Monthly Archives: September 2006

Preferred WordPress plugins

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It is amazing to see the quantity of plugins that are available for WordPress; so far, I’ve found a plugin for every idea that I’ve had for this blog, so these are the links of each one of them:

Another worth mentioning is Gengo for localizing (translating) your pages and posts; I have played with it and it is simply awesome!

Finally, I also add here a “plugin” in the generic sense – since it is not a WordPress plugin, but a JavaScript library that can be used in any website: dp.SyntaxHighlighter that can be used to highlight the syntax of code shown in blog posts… really simple to use and with great capabilities (I’ve already mentioned it before).

It allows you to do things like this:

[source:sql] SELECT TOP 10 FirstName, LastName, Email, –SUBSTRING(Phone, 2, 3) AS CityCode, SUBSTRING(Phone, 7, 8 ) AS PhoneNumber, upper(LanguagePref) AS Language, Address1, UpdatedOn AS CreatedOn FROM profiles WHERE — Exclude all test emails Email NOT LIKE ‘%test%’ AND Email NOT LIKE ‘%asdf%’ ORDER BY UpdatedOn DESC [/source]

Particularly, the WP Unformatted plugin must be installed and enabled to use dp.SyntaxHighlighter, since otherwise WordPress “reformats” the text of the posting, and this affects the inserted code. To use WP Unformatted, just create your post and add two custom fields: “sandpaper = 1″ and “sponge = 1″, and that’s it! Your code will appear correctly formatted.

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Update, February 20th 2007: Using the SyntaxHighlighter Plugin from Erik Range makes WP Unformatted unnecessary! Thanks Erik!

Starting again

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So here we go again. They say that the only constant thing is change.

Back to blogging, but with a few differences. Not only on the screen, but in real life too.

This time, I drop the idea of maintaining several blogs at once, as I did before with those previous blogs. It was much too work :-P actually, only two of those were purely mine, since “Stop the Press” was more a blackboard to put interesting stuff that I find elsewhere, trying to keep it in a handy place. As a matter of fact I always feared that someone e-mailed me telling me to take those copies offline, but it never happened, and I hope it doesn’t; I like to have all of that online.

I also drop Movable Type altogether, and instead choose WordPress. For several reasons:

  • WordPress is open source software; Movable Type is not, although it is free;
  • WordPress is easy to install, to use, etc, etc, etc.;
  • WordPress has lots of cool plugins and themes;
  • WordPress has a rich text editor for posts that works also on the Mac;
  • WordPress looks and feels nicer (purely subjective)
  • Scobleizer uses WordPress :D

The old blogs will remain at the same URL as before, since some posts (particularly those related to Ubuntu and the Linksys wireless card configuration) are referenced from other sites, and I do not want people to get lost. Those pages are very important to me, and hopefully to others as well.

And in my life… well, Claudia came to Switzerland and we’re finally married. Life starts again, better than ever. My working life has also changed substantially; I no longer work with or for Microsoft technologies; I am now senior C++ software developer in riskpro technologies AG, happily using and discovering wxWidgets, Boost, Ubuntu, Ruby on Rails and lots of other cool things going around, free to discover, to enjoy, to use, and to fix, if needed. I have discovered lots of cool stuff, and everyday the open source world keeps me more amazed, entertained, and productive than ever before; this is something that Microsoft ceased to do long ago…

So here we go again, because I still have a lot to say. Stay tuned!