Monthly Archive for May, 2010

Contribution to Google News Widget (& Shortcode) Plugin for WordPress

I’d been looking for a good plugin to feed local news to my condo’s website and wasn’t really finding any that seemed to be doing the trick for me, but then I stumbled on Stefania Marchisio’s Google News Widget (& Shortcode) Plugin for WordPress.

It looked pretty good, but unfortunately the built in options, while supporting “localized news”, weren’t quite as specific as I’d like. I live in the US, and it’s a pretty big country. While some news is relevant all across the country (and as I live near the Capitol, in Washington DC, the most major news likely is somewhat local), I really wanted news that was more specific to the immediate area. Seeing as the plugin was just making use of Google’s own RSS news feeds, I looked into it and discovered that Google actually supports localizing the feeds by zipcode and by city names. I took a look at her code and came up with a way to essentially implement this option, and violà, extremely local news!

I submitted my changes to Stefania, and she graciously approved of them and officially implemented them, so now everyone can benefit!

Go check it out.

WP-Slimbox2 v1.0.3.2 (and v1.0.3.1) Released

So I had to release extremely two minor bug fixes (seems like that’s what usually happens).

Apparently I’d never committed the changes I’d made to handle the updated RTL localization support in the index.php file, so release v1.0.3.1 remedied that.

Then, after I had reports from two people who apparently had some minor issues with the plugin (one of them thankfully providing clarity to the issue) not loading the defaults. As it turns out, the code I’d implemented to help me see the localizations people running the plugin were using involved changes that I believe were initializing the plugin storage variable in such a way that bypassed the actual default initialization process. If you’d already been using the plugin, you didn’t notice a problem, but if you were a new installer you’d get a solid black screen when you tried to use the slimbox effect. Needless to say, that just wouldn’t do, so I tweaked the initialization code, and it should all be fixed now.

While you’re here, why don’t you check out our store and buy a T-Shirt!

Official Transient Monkey Store!

I mentioned it in the previous post, but Transient Monkey now has its own store! You can follow that link, or the link from the drop down menu above!

Currently we’re just selling some Silk-Screened T-Shirts, but we’ll be adding more unique and interesting products to the store over time.

Check it out, buy something, support Transient Monkey!

WP-Slimbox2 v1.0.3 Released!

I’ve been sitting on a number of localizations that have been coming in ever since the previous release. I’d been holding off on an update since I’d hoped to get all the current localizations updated, rather than having several minor releases in a short period of time that only updated localizations. Unfortunately, nv1962, who graciously manages the Spanish and Dutch localizations, had a major computer failure just around the time of the last release. He wasn’t able to get things back in order until just a few weeks ago, which was a bit longer than I’d realized! Laws was also able to provide me with an update to the German/Deutsch localization.

In that time, however, I was also contacted by Marcis G. who provided me with a Belarusian/Беларускі localization, and later by easespot with a Chinese (Simplified)/中文 localization (and before I had a chance to release it FunDo provided a second Chinese (Simplified) localization).

Once all of the localizations were in and up to date I had to do some tweaking, plus my curiosity had been piqued by the number of localizations I was getting in, and I wanted to do something that would help me track just how many people are using WP-Slimbox2 in a language other than English, so I threw together a little tracking script, statTrack.php that would transmit that information to me upon activation of the plugin. The only information that’s transmitted is the locale, and it’s only ever done once. Since I know some people are a bit touchy about anything that “phones home” I implemented it in such a way that it can easily be deactivated by deleting the statTrack.php file, without effecting the functionality of the plugin.

Now, just as I was about to wrap all of that up, Christophe Beyls, the creator of Slimbox, posted a comment on the last release letting me know that he’d just released version 2.0.4 of Slimbox, so of course I had to tack that on to the list of things to implement! The main thing he’d implemented that would effect the WordPress community was increased support for RTL languages, though I still don’t have any RTL localizations. He also fixed a few issues with jQuery 1.4 and Flash (currently WordPress only uses 1.3.2, but some users may implement 1.4, and eventually WordPress will likely upgrade. He also trimmed the script down a bit by removing some compatibility code, which was no longer needed after he switched the jQuery requirement to 1.3.

Ok, so I finally got all of that taken care of, but there was still one more thing to do! My brother and I have been hoping to start marketing some custom art type projects, and he’d finally gotten around to getting some of them off the ground, so we’ve added a store! Currently we’re just selling some silk-screen shirt designs, but it’s still cool. Check it out and support Transient Monkey!




Bear