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.

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.

I’ve been quite excited by Ruby on Rails for a while now but I’ve never actually had enough time to sit down and figure things out. Well, recently I plucked up the courage and delved in.

There’s tons of tutorials out there helping you get set up and coding with Rails but I found many of the a little hard to follow and, being a designer more than a programmer, I found myself going round in circles with a lot of trial and error. I finally got myself sorted and I thought it might be useful for other people in my boat if I blogged about just what I did.

This post will tell you how I got my Windows based development environment sorted and subsequent blogs will talk you through some of the first little projects I undertook.