A Tasty Pixel

I ♥ Alfred: Code execution extensions

I’m a really big fan of Alfred, and lately I’ve found it really useful for running tiny little snippets of code — whether it’s to quickly URL decode a string, or remind myself of how C integer-to-float conversion behaves, I find myself using these little extensions I put together quite frequently.

Here’re two workflows I use to run PHP code (one which just executes it and shows the result in Growl, and one which copies the result to the clipboard), and a workflow that runs a snippet of C code. Of course, it wouldn’t take much to make workflows for many other languages, too.

Alfred 2 workflows

Now with live results! Hit enter to copy result to clipboard.

Run C Code.alfredworkflow

Run PHP Code.alfredworkflow

Older, Alfred 1 extensions:

Execute PHP Code.alfredextension

Execute PHP Code, Copy Result.alfredextension

Run C code.alfredextension

Keeping blog visitors by showing meaningful search results in WordPress

I recently became disgruntled with the way my blogs displayed search results. By default, WordPress blogs will show searched posts exactly as they might appear on an index or archives page: Typically as an extract, or perhaps even as the full entry.

This doesn’t help at all if you’re looking for something in particular – It’s a much better idea to show the post within the context of the search query, as real search engines do.

See it in practice here.

This is a fairly easy thing to actually get working in WordPress. It’ll take just a couple of minutes, and will make a big difference to blog visitors. Here’s how I did it.

Sort your Flickr photostream

Flickr has a limitation that your photostream is ordered by the date you uploaded your photos, and this order can’t be changed. If you’ve done a big import of photos – say, from iPhoto – then they could show up in your photostream in any order.

There’s been some talk about the issue, with one suggested solution being to manually set the ‘posted’ date of every photo to the ‘taken’ date. A utility exists to do this, but it has some major limitations, including a difficult user interface and limitation that causes the process to fail if you have any photos that were taken before the date you set up your Flickr account.

So, I’ve made a utility specifically for sorting a Flickr photostream. It should be fairly user friendly, and provides the ability to backup and restore your photo metadata, in case you ever want to revert.

Check it out here: SortMyPhotostream, or get access to the SortMyFlickrPhotostream source.

Leave a comment below if it’s useful to you.

Flickrpress: WordPress Flickr widget

Flickrpress is a widget/shortcode function to display items from Flickr in the sidebar or within pages and posts. This widget supports:

Flickr RSS feeds
Photostream
Filtering by tag
One or more photosets
Favorites
Displaying random items

Other features:

Choose from three different thumbnail types
Lightbox/Thickbox are supported
Data is cached locally to lower server load
Secure Flickr API used, to eliminate the risk of damage to your server, unlike some other Flickr widgets
Flickrpress is a multi-widget, so you can use more than one instance (e.g., one in your sidebar, one in your footer)
Use as a shortcode to insert into posts and pages — multiple instances supported in the one entry

Flickrpress uses the excellent phpFlickr library.

Links for May 21st through June 2nd

Links for May 21st through June 2nd:

49 Decent Virtual Assistant & Personal Outsourcing Resources
PHP: Display Adobe PSD files on a web page "Any webdesigner know the PSD filetype, which is the Adobe Photoshop format. PSDs have a lot of great features, as such as layers, but they can’t being read by a browser. Unless you use this great PHP class!"
Iconfinder – Icon Search Made Easy
Typetester – Compare fonts for the screen
KNAppGuide KNAppGuide is a Cocoa framework for embedding “guides” into your application, visually inspired by Apple Guide from the System 7 and 8 era

Private Tags WordPress Plugin

The “Private Tags” WordPress plugin allows users to specify a list of tags or categories to keep hidden from the public – all posts within the specified tags/categories, and the tags/categories themselves, will not be visible to anyone but the original author.

Alternatively, in ‘inclusive’ mode specify a list of tags/categories to make public – all other tags/categories will remain hidden.

Sneak preview of my new web framework Michaelangelo

I’ve been working on a new web framework which provides image theming – a little like what Elegant Grunge does with its image frames, but much more sophisticated.

For example:

This is a PHP framework that uses the common GD library to manipulate images.

It’s main interface is a content filter – give it HTML, containing images, and it will return the same HTML modified so that the images are now the converted versions, according to their ‘class’ attributes, with appropriate width/height attributes, etc. This makes it super easy to work with.

It stands alone, but it is also going to be a WordPress plugin (as you can see on this site, it’s already operational), a Joomla plugin, and I’m considering establishing a web service too, so those who don’t have adequate software on their server can still use it.

It has a plugin-based architecture so anyone can add new ‘themes’ (props to my partner Katherine for that beautiful wooden frame, by the way). I’m going to also implement a simple XML-based plugin schema, and possibly an interface to it, so that it’s easy to do so. I’m planning a ‘community’ style directory site to host contributed styles.

The base frame rendering code is such that it is trivially easy to add a new ‘theme’. It extracts segments from a single frame image, and handles seamless tiling to make the frame the right dimensions, so you don’t even have to worry about overlapping regions.

I will release it soon, after adding a little more content – keep your eyes peeled.

For now, check out the Michaelangelo showcase, which gives an idea of the different styles, and contains an interactive sampler to play with styles (IE users should stop being IE users to view this).

Doing my bit to beautify the web.

Facebook News Feed RSS

Tired of either logging into Facebook frequently, or being entirely oblivious to friends’ activities, I was searching for a way to view the Facebook front page news feed as RSS, so I could load it into my news reader and forget about it.

‘Nemik’ has created such a thing and kindly made it available. It was a bit elderly, and didn’t work with the new Facebook, so I jazzed it up a bit.

Put it on a webserver, configure it, and access the URL to view the RSS feed. Probably a very good idea to provide password protection, as well.

Use at your own risk, and Facebook, please don’t sue me.

Download the script here