Day: January 26, 2012

DrawBot – The Silver Lining of Failure

After having fried my Adafruit motor shield with excessive levels of stupidity by accidentally soldering two chips in each other’s spots, I thought of a little bit of silver lining.  I now have an H-bridge and an IC that may both still be good!

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This is a test of the Simple Series post system… This is only a test

This is really just to see if I’ve solved the “Hey!  The series link doesn’t show up in my RSS feed” problem. 1

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  1. Thanks for telling my Dna! [↩]

My first published WordPress plugin! Simple Series!

This may seem silly, but I’m really happy with having published my very first plugin on WordPress.org.

My Simple Series plugin lets you easily create and helps you automatically maintain a list of posts.  I started writing this plugin because all of the existing ones seemed really clunky and over-engineered.  There’s no need for extra tables in WordPress, brand new taxonomies, or special system requirements.  If you can fire up any recent version of WordPress, you should be able to use this plugin without a problem. 1

As much of a WordPress fanboy as I am, I’ve never actually shared a plugin on the WordPress.org repository.  It was simultaneously easier and more difficult than I thought it would be.  The page that discusses how you can contribute your plugin and talks about “checking out” files makes absolutely no mention of how you’re supposed to do this!

Apparently you require a program to connect to the WordPress SVN to check out the file and commit changes.  On the advice of Schmarty I’m using TortoiseSVN.  Once that was installed and a sub-directory selected, it was relatively easy to commit changes.  If you haven’t tried it before, this whole SVN thing feels like a clunky slow version of FTP.

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  1. Of course, now people are going to start e-mailing me with problems… [↩]

Simple Series WordPress Plugin

I’ve written a new WordPress plugin specifically designed to let you simply and easily create a series of related posts.  You can download Simple Series here.

What does “Simple Series” do?

Simple Series uses a WordPress shortcode to associate your posts together.  All you have to do is use the same shortcode in all of the posts you want to associate together and the plugin does the rest.  It will automatically find all of the posts with the same shortcode, organize them by publication date, and put them together in a professional and easy to read format.  If you wish to change the format, you can just add your own custom CSS to your theme.

How does “Simple Series” work?

Easy!  Just add the shortcode to each of the posts you want to put in the series.  Inside the shortcode you will need to specify the title for the series.  Like so:

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What if I add more posts later?

No problem!  The “Simple Series” plugin will always update the series lists in each of your posts whenever you publish a new post.  The newest post will always be added to the series in chronological order, by publication date.  You can see an example of what it looks like here in my own DrawBot series.

I have more questions!

Cool!  Please leave a comment to this post or send me an e-mail!

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i find i want to add more posts in some random series, just so i can use my new plugin

Wouldn’t that be something?  A bunch of posts… all associated with one another by nothing more than some kind of random brain process fueled by stubbornness, a fever, and too much caffeine?

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Test