPress, despite the locality of the end user. The discussions have ranged from “Not everyone greets each other by saying Howdy” to “Whats the big deal about the word Howdy anyways, it’s not like it breaks WordPress”. The good news is, because WordPress is open source, there is generally someone out there who has the skill and know how to put together a solution for even the most mundane problems.

This brings me to the “No Howdy Plugin” created by Ozh. No Howdy provides you with the opportunity to change the text in that area of the WordPress administration panel, or you can completely remove the text from appearing in the first place.

To use this plugin, copy the text from the link above and paste it into Notepad or your favorite code editor such as Dreamweaver. Save the file as no_howdy_plugin.php and then upload the file to your plugins directory. Activate the plugin from within your administration panel and you’re all set. In order to customize the plugin, edit the plugin file by changing the word (Bonjour) to the text that you would like to have displayed.

Addendum from Ozh: the word “howdy” is localized, so for instance in the fr_FR translation it becomes “Bienvenue”.

WordPress 2.4 Admin Preview
WordPress 2.4 Admin Preview: Jordan built up a mockup of the new WordPress 2.4 admin backend. Some of the features work, some of them do not. However you can still get a good idea of what it will look like in 2.4 and where the admin redesign is headed. Via Email. Also, TubeTorial has a […]

WordPress 2.4 Admin Preview: Jordan built up a mockup of the new WordPress 2.4 admin backend. Some of the features work, some of them do not. However you can still get a good idea of what it will look like in 2.4 and where the admin redesign is headed. Via Email. Also, TubeTorial has a video walkthrough of the new admin interface.

[EDIT] Please be mindful of the fact that this is a cursory glance at unfinished work on the WordPress admin interace and nothing else. Please read Matt’s comment.

6 things to try in Rails this year
It seems that blog posts in the first couple of weeks of the new year (happy new year by the way) follow the “x things to do this year” meme as a virtual homage to new years resolutions. Never one to buck a trend, I have prepared this short list of things you should try […]

It seems that blog posts in the first couple of weeks of the new year (happy new year by the way) follow the “x things to do this year” meme as a virtual homage to new years resolutions. Never one to buck a trend, I have prepared this short list of things you should try in Ruby and in Rails - I hope to cover each topic in more detail over the next couple of weeks.

1. Install Rails: This is aimed at those of you out there that haven’t tried Ruby on Rails yet. Jump in - have a go, there are plenty of resources out there, and it is fairly easy to install regardless of your platform
2. Upgrade to Rails 2.0: I have covered what’s new in Rails 2.0 in a number of my previous posts, and upgrading isn’t really THAT difficult if you follow the steps and fix any deprecation notices.
3. Write a plugin: Plugins allow you to re-use common patterns without having to resort to the dreaded cut-and-paste keys. Rails has a built in plugin generator that gives you the skeleton code, all you need to do is to mix-in the right modules - oh, and write the code…
4. Try out RESTful routes: RESTful Rails have been around for a while now, but many of the tutorials around the net are still CRUD based, so if you are a Rails beginner, you might not have tried them out yet.
5. Use Ruby as your scripting language: Because Rails does such an excellent job of doing the hard work, it is very likely that you have never had to manually connect to a database or read the contents of a directory or performed other mundane tasks in Ruby. If you have to do any scripting, instead of PERL or Python, use Ruby - it will help you better understand the nuances of the language.
6. Refactor your code the Ruby way: If you have come from other C-like languages (such as PHP or Java) you would
   be used to the idioms from that style of coding. Try refactoring your code to use blocks instead of for loops, or using inline if statements - you can squeeze a lot into one line in Ruby, see how far you can push it. Again, this is a great exercise to learn the language.

Go on, try them out - the new year is a great time to try something new!

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

HTML Purifier 3.0
HTML Purifier 3.0 has been released. What is HTML Purifier? HTML Purifier is a standards-compliant HTML filter library written in PHP. HTML Purifier will not only remove all malicious code (better known as XSS) with a thoroughly audited, secure yet permissive whitelist, it will also make sure your documents are standards compliant, something only achievable with a […]

HTML Purifier 3.0 has been released.

What is HTML Purifier?

HTML Purifier is a standards-compliant HTML filter library written in PHP. HTML Purifier will not only remove all malicious code (better known as XSS) with a thoroughly audited, secure yet permissive whitelist, it will also make sure your documents are standards compliant, something only achievable with a comprehensive knowledge of W3C’s specifications.

What’s new in 3.0?

Release 3.0.0 is the first release of 2008 and also HTML Purifier’s first
PHP 5 only release.
The 2.1 series will still
be supported for bug and security fixes,
but will not get new features. This release a number of
improvements in CSS handling, including the filter
HTMLPurifier_Filter_ExtractStyleBlocks which integrates
HTML Purifier with
CSSTidy for cleaning style sheets
(see the source code file for more information on usage), contains
experimental support for
proprietary CSS properties with %CSS.Proprietary, case-insensitive
CSS properties, and more lenient hexadecimal color codes. Also, all code
has been upgraded to full PHP 5 and is
E_STRICT clean for all versions of PHP 5 (including the
5.0 series, which previously had parse-time errors).

You can run a live demo to see it at work.

SimplePie Almost Dies
Geoffrey Sneddon, one of the developers behind the popular syndication plugin called SimplePie has announced that he will be discontinuing his role as an active developer. In a blog post published on the official SimplePie dev blog , Geoffrey explains why it’s time for him to move on. Schoolwork, lack of available time for the […]

Geoffrey Sneddon, one of the developers behind the popular syndication plugin called SimplePie has announced that he will be discontinuing his role as an active developer. In a blog post published on the official SimplePie dev blog , Geoffrey explains why it’s time for him to move on. Schoolwork, lack of available time for the project and what free time he has is spent on the HTML 5 specification and Tolerant HTTP Parsing specification. However, a couple of the modules that deal with the SimplePie API will be maintained.

Despite Geoffrey leaving his development duties, he has left himself open to take more of a consulting role with the 1.x SP code base.

The good news? Ryan, the other developer for SimplePie has responded by stating:

1) SimplePie is NOT stopping development. I have big plans for where I want to take SimplePie, and those can’t happen if SimplePie is dead. In posts over the past few months, I’ve talked about where I want SimplePie to go, and that is still the plan, although it may take a little longer.

2) Over the past 3.5 years, SimplePie and it’s community have grown larger than Geoffrey and I could properly handle. It’s certainly larger than I alone can handle. Geoffrey and I will be looking for people in the SimplePie community to get involved with development, support, and other various aspects of the project.

3) I’m expecting to release SimplePie 1.1 in a matter of days. We also have a MySQL-capable branch that was likely to be 1.2, and will now definitely be 1.2. SimplePie 1.5/2.0 are no longer on any kind of timeline, as we need to get new people involved and up to speed first before we really plan those releases out.

As soon Geoffrey and I have time to work out more of the details, we’ll be sure to let you know.

I currently use the SimplePie Plugin for WordPress which provides WordPress bloggers the ability to syndicate RSS and Atom feeds to your blog. It works wonderfully well and is the plugin that powers my link blog. I really hope development continues for SimplePie as it would be a real downer if the project were to disappear.

Do you use SimplePie? If so, be sure to let me know your thoughts on the plugin.