Category Archives: Blog

This blog, blogs in general, and blogging

WordPress Started Seven Years Ago

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Another year has passed for WordPress, and for me my first year as an inde­pend­ent WordPress developer whose sole income comes from WordPress.

It was seven years ago that I made the the com­ment on Matt’s blog that star­ted the whole thing off.

These days WordPress cel­eb­rates its birth­day on May 27th, the anniversary of the first WordPress release.

I’m really look­ing for­ward to the future WordPress, espe­cially the new merged with mu version.

Update: I acci­dent­ally left this post in draft mode, so I guess it didn’t appear at the right time.

Site Down — My fault

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Appar­ently this blog was down for two days, and I didn’t notice. :-(

The prob­lem came cour­tesy of a track­ing a trunk check­out of a plu­gin. A change got checked in which broke some func­tion­al­ity I was using, and when I updated I picked up the change and didn’t check my site.

I really should know bet­ter. My only excuse: I have been out of the office for a couple of days and busy work­ing for clients.

WordCamp Day 1 Roundup

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I’m back in my hotel room after a very long day at WordCamp UK. I’ve had a fant­astic day. There were some good ses­sions, it’s a pity I didn’t get to see them all. That whole multi-track thing can be frustrating.

My own ses­sion got off to a poor start with tech­nical dif­fi­culties. Even­tu­ally solved, but it threw me a little. I didn’t man­age to fill my 1 hour slot, but it seemed to go down well enough. I got some good ques­tions and feed­back later.

It was great to see Matt again after so long. We were both inter­viewed and filmed after the last ses­sion by two dif­fer­ent people, and I look for­ward to see­ing the recordings.

I then went for a great meal with Matt, Westi, and a small group of people and it was really nice to just chat and chill with a fant­astic bunch.

I’m really look­ing for­ward to tomor­row.

WordCamp UK 2009 — This year it’s Cardiff

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I have now bought my ticket to WordCamp UK 2009. The second annual UK-based WordCamp. This time the venue is Cardiff and I am really look­ing for­ward to it.

Last year’s Word­Cam­pUK was the first and went really, really well. I got to speak at the event, I met some great people, and for me, it was a life chan­ging event — lit­er­ally! Hav­ing listened to and spoken to a num­ber of people who earn all or part of their liv­ing with WordPress, I decided to give up my job and work for myself.

I can’t prom­ise it will be quite so sig­ni­fic­ant for you, but I do prom­ise you will hear some great speak­ers, and meet some really nice people. Some who are experts, some who are begin­ners, plenty in between, all of whom are fans of WordPress.

WordCamp UK 2009 Logo We all work together to make it a great couple of days from which every­one can learn some­thing, be inspired, and maybe, just maybe, it can change your life too.

I have volun­teered to speak again, but don’t let that put you off. :-)

This time I am bring­ing the fam­ily along a day early and I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing some of what Cardiff has to offer. I’m espe­cially look­ing for­ward to the Dr Who and Torch­wood exhibitions

Tick­ets are now on sale, with a dis­count before May 31st. We are look­ing for Spon­sors too.

Come along, all are wel­come. Please book early, as places are limited.

New Release: a DITA to WordPress Importer

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I’ve just released an eagerly awaited (by some any­way) DITA to WordPress importer. Take a look at the tool’s page to learn a little more about what it does.

This is not a gen­eral pur­pose tool. It is par­tic­u­larly spe­cial­ized and only use­ful for people using the DITA Open Toolkit to gen­er­ate web content.

Other developers might be inter­ested because it does import static XHTML files and pick apart the con­tent, extract­ing info, remov­ing unwanted parts, and change oth­ers, as well as import­ing the body of the page into WordPress.

Take a look if you are inter­ested on the plu­gin page (yes, I know an importer is not a plu­gin). Please leave feed­back in the com­ments on that page.

WordPress is 6 — or is it?

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At this time of year, I nor­mally say Happy Birth­day to WordPress. After all it was 6 years ago today I made the com­ment on Matt’s blog that star­ted the whole thing off.

How­ever last year, Matt held a birth­day party for WordPress’ 5th in May. May 27th to be pre­cise, which is the anniversary of the first WordPress release.

If the birth of WordPress was the first release, then I guess I’ve been cel­eb­rat­ing the con­cep­tion.  :-)

Regard­less, WordPress has come a long way. The baby  has grown into a world beat­ing piece of soft­ware. It’s so good I’ve bet the house on it (more of that soon).

Any­way “Happy Con­cep­tion” to WordPress and I hope there are many more to come.

Journalized Theme 2.7.2 Released

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There is a new ver­sion of my Journ­al­ized theme avail­able. This ver­sion, 2.7.2, fixes a couple of bugs raised by users.

  • A couple of 2.7 only depend­en­cies have now been fixed.
  • A prob­lem with ver­sions of PHP less than 5 was fixed.
  • The theme is now trans­lat­able and comes with Rus­sian built in (Thanks to Dmitriy Donchenko)

Go to the theme page to down­load it.

As usual, please add your com­ments, ques­tions, or bug reports to the theme page.

I am par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in feed­back on the inter­na­tion­al­isa­tion of the theme. This is the first time I have trans­lated a theme, so I may have done some things wrong! I have included the POT, PO, and MO files. If any­one wishes to trans­late the theme to other lan­guages, please do, I am more than happy to dis­trib­ute other lan­guage files with the theme.