majordojo

Recent Entries in Personal Projects

• ChicagoNow - a "Website That Could Reshape the News"

  I am so proud today to see ChicagoNow featured in an article on Mashable as one of five web sites that could reshape the news. From the article: Owned and operated by the "old media" outlet The Chicago Tribune, ChicagoNow...

• Media Manager works with Amazon. Again.

  Not too long ago Amazon made some important changes to its API to improve security, but this change had the unfortunate result of breaking Media Manager. My knee-jerk reaction was to just go into my code and implement the API...

• Great news for Perl: mod_perlite lives!

  This weekend I was pleasantly surprised by an email from Aaron Stone, the lead engineer of modperlite -- a project the two of us had started while we were both at Six Apart focused on addressing ways to dramatically improve...

• Media Manager users: thank Amazon.

  I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon right now as they recently made changes to their Amazon Product Advertising API that has broken Media Manager. Now I have numerous users tapping their feet anxiously waiting for an update, during a...

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  Still Making Things

  As my life has been slowly re-attaining equilibrium after having a second child, I have still somehow managed to find time to make things. Thank god, because making things keeps me sane when life wants to dog pile my schedule,...

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  Meet Melody

  People who know me, know that I love Movable Type. In fact I have devoted much of the last five years to the product and its community. Therefore it gives me great pride and much relief to be a part...

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  Teaser: Hybrid News Theme for Movable Type

  The most common request from people contacting me is for a redesign for their web site. While I am happy to work with them to completely redesign their website and engineering one exclusively for them, but rarely do people have...

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  A Photo Gallery Theme for Movable Type that works.

  I am the maintainer of the Photo Gallery plugin for Movable Type. It originally started with me creating a plugin to simply automate the installation of Doug Bowman's amazing photo gallery templates for Movable Type and slowly evolved from there....

• Easy, easy, easy contact forms for any web site.

  One project that I had always hoped to find time to work on while at Six Apart was a plugin that provided Movable Type bloggers with a capable and easy to use contact form solution for their web site or...

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  Using jQuery Lightbox for Your Images in Movable Type

  In yet another example of just how flexible Movable Type can be, I have assembled this simple tutorial which can help you make more compelling and interesting pop-ups for the images you insert into your blog posts. This simple recipe...

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  Making a Better PHP Library for Google Checkout

  Long before Google had produced their own PHP example code for Google Checkout, I had the need to create my own. It was a library based upon the idea of keeping e-commerce online simple. My goal was to make it...

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  More Publish Queue Manager Enhancements

  Publish Queue Manager was received well by the community and as a result, I got a lot of bug reports and feature requests for this little plugin. So I spent some time today working on an update that includes: a...

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  Introducing Publish Queue Manager for Movable Type

  An essential component of any large scale Movable Type installation is "Publish Queue." Publish Queue is a system by which files published by Movable Type are published in the background at the next available moment, as opposed to slowing down...

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  Photo Gallery plugin for Movable Type gets some love.

  Finally, the Photo Gallery plugin has been upgraded to work with Movable Type 4.2. At first I considered just upgrading the photo gallery templates, but after such a long time, I figured my patient users deserve a little bit more...

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  Introducing Super Page for Movable Type

  Following the release of Movable Type 4.2 I wanted to take some time to focus some concerted energy upon an area of Movable Type that needed a great deal of love: documentation. In about a week I had managed to...

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  Universal Template Set Hacks

  With the release of Movable Type Pro, and with us making is completely free to bloggers, the Universal Template Set has been quickly making its way into the hands of more bloggers. I often get asked by other UTS users,...

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  Introducing Yahoo! OpenID for Movable Type

  Today I am happy to announce the availability of the first Movable Type plugin to make use of Movable Type 4.2's built in support for OpenID 2.0. The Yahoo! OpenID plugin for Movable Type allows users to provide Yahoo! users...

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  @Make: Introducing AutoLink for Movable Type 4

  Make is brand I adore because it teaches us in its many ways that the best way to understand something is to take it apart, and in some cases to build something else in its place. As a hacker,...

