d13design.co.uk [ dave waller ]

I’ve finally got around to developing yet more WordPress plugins and one of them has now been released on wordpress.org.

D13Slideshow is a simple WordPress plugin that creates animated, JavaScript slideshows with excerpts from selected WordPress posts and pages. By adding a simple tag to your template you can embed interactive adverts for your chosen featured posts and manage all of the settings instantly, using your WordPress admin pages. Unlike other components, d13slideshow uses the prototype and scriptaculous JavaScript libraries which means that if you already use Lightbox 2 then there’s no further downloads added to your page

The IBDashboard plugin for Wordpress is an easy way to display your detailed IconBuffet statistics in your blog. The plugin will let you display a whole host of data about your IconBuffet profile including your username, avatar and referral link, how many referrals you have, how many stamps and tokens you have, how many deliveries you’ve made, whether you’re a VIP and even all of the badges you’ve accumulated - phew!

Anyway, they’re doing quite well at the moment (so much so that I exceed my bandwidth after just 3 days!). Check them out and drop me a line if you use them on your site.

I thought it was about time for an update to the fucntionality of the d13gallery WordPress plugin which takes us to version 3.4. This new version has some nifty new features as well as some critical bug fixes for the thumbnail saving script.

D13Gallery is a simple Wordpress plugin that allows you to quickly add thumbnail image galleries to your posts and pages. By including a simple HTML-like tag to the body of your post, a folder on your web server can be scanned for images and a gallery generated automatically.

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later but Jake made it to the rabbit hutch when he was playing in the garden and thought “maybe my baby bunny wants a run around!” and, he did. He jumped straight through the gap in the fence and vanished to the fields beyond.

It’s a bit sad really as Jake was quite attached to the little fella but the bunny was just getting to the age where he was getting a bit boisterous and I think he’s now hunting around the local fields for a lady bunny to seduce.

A quick trawl through some of the (countless) online CSS galleries came up trumps this week when I came across not one but two sites that I’ve worked on featued at WeLoveWP.com.

Well, the other week I finally succumbed and we all headed into York to look at some puppies Caroline had found on Gumtree. She’d wanted a puppy for a while now and I wasn’t too sure but when she showed me the pictures I was swayed and phoned up to arrange to go and see them.

When we went to check them out they had a total of six puppies with only one of them taken which was quite a surprise as they’d been advertised for a while and they were incredibly cute (and cheap too). The dad is a Cocker Spaniel and the mum is a Parson Terrier so the puppies aren’t going to be too big and they have a really inquisitive and playful temperament. All of the puppies were black with little white bibs and a few had short terrier ears and a few had big, floppy spaniel ears.

I’ve now had my Windows Mobile phone (HTC TyTn on T-Mobile) for just over a year now and I still love it. Getting my emails done on the train in the morning, browsing the web with 3G and WIFI speed and getting in a quick game of solitaire all makes life worthwhile.

I’ve also been playing about for a little while with software to run on it and thought I’d blog about some of the better bits-n-peices I’ve tracked down.

With a long weekend booked off from work we decided to all hop in the car and head up to the Yorkshire coast for the day. We headed out past York (sat in the rush hour traffic for about an hour) and then sped up the A64 towards Scarborough. We split from the main traffic and headed over to Filey–a bit quiter than Scarborough or Bridlington.

We managed to park up right by the beach and headed down for a look around. After a quick tour of the beach we set off for Filey town in search of a cash machine and a bucket-n-spade shop for Jake. On our travels through the town centre we even stumbled on a small Italian deli where we stocked up on fresh Ciabbata and olives for a slightly more sophisticated picnic.

The last few tutorials have got us pretty far with the “Gabber” application–we’ve now got a micro-blog up and running allowing you to create new posts (using Ajax no less!) and view them in reverse order as part of a styled page.

What we’re going to do now is add some extra bits for choosing avatars when posting messages and the ability to comment on posts too.

Remember, you can view the final application at http://gabber.d13design.co.uk/gabber/public/posts.

Now, if you’ve been following this series of blogs so far you’ll have set up a neat little Rails development environment and created your first application–a little micro-blog that lets you add, show, edit and delete short posts. What we’re going to do as part of this blog is add some styling and formatting using layouts, view files and CSS. So, fire up Aptana and we’ll get started.

Remember, you can view the final application at http://gabber.d13design.co.uk/gabber/public/posts.

While getting to grips with Rails I followed a number of tutorials and screencasts, many of which were confusing and ended with me deleting my Rails projects and starting again. What I’m hoping to do with this series of blogs is combine all of the best bits from the tutorials I used to guide you through the process of creating an actual application.

For this guide I’m going to assume that you’ve got Rails set up and I’m going to be using the environment detailed in my earlier post although you can do much of this with just a basic setup.

So, what are we going to create?

The first tutorial I embarked on was creating a simple blog. This consisted of a main homepage listing recent posts as well as pages for managing and creating posts, I later added the facility to comment on posts and started looking at styling, templates and Javascript to lift the application.

What we’re going to create here is an application called “Gabber”–a simple collaborative micro-blog (a bit like Twitter) that allows people to post a short message and allow everyone to add comments. The reason it’s collaborative is because we’re not going to look at authentication so it’ll be an open system.

You can view the final application at http://gabber.d13design.co.uk/gabber/public/posts.