james low

A while ago I “released” limegreen, an application template for making java applications look as good as they can, and function as natively as they can, on OS X, windows and linux.

Anyway, I use it in some of my applications, and I’ve recently added a completely automatic autoupdate feature. It will produce an ATOM file with the version in it and change history, and links for where to get the update files. I choose ATOM, because it meant with the same file I could store information that could be read by a program that needed to know if it should update, as well as allow people to subscribe and be notified of updates in a feed/RSS reader.

I’ve also released a PHP library and wordpress plugin that allows the ATOM file to be read, and version information to be automatically placed on a website. Its what I use to show this, and generated the latest download links on my website. If you’re looking for the PHP library, just download the wordpress plugin and include limegreen.php.

I run several websites / blogs powered off wordpress. In order to back them up I’ve written a unix shell script to do this. It will automatically read the database settings and do a dump of it, as well as copy themes / plugins / uploads.

There are two versions. One will copy files locally, the other allows a remote sync to another server which is compatible with Dreamhost.

The local copy version can be found here: wp-backup.sh Example usage can be seen below. The -t option allows you only to backup a single theme. The -u option allows you to skip backing up uploads.

./wp-backup.sh /path/to/wordpress /path/to/backup
./wp-backup.sh -t theme -u /path/to/wordpress /path/to/backup

There is also a version to work with Dreamhost’s free (with hosting) 50GB backup plan than can be downloaded here: wp-remote.sh

./wp-remote.sh /path/to/wordpress [email protected]:backup
where b123456 is your backup user

Limitations
1) Your wp-config file must be pretty strict in order to be read:
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘database’); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘username’); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password’); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘hostname);

2) The directory you’re copying to must already exist.

3) The options/order of the parameters in calling the script is very strict

In continuing to blog ideas that I think are cool but I need to take off my todo list, here’s a list of apps that I think could be written sometime. Feel free to write them:

Facebook Apps
Social facebook app of where to find hard to find stuff
Mac vs. PC
Virtual Time Capsule Gift app

Deskbands
World Clock
Multiple Desktop for windows XP

Widgets
Scrolling Stocks
Scrolling News

iPhone
Dos Box on iPhone, with easy to build script that incorporates it and a dos application into a new iPhone app
Penny football
Super rubber dub for iPhone
Style Diary for iPhone

I’ve been looking for a spreadsheet widget for dashboard for along time, something to quickly blot without loading up a full spreadsheet like open office, excel or numbers. I was thinking of writing my own, but I’ve been trying not to program so much “pointless” stuff and focus on what really matters. This lead me to the idea of using Mac OSX’s webclip feature that lets you create a widget from any webpage.

I originally tried Google Docs with a public spreadsheet, but something went wrong with the javascript. A quick wikipedia and I discovered Zoho’s public spreadsheet. It worked great as you can see from the image!

Just a quick note saying I’ve released a REST library that I’ve been using in some of my work. There currently exits a version in PHP and Java and it signs the POST parameters with a key, so that you can be sure of client authenticity:

http://code.google.com/p/randr/

I was writing a program and needed a Java class that would read some text a line at a time but also tell you what the last line seperator was, whether a line feed, carriage return or both. It was written very quickly, and may not be perfect, and it requires a java.io.Reader in the constructor that returns true for markSupported()

You can download it here: SmartBufferedReader.java

I spent some time fixing some bugs in my facebook comments wordpress plugin. It uses a lot of regular expressions to scrape data from facebook. Regular expressions can be a real pain to get working, but I recently found this website that helps you test them in PHP:

PHP regular expression tester

This is also useful:
Regular expression cheat sheet

Just blogging and saying thanks for everyone that’s downloaded one of my plugins for wordpress. Its made me the 352nd most popular plugin author by number of downloads.

http://4webmasters.nicuilie.eu/2008/12/top-1000-wordpress-plugin-authors/

Been helping Janakan a bit with his great new app found at www.youtubeapp.com. Its awesome and you can really should check it out.

Things I love:

• Seeing everyone’s libraries, you get to find great videos AND its really interesting seeing how it reflects different things about someone’s personality.
• Auto playing next video, this is great, because you can use a search or setup a playlist and it just keeps going.
• Facebook integration, this is great because facebook is where I go to find out what my friends are doing. I don’t have most of them added as friends on youtube as well.
• Drag and drop, just rocks

Post ToDo is a modification of Our ToDo list with the ability to attach a to do list to a post or page and some additional options.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-todo/

Installation
1. Download post-todo and place in wp-content/plugins/post-todo
It must be in exactly that place to work:
wp-content/plugins/post-todo/post-todo.php
2. Log into your WordPress admin panel
3. Go to Plugins and “Activate” the plugin
4. Add a todo list to a post by just inserting the tag [post_todo]
5. You must be logged in to edit
6. Display all todos from all posts using [post_todo_all]

Todos for Post ToDo
[post_todo]