• PHP Paginator 1.01

  I just released PHP Paginator 1.01. PHP Paginator was born out of the frustration of having to reinvent the wheel too many times to do something as simple as creating the next and previous links at the bottom of a...

• Automagic URL redirection and SEO maximization in Movable Type

  Clean Sweep now allows me to change my URL structure without worrying about how Google might penalize me. Clean Sweep is a plugin I released in conjunction with Movable Type 4.0 to help users keep URLs and permalinks valid on...

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  Creating plugins in Movable Type, with NO PERL REQUIRED

  Not to long ago I began work on a very cool new theme, or Template Set, for Movable Type. I had built out all the templates and nearly completed all of my work without having to write a single line...

• Podcasting for Movable Type just got better

  Podcasting support for Movable Type just got better. In this most recent release of the Podcasting plugin for Movable Type, iTunes support has been rounded making it easier than ever before to get your podcast listed and listed properly within...

• Promote This! Plugin updated

  Following the request of a user I have updated the Promote This plugin for Movable Type, the plugin similar to the Socialize plugin for WordPress to include support for Technorati and Ma.gnolia. Thanks for the suggestion cognitive dissident!...

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  Clean Sweep Updates

  A while ago I switched from Apache to Lighttpd and in the process I broke my very own plugin installed locally here on majordojo: Clean Sweep. Clean Sweep is a plugin designed to help put an end to 404's...

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  More Photo Gallery Enhancements

  Last week I began the long overdue process of upgrading the Photo Gallery plugin to work with Movable Type 4.1. A week later I have made a number of improvements and have gotten the plugin to a point where...

• Template Macros: The coolest template trick you don't know about

  Republished from Learning Movable Type, a great community resource to help people get the most out of Movable Type. Recently when working on updating the Photo Gallery plugin to work with Movable Type 4.1 I found myself neck deep in...

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  Stop Design Photo Gallery Plugin for Movable Type 4.1

  In today's Movable Type hackathon I chose to focus on a Movable Type plugin of mine that has been neglected quite far too much since the release of MT4: the Photo Gallery plugin. I held off primarily because I knew...

• mod_perlite working!

  I have had a theory for a long time that perl based CGI scripts could be sped up considerably by simply by keeping the interpreter resident in memory. Not only that, but the module that makes that possible wouldn't be...

• Magnolia Support for Movable Type

  Another one of my hacks yesterday was to beef up Movable Type's support for the metaWeblog API. Of course many services and clients will likely benefit from this, but the inspiration for the hack was the shock and surprise that...

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  YouTube and Flickr support comes to Media Manager

  In yesterday's hackathon I took another whack at Media Manager 2.0 adding support for two of the web's most popular media sharing services, Flickr and YouTube. I have yet to update the documentation for these new services, so here are...

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  Demonstration of Amazon and Movable Type Integration

  Media Manager is still in beta for Movable Type 4.0, but it is still relatively stable and in use by a number of different users across the web. To help demonstrate how seamlessly Movable Type can integrate with a third...

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  Introducing Media Manager 2.0 Beta 1

  Media Manager has been a hobby of mine ever since I first started working for SIx Apart; from my first release of BookQueueToo, which was an expanded version of BookQueue, to a nearly completely rewritten Media Manager for Movable Type...

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  Introducing Clean Sweep for Movable Type 4

  When I upgraded this blog to Movable Type 4.0 I wanted more then anything to completely start fresh. To rethink my URL structure, the use of hyphens vs. underscores in my file names and so on and so forth, but...

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  Movable Type 4.0: The Ultimate Peace Maker

  Movable Type 4.0 is most developer-friendly release of the Movable Type platform to date. We have devoted countless hours creating some of the best developer documentation Six Apart has ever produced, and even harder trying to build into Movable Type...

• It's a Whole New World: Movable Type 4.0 Launches

  Earlier tonight we released Movable Type 4.0. It is hard to describe the feelings I have for this release, perhaps because it is 2:30am and I still am online reading the reviews coming out; but most likely because this is...

• Intermediate Perl Programming

  For those that don't know me, I love to teach. Some may say I love to hear the sound of my own voice, which is also true, but I genuinely love to teach. To scratch that itch, I often teach...

