Dented Reality - Beau Lebens' project information, blog and contact details.

Idea: “LiveJournalish” WordPress Plugin

Jun 30 2009

I’ve been doing a lot of work with LiveJournal/WordPress lately, and have been seeing that there are some passionate LJ users who are loyal to the platform largely for a few specific reasons/features. It seems like those features would mostly be pretty easy to replicate on WP though, given its flexible plugin system.

The main features that LJ supports that WP is (or was) “missing” seem to be:

Robust permissions (create a group of people, grant them access to view a post, but no one else, etc)
Support for integrated “metadata” on posts such as Current Music, Current Mood, etc
Reply to comments directly via the notification emails you get
Threaded comments
Userpics

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Updated to WordPress 2.8

Jun 11 2009

I’ve just updated this site to WordPress 2.8, using my favorite method for handling a WordPress install, Subversion. Here’s what I typed at the command line to upgrade:

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.8/

Once that was complete, I logged into my admin panel and completed the DB upgrade, then I had to check some plugins. I had these problems/changes:

TinyMCE Advanced had an update available, so I did that,
One Click Plugin Updater seems to clash with the new Plugins page, and I don’t really need it now anyway since its functionality is in core, so I deactivated it and then deleted it
IntenseDebate seems to clash with some of the JavaScript now used in the admin, but I work with those guys now, so I’m working on a new version of the plugin to address those issues! My comments are a bit ugly while I deal with this, but I figure that’s a good motivation to get it done ASAP.

Have you upgraded yet?

KRead: a simple feed reader for the Kindle 2

May 16 2009

It’s Saturday, and I just got a Kindle 2 this week. I’ve been thinking it’d be neat to be able to read feeds on the Kindle (since it has a built in Web Browser and internet connection), so I whipped up KRead. It’s a super-simple, mostly-text-only feed reader for the Kindle which just requires you to enter the URL of a single feed (or a website, it supports auto-discovery) and it’ll give you the content of the feed in a simply-formatted list so that you can read through it.

Check out the KRead project page for some more details or jump over to http://kread.dentedreality.com.au/ and try it out.

Fully Automattic

May 11 2009

Today is a very exciting day for me, because I start as a full-time employee with Automattic, Inc.

Here’s a little bit about how that happened and what it means to me:

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Twitter’s Missing Features

May 03 2009

I’ve been sketching some random thoughts and plans for a new Twitter client, and rather than restrict it to my notebooks and condemn it to the fate of so many other ideas of mine that never see realization, I’m putting my wish-list for what a decent Twitter client should allow me to do here. Feel free to roll these into another client and let me know so that I can just use it, rather than have to build it

Read the full list after the break

Secret Decoder Ring

On Social Customer Support

WordCamp San Francisco 2009

Me, Live (ish)!

(4 Jul, 4:44 pm)

Tweeted: Happy 4th everyone! Last night was huge, wonder what today will hold? # (4 Jul, 11:22 am)

Tweeted: Awesome dinner and night in general, despite some attempts at drama. 5A5 == A++ # (3 Jul, 11:50 pm)

Tweeted: http://twitpic.com/98na6 3x Kobe beef. Yes. # (3 Jul, 10:27 pm)

Tweeted: http://twitpic.com/98lev this is up now. @garyvee, yes? ;) # (3 Jul, 10:07 pm)

Tweeted: http://twitpic.com/98h9f <-- enjoying this :) # (3 Jul, 9:26 pm)

Tweeted: Sitting down to what is no doubt going to be an amazing dinner at 5A5 Steak Lounge. Happy Birthday David! # (3 Jul, 8:54 pm)

Listened to Beautiful, Jason Mraz (3 Jul, 6:59 pm)

Listened to Bella Luna, Jason Mraz (3 Jul, 6:58 pm)

Listened to The Remedy, Jason Mraz (3 Jul, 6:53 pm)

Listened to After an Afternoon, Jason Mraz (3 Jul, 6:48 pm)

Listened to The Boy's Gone, Jason Mraz (3 Jul, 6:46 pm)

Listened to Curbside Prophet (live), Jason Mraz (3 Jul, 6:42 pm)

Listened to Where The Streets Have No Name, Johnny Vicious (3 Jul, 6:31 pm)

Listened to Mornington Crescent, Belle and Sebastian (3 Jul, 6:19 pm)

Listened to The Salt Wound Routine, Thirteen Senses (3 Jul, 6:14 pm)

Listened to We Rule the School, Belle and Sebastian (3 Jul, 6:09 pm)

Tweeted: Came to cafe to do some work but their wifi is off because of the holiday. FAIL! # (3 Jul, 11:54 am)

Tweeted: "I just posted a twenty minute screencast on how to install WPMU and BuddyPress locally on a Mac: http://bit.ly/tteM8" - @apeatling # (3 Jul, 9:32 am)

Tweeted: Doing a bunch of performance optimization; conditional Javascript loading, minifying, etc. Good times. # (2 Jul, 6:02 pm)

Tweeted: Thanks to Akismet, I haven't seen the 20,000 comments (just passed that num) that it's blocked from my blog :) # (2 Jul, 11:01 am)

Tweeted: I wish my Mac and iPhone would talk via Bluetooth and if in range, only my laptop's alarm should bother going off in iCal. # (1 Jul, 12:58 pm)

Tweeted: Testing Flickr's new auto-Tweet feature http://flic.kr/p/6B59Ta # (1 Jul, 12:32 pm)

Tweeted: I think I'm giving up entirely on the Mighty Mouse. Any suggestions for your favorite mouse? Logitech MX Revolution looks pretty serious. # (1 Jul, 10:19 am)

Tweeted: Since I got my Kindle (1.5 months ago), I've read 5 complete books on it. Approx 1500 pages. That's well above normal for me. # (30 Jun, 7:51 pm)

Tweeted: Lame; my *second* Apple Bluetooth Mighty Mouse's scroll-ball has ceased working in a downward motion *again*. These mice are horrible. # (30 Jun, 5:49 pm)

Bookmarked Yapper - a Jabber/XMPP interface to Growl. Awesome. (27 Jun, 11:28 am)

Bookmarked How to use curl_multi() without blocking - Good post on more efficient use of curl_multi() under PHP. Much better use of resources than most examples around the place. (25 Jun, 3:17 pm)

Bookmarked WordPress Console - "Once activated, the plugin adds a "Console" page to the administrator's "Tools" menu. This page includes a JavaScript-based interactive shell which loads the WordPress environment. It allows execution of arbitrary PHP code as well as anything defined by WordPress or activated plugins. This is awesome." (24 Jun, 1:52 pm)

Bookmarked RPX: Instant OpenID and Data Portability - "RPX handles the UI, authentication, and import of user profile and registration data for your website." Includes OpenID, Twitter, FBC, Google, etc etc etc (23 Jun, 10:56 am)