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!

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.

I love tags. I think it’s a brilliant idea to tag blog post. Not so much because I feel it enables people to find information they’re looking for, but because tag clouds usually offer a more adventurous mode of navigation. If I click on a tag called “water” there’s no way of telling whether I’m going to end up reading about water shortages in the third world or the chemical composition of rain. And I like surprises.

What I do not like however, is the way tag clouds traditionally look. Enlarging the font for often-used tags causes all sorts of line height weirdness, which bugs me. This why I started experimenting with Flash to see if I could come up with something better looking. I’m so happy with the initial results I decided to post them here. Both the movie and the plugin itself need loads of work, but please feel free to tell me how you like it so far.

P.S. The tag cloud displayed by the movie is this site’s actual ‘live’ tag cloud, and yes, if you manage to click a tag the page for that tag will open…

P.P.S. You can download the plugin here.

As of now, ‘m testing a new WordPress theme on this site. I haven’t decided on a title yet, and there’s tons of little stuff missing, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be releasing this one sometime this or next month. The most important thing to sort out is decent widget support. This was sorely lacking from some of my earlier themes, and instead of updating them I decided to dedicate the time to designing a new one altogether.

I wanted to use a white background to increase readability, and I’m using Flash movies to do some typography tricks that plain HTML doesn’t know yet. Other than that it’s a relatively simple theme that will be easy to modify by anyone who isn’t completely allergic to style sheets or HTML.

So, what do you think?

I nicked the title for this post from my good friend Marco, who decided to quit his job and work as a freelancer a couple of years ago. Mostly because of Dutch tax law I myself am trying to avoid the term ‘freelancer’, but I did just quit my job. From January 2008 on, I’ll be focusing solely on my own web design business.

It’s been a tough decision, and one I’ve been struggling with for years. I love the people I work with, and will miss definitely many of them. But the direction my employer is moving in does not match my interests, talents and ambitions. Becoming an entrepreneur will allow me work with WordPress more, look into other CMSs, learn PHP and do way more design work. I’ve got plans for developing a Flash-based toolkit that will allow designers anyone to create cool websites with no programming skills needed, and tons of other projects.

Hopefully, I’ll also be able to devote more time to creating new WordPress themes and plugins and improving/updating the current ones. Marco has since his ‘plunge’ been tempted into not one but two seriously cool jobs, which goes to show that things always turn out how you least expect them to.

I’ve been getting a lot of email asking me whether I’m going to be updating my themes to work with the new WordPress version that was released a couple of weeks ago. The short answer is ‘yes’, but there’s a ‘but’. I’m writing this from a spyware-ridden PC in an internet cafe in Bali, Crete, where I’m on vacation with my family. I’ll be back home next week and I hope to find the time to work on a new version for my themes. I’ll post the new versions here of course. Please hang in there a little longer…

I used to get files like this from Mark Jaquith’s website, but hasn’t released changed files packs for the last couple of upgrades. The zip below contains all files changed from version 2.2.2 to 2.2.3. If you, like me, run several WordPress blogs, uploading the changed files alone can really save lots of time.

WordPress 2.2.3 changed files

Please read (and follow) the upgrade instructions, although this particular upgrade does not require you to run the upgrade.php script. If this doesn’t work for you you’re on your own. It worked just fine for me though :).