Dented Reality

Monthly Archives: November 2009

LDAP (very) Basics

Nov 28 2009
2

Getting started with LDAP can be quite daunting. In the space of a weekend, I took myself on a bit of a crash course to learn about LDAP so that I could work on a project that needed LDAP to access an address book. Here are some of the things I learned along the way:

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Idea: Bookmark Plugin for WordPress

Nov 24 2009
11

I just saved yet another link in my Delicious account, and suddenly thought — “man, it would really suck if Delicious one day disappeared and I lost all of this”.

Indeed.

According to my stats, I have 1,164 bookmarks, mostly with descriptions and manually crafted (to some extent) titles, 1,813 different tags in use, with some being used 187 times. That’s a lot of rich, valuable data that I’ve collectively invested a lot of time in. I want control over it. I want insurance.

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Inline Collapsed Content with jQuery

Nov 22 2009
8

One of the things I find ListML really handy for is planning a presentation/talk. I write up a hierarchical list of all the things I want to cover using ListML, then I can work from that list to build out my slides/demos/etc. For the recent WordCamp NYC, I needed to present 2 structured talks, so I went to work in ListML and knocked up 2 lists of things to cover. Once I was done with the talks, I realized that there was some good content in these lists that a) served as a bit of a transcript to the talks themselves, and b) in some cases wasn’t actually covered (for time reasons, or just because I forgot them).

I wanted to be able to post these lists to my site along with the presentations, but didn’t really want to post a whole separate page for each one just to put up a simple HTML list.

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New Project: ListML

Nov 22 2009
2

If you’re anything like me, you write a lot of lists. I use lists for pretty much everything — note taking, planning my day, managing projects, shopping, organization, etc etc etc. I have lists of lists. It’s a bit out of control. Over the years, I’ve coalesced on a simple, basic format, where I write things using indented (tabbed) lists of plain text (in TextMate). I kept finding myself converting some of these lists to HTML, so I’ve written something up that will take a plain text list and reformat it as HTML, given a simple set of formatting rules.

That project is available for download now, under the name ListML. Check it out, I use it all the time, so will probably continue developing it. At the moment it’s just a simple script that you drop into a directory, then drop other TXT files in there to view them as HTML. We’ll see where it ends up. If you’ve got any suggestions or find any bugs, feel free to post them as a comment here and I’ll fix things up. I already have some ideas on new features:

  • Ability to load external files (from URL)
  • List files in the current directory if none specified
  • Cut out the parsing engine properly to make it more portable
  • Make the HTML view (optionally) into a lightweight editor as well
  • Quick UI for grabbing the HTML snippet of just the list (sans CSS/extras)

WordCamp NYC Round Up

Nov 17 2009
4

This past weekend, WordCamp NYC was held at Baruch College in New York. It was (I believe) the second biggest WordCamp to date, if not the biggest (by number of attendees), right up there with WordCamp San Francisco. WCNYC was an incredibly busy event, with so much great WordPress stuff going on at any one time that it was hard to decide what to attend. I was lucky enough to be able to present/be involved in not just one, but 4 presentations throughout the weekend, and I wanted to get some slides and details up here for reference.

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Double-Yolkers

Nov 01 2009
5

When I was growing up (on a “hobby farm”), we raised chickens which we mostly had for their eggs. We always had fresh eggs, and would sometimes get what we always called “double-yolkers”. Two yolks in a single egg. Until recently, I think I’d only ever had one of them from a store-bought egg. Something has changed though. In the last carton of eggs that I bought (Rock Island, Brown Fertile Jumbo Grade A), I got THREE different double-yolkers:

Something in the water?