OK, i admit it. I’m probably the only person bothered by this. In the age of broadband where mobile phones browse the web at high speed, I’m probably a dinosaur for trying to keep movie file sizes down. But still. There still are people out there who browse the web at 56 kilobits per second, waiting for minutes while a web page full of graphics is transferred to their computer by two analog modems shouting bits at each other.

That’s one reason why I decided to see if re-writing my WP-Cumulus Flash movie in Actionscript 3 would yield a smaller file. Unfortunately, the outcome was not all I had hoped it to be.
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It’s been five years since Matt released WordPress 0.7. I think it’s quite an accomplishment that (and how) WordPress has managed to evolve into a very mature blogging solution with all the right features and no bloat whatsoever. I switched to WP (from Movable Type, like so many others) in 2005, and it has since become my favorite CMS solution. I’ve been using it professionally for a while now, and have made quite a few customers very happy.

So here’s to you, WordPress. May you continue to evolve the way you did!

I’ve just uploaded a new version of WP-Cumulus. Version 1.03 attemps to fix compatibility issues, adds a widget, speed control and several other little things. See here for the changelog.

Update
With the help of Mujahid (and several others), I’ve been able to track down the cause of the “it kills my blog” error. I turns out I was closing PHP’s output buffer once too often, which PHP version 5.2 and newer does not like very much. All should be well for these users with version 1.04. Can’t tell you how relieved I am.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my WP-Cumulus WordPress plugin. Many people have asked my whether they can use the Flash movie in their own projects, and how to go about it. Well, here’s how.
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I’ve been enjoying Suzero’s line of “incompetent companies” posts, so I thought I’d join in…

The internet is where you go to get a good deal, right? I order tons of stuff online, and have had only very few negative experiences. That’s why I felt quite confident ordering a cab to the airport (Schiphol, Amsterdam in my case) through taxi2airport.com. Big mistake.
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It’s been three months since I got my Nabaztag/tag internet bunny, so I thought I’d share my experiences so far.
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Imagine renting a big-ass car, with pretty much unlimited mileage. But when you get in the engine turns out to be too weak to actually move you forward. That’s how this feels. This site too has been hosted with Hosting Zoom for a while now, as are some of my other sites. Recently however, I’ve been getting 500 errors (internal server error). So was a friend of mine, and she eventually got HZ’s support department to fess up. WP is exceeding their memory limit for PHP scripts.
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I’ve updated my Youtuber plugin to include an options page. This allows you to much more easily adjust the display size of YouTube videos to match your blog’s layout. This required a bit of hacking in the previous version. Youtuber generates valid XHTML and is extremely easy to use. If you embed all you YouTube video’s using this plugin, changing a few values in the options page will allow you to adjust the display dimensions of all the videos on your blog. This might come in handy if you ever upgrade or change your theme.

More info (as well as a download link for the new version) in the original post.

A little while ago I posted a Flash based tag cloud frontend here that was hoping to convert into a plugin for WordPress. I had some time on my hands tonight, so I decided to finish it. The actionscript needed a major overhaul, and in order to allow decent integration into as many layouts as possible the plugin itself needed an options page. Thanks to WP’s brilliant documentation, and lots of helpful posts by people who’s PHP skills far exceed mine, it’s now done.
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I love it when business and pleasure coincide. I had to look into styling widgets today for an upcoming project, and decided to use my Paper Trail theme as test material. Turns out the markup of widgets gives you surprisingly (frustratingly) little to work with in terms of CSS. Still I managed to get the widgets to look like I wanted them to, thus completing the theme.

Paper Trail is a two column layout with fancy Flash post and blog titles.

• It requires Flash and Javascript (although it doesn’t break completely if these are missing). If your blog targets mobile users (for instance), this is not the theme for you.
• This is my first theme where I’ve paid any real attention to widget styling. Third party widgets may not look as intended. Chances are they will.
• Thanks to Geoff Stearns, the use of flash will not affect search engine ranking.
• The Flash titles contain complex algorithms that change things like line breaks and font size in order to best accommodate your post’s titles. Let me know if they act up. Using very long words in titles might render them unreadable.
• I’ll not be releasing the source code for the Flash movies. Mostly because I’m afraid you’ll laugh at me for my poor coding skills, but also because I fear you’ll ask me to explain how they work.
• Paper Trail was built for WordPress version 2.3, and will spend most if it’s time looking for missing things like tags on older versions (and not actually work).
• Because of limitations in the way Flash handles dynamic text the theme supports basic Latin characters only. Sorry about that.

If you want to give it a try, you can download it here.