I’ve had nasty old time trying to get some audio stuff going on the iPhone, no thanks to Apple’s lack of documentation. If you’re an iPhone developer interested in getting RemoteIO/IO Remote/whatever it’s called working on the iPhone… Do I have good news for you. Read on.
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Custom Permalinks is a WordPress plugin that gives you ultimate control over your site structure.
Lay out your site the way you want it. Set the URL of any post, tag or category to anything you want. Old permalinks will redirect properly to the new address.
Read MoreI’ve recently enabled the Paged Comments plugin for this site, as the comments over at the Elegant Grunge page were getting a little large in number. A few tweaks were required to make it look right, though.
So, here’s the Elegant Grunge theme for the plugin – put this in the ‘themes’ directory under the ‘paged-comments’ plugin directory.
elegant-grunge-for-paged-comments.zip
Read MoreThis will only be of interest to a very small minority, but for those of us who have used Core Audio and come across error -66632 in all its glorious undocumented-ness, this is a helpful note.
The error occurs when using AudioQueueEnqueueBuffer. It happens when one tries to enqueue a buffer when the queue in question is no longer running.
Wrap the AudioQueueEnqueueBuffer in a statement that checks to see if the queue is actually running, as in the SpeakHere/SpeakHear (depending on where you look) example. Something like:
if ( [track recording] ) {
// Re-enqueue this buffer
status = AudioQueueEnqueueBuffer (inAudioQueue,
inBuffer,
0,
NULL);
checkStatus(status);
}
..Should do the trick.
Read MoreOriginally for my own use, I put together a couple of WordPress plugins, which I thought I’d make available in case they were useful to anyone else.
This is the simplest plugin, which provides an ‘adsense’ shortcode to output a Google ad. To use it, use Google’s tools to create the ad, then paste it into the php file where indicated, then put {adsense} (replace the curly braces with square brackets) in posts/pages where you want the ad to appear (remove the spaces around the square brackets).
And now for a demo + shameless attempt at monetization:
This one is useful if you occasionally post a video file on your blog, and host it locally. If you use video more frequently, there are plugins that probably are more suited, but I personally didn’t want the overhead, and I wanted to store videos in the standard upload locations, instead of having a separate repository, which seems to be what other plugins do.
This one uses the JW FLV player, provided in the plugin. Use something like:
{media source="http://my.site.com/path/to/video.flv" width="400" height="308" preview="http://my.site.com/path/to/preview.jpg"}
(replace the curly braces with square brackets)
I used this just the other day on a post demonstrating the output of the simulator I’ve written for my PhD.
This is the plugin that renders the content for my music page, as well as providing mini-players for other posts. Give it a path to a directory, and it will display all mp3 files in that directory with flash players based on the XSPF Web Music Player. Recently-added mp3 files will be marked as ‘New’. Use something like:
{musiclist path="path/to/my/music"}
(replace the curly braces with square brackets; add optional nolink=”true” parameter to avoid linking to the mp3 files from their titles)
For just one track, use:
{audio source="path/to/audio.mp3"}
Read MoreEdit: Whoa! savethedevelopers.org now links to Microsoft, and the script is gone! What gives? Buyout? Hostile takeover?
IE 6 visitors to this site will notice a message sliding down from the top of the page directing them to update IE. This is a script provided by savethedevelopers.org who are all about making IE6 go away. Bravo I say. That said, I’d be happy if it directed users away from IE altogether (because it sucks; even the U.S. government is ‘pleading users to stop‘ using it) but – one step at a time.
Visit their site to grab the markup for the script if you’re interested in supporting the cause from your site too. Save a developer today!
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Recently I released some code to discover and embed Twinkle images linked from Twitter postings, and released a modification to Ricardo González’s Twitter for WordPress plugin which uses it.
I’ve now implemented support for Twitpic as well.
Grab the modified WordPress plugin here:
twitter-for-wordpress-plus-images-v0.2.6.zip
After installation, add the widget and make sure ‘Discover images’ is ticked.
For non-Wordpress users, the base code is also available here:
TwitterImageUtil.class.php-v0.2.6.zip
Include it in your twitter list source code, and use it as a filter for the message content. Something like:
$message = TwitterImageUtil::processContent($message, $mysql_database_handle);
Some configuration is possible – see the header comments for more details.
The code will create a thumbnail of the image, and store it locally. It’ll also cache the results in a MySQL database for speed. It supports Lightbox, too – just supply the relevant flag to turn it on.
This post describes a method to gain more control over the styling of images for web templates/blog themes, using a bit of Regular Expression magic. This is the technique used for my recent theme, Elegant Grunge.
You’ve just designed the most beautiful template ever – pleasing composition, clean lines, smooth colours and gradients and an awesome typeface. You apply it as the theme for your blog, or release it to the community, and there is much rejoicing.
Then you or someone else inconsiderately puts a photograph into a post – disaster! That nasty square of graphic just destroyed your composition, and the page is unbalanced and suddenly looks terrible.
Images are particularly tricky to make work with a theme, mostly because they’re so unpredictable. With text, it’s easy to control the way it looks. With images, they can be any colour or shape, many of which will break the composition of a theme, especially if the design elements of the theme contains irregular lines.
A big impediment to making images work is the limitations introduced by the current versions of CSS: All you can really do is provide a square border, possibly with some padding. That’s it, unless you’re willing to manually add tons of markup around images every time – and willing to make your users do it, if you’ve released a theme.
Some people will carefully Photoshop-up their images to make them fit – Webdemar (who made the theme I first used on my blog) does this, for example, and it looks great. That’s a lot of work, though, especially if you make frequent posts with images!
If you’re a theme designer, there’s an easier way to make images work.
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