• Weekend Hacking on Test Run

  This weekend Arin took Harper to Los Angeles to visit parents/grandparents and for Harper to get his first haircut. Dad stayed home to do a few chores, order lots of pizza, stay up late watching television, and of course: hack....

• My Hackathon Hacks

  Last week I went on a whirlwind trip to New York. I was there attending and presenting at a Blogging Summit I helped organize at the Affinia Hotel in midtown Manhattan. It was a two day event for developers and...

• Agile QA Practices: A Better Way to QA

  The past several years the Internet has been transformed by a slew of new web based tools and applications. A key success factor in all of these applications is adherence to a development methodology in which product teams release fewer...

• Widget podcast with Niall

  Last week Niall Kennedy asked if I would sit down with him and record a podcast about Widgets and Six Apart. Not wanting to miss an opportunity to hear myself talk, much less have it recorded so that I could...

• Is your Movable Type software Plugin Manager enabled?

  Recently I relaunched Plugin Manager's website. The new website has an awesome new design, compliments of Jesse, and perhaps most important to my users, it also has completely revised and updated documentation. The relaunch inspired a lot of people to...

• Gravatar Plugin for Movable Type

  Gravatar is a userpic service that allows commenters to display avatars or userpics next to the comments they leave on a blog. The original Gravatar plugin for Movable Type was written by Tom Werner, the creator of Gravatar. But he...

• Less blogging, more programming

  Earlier this week I had the opportunity at the Movable Type Hackathon to dust off some of my "old" plugins and start working on them again. The plugin I chose to work on? Why Plugin Manager of course. It gives...

• Announcing "My PHP Google Checkout"

  I bet for many people looking to start an online store think of PayPal first. I remember when PayPal first debuted in 1998 when it fueled a renaissance in Internet commerce by enabling the long tail of retail - second...

• An idea man.

  As I sit here at 11:38 feeling the pressure of midnight while trying to think of something to write about for this 4th day of NaBloWriMo, I hit myself for giving my wife all of my good blogging ideas. But...

• I will never implement a pagination control again. Period.

  Do you know how many times I have been working on an application that has to allow users to paginate through a list of something? 1,259,041. Give or take a few of course. Well, I finally had enough. There should...

• See the Tag Widget in action

  Arvind just sent me a link to an updated screencast of one of his many Movable Type plugins called MTProtect. In this plugin Arvind utilized a Javascript widget/control that I created a while ago, the screencast he created shows it...

• Vanilla is the new Chocolate

  I have been on the look out for good forum software for quite some time to make it easier for me and the users of the various projects I undertake to find help. But nothing I found looked good enough...

• Movable Type 3.3 and Photo Gallery Update

  In case you haven’t heard, the software that powers this weblog has been upgraded to the newly released version of Movable Type: 3.3 Beta 1. Now begins the process of ensuring that the many plugins I have written for the...

• Make your Atom feeds pretty!

  I have always been impressed with the ingenuity behind FeedBurner’s rendering of “burned feeds.” Using a simple XSL stylesheet, Feedburner instructs browsers to render unintelligible XML feeds into a human-readable HTML format. The tech is cool enough and easy enough...

• Announcing Feed Manager for Movable Type

  In my work with the Atom Working Group, which I admit, has been scant recently, I have become really impressed with the number of Atom Extensions being defined and developed by the community - a testament to Atom’s extensibility. One...

• Releasing Photo Gallery: a Movable Type Plugin

  I have been taking a lot of photos lately and have had to upload them for friends and family to see. I have been using a plugin for Movable Type that I wrote a while ago and have been learning...

• 1000+ Downloads of Test Run

  Today, the 1000th person downloaded Test Run. Without a doubt, this project of mine is the one I am most proud of. The feedback I have received from users is extraordinary, and each person who tells me how this apparently...

• Amazon Query

  To be fair, Amazon does have their own native SOAP interface which most likely is a better option than this gateway. Please visit Amazon.com Web Services Homepage for more details. However, as an example on how to implement a Web...