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!
Default Series TitleZOMG! Simple Series is going viral!
Nine people have downloaded my super awesome WordPress plugin for automatically generated a list of posts in a series!
NINE, internets – NINE whole people! 1
Default Series Title- Wait… now ten! [↩]
Now Simple Series will also add the series list to RSS feeds too!
How awesome is that?!
Default Series TitleThis is a test of the Simple Series post system… This is only a test
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.
Default Series Title- 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:
Default Series Title
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!
Default Series Titlei 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?
Default Series TitleWhat in the world am I doing?
I’m still sick. I should not be at work right now. I should be at home, in my jammies, asleep.
Delirium and the giggles have set in. I wonder what I’ve been e-mailing my clients all morning? Gah, it’s only 2pm. In three more hours rainbow armadillos shooting stars out of their butts will seem the status quo.
DrawBot – The Delivery, Part V
After frying some unknown number of unknown parts, I’m re-ordering an Adafruit Motor/Stepper/Servo Shield for Arduino Kit v1.0 from MakerBot. 1
Upon its arrival, I’ll need to solder the new board and try, again, to build a DrawBot!
Default Series TitleA nifty little WordPress plugin…
The idea for this little plugin has been rattling around in my head for a little while now. It clocks in at less than 60 lines of code, including comments, and makes it easy to create a “series” for posts.
As I’ve been blogging about my (mis)adventures in building a DrawBot, I’ve been updating each post to contain a link back to all of the prior posts in the series. However, if someone were to find one of the first posts – they wouldn’t see a link to a later post. That is, unless I update all the posts. That’s not really much of an option, since I’ve racked up 23 posts in less than 19 days. 12
This plugin is actually super simple. Here’s what it does:
- Add a “post meta” tag for the current post with the same key as whatever you want to name the post series
- Query the database for all posts with the same post meta key as the one for the current post
- Output an ordered chronological list of all posts in with the same post meta key as the one for the current post
The simplicity of this plugin are actually some of it’s strongest features. Unlike a lot of other series plugins out there, it doesn’t create any unnecessary tables in your WordPress database. There are no settings to mess with, no CSS to fiddle with, no ugly standard formatting to overcome.
The only downside I can perceive is that if you delete the shortcode from a plugin, it will still leave the post-meta attached to the post and the post will still appear in the series. If you leave the shortcode in and don’t specify a series title, it will delete the post-meta. I suppose I could include a little button in the interface to delete the post from the series, but really, it’s just not going to be used that often.
Anyhow, this is something that I’ve wanted to have for a long time – I just hadn’t gotten around to building it yet.
Default Series Title- I’ve got a lot to say. [↩]
- And, actually, that’s just 23 posts on this one topic. I’ve probably blogged an equal amount over on the MakerBot blog, with a few totally random additional posts here. [↩]