Life, The Universe, and WordPress
Before Christmas I took a trip to Chatsworth in Derbyshire. It’s a fantastic house set in the middle of the Peak District, and well worth a visit. It was also probably the coldest I’ve been all year.
You may recognize it from the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which is as good a reason as any to introduce Keira Knightley onto this site. It was also in Benicio Del Toro’s Wolfman, but I’ve never seen that.
My first real exposure to the internet came via a University email address, and Pegasus Mail – a DOS based email client. The email address is long gone, but it seems that Pegasus Mail has been going strong ever since:
So now we’re about to enter the third decade of Pegasus Mail. Will it make it to 30? Who knows, but I really hope so: I still enjoy working on it, and even though the Pegasus Mail Thousand hasn’t had entirely the response I might have hoped for, I’ll keep working on Pegasus Mail and Mercury for as long as I can.
Pegasus Mail – Twenty Years Old And Counting.
As a boy I spent many a happy hour wishing I had a Big Trak, a programmable toy moon buggy thing. Maybe it was an early sign of geekness, or maybe it was the fact that it was just really cool and I imagined myself getting it to do all kinds of exciting things.
I was surprised to see that it’s back in production and now being sold as a kitsch nostalgia toy for grown-ups!
Image taken from the Wikipedia entry with CC Share Alike license
Another small plugin, this one renames media files that have been uploaded through WordPress. Although you can rename the title of an image, the underlying file still has the original filename (IMG_1234.jpg, for example). This plugin ensures that the filename changes along with the title.
One of the widgets that I’ve had running on this blog since before widgets existed (in WordPress land, anyway) is an ‘extended comments’ area. This is similar to the default comments widget, but shows more detail.
I’ve packaged it up and made it available in the WordPress.org plugin directory, naturally called Extended Comments Widget.
There have been some fantastic sunsets in Leeds, and this is not one of them (waited too long). Apparently it’s been down to -20°C in some parts of the UK.
Following on from updating some of my older plugins, there are some updates to HTML Purified:
Also AJAX Calendar gets an update:
In the iPad ‘top hits’ section of the app store at the moment (in the UK at least) is an app called Aweditorium. It’s a really nice app to explore bands, and you get to swipe and pinch your way through various music, images, and see random popup information ala VH1’s Pop-Up Video. It’s from thesixtyone.com, which is a website that does the same.
I came across a band called the Hot Toddies, singing a song called HTML. You should probably just listen and make up your own mind:
HTML is not hard to spell,
When I’m with you, when I’m with you
Binary code is just ones and ohs
I thought you knewYou are so swell, just like DSL
You touched my modem, you touched my modem.
We went to the bop, my heart gigaflopped
So my second plugin update in a week, quite a record this year! This time it’s one of the oldest plugins on this site (the readme.txt file said it worked on WordPress 1.3) – PageView.
Enough people were still writing in, all asking the same question – can I make it borderless. Now you can. The plugin has taken a leap into 3.0 and uses the shortcode API, and strips out the stuff that wasn’t being used, while adding a bunch more flexibility.
Not sure why, but I couldn’t get into this game.
The graphics are superb, the controls are slightly fiddly, and the story seems like it would kick off, but I found myself getting frustrated and wanting to do something else.
Shame, I was looking forward to it.
