New Stable Release of Google Chrome

New Stable Release of Google Chrome

Sep 2009
18
Posted by John Bloch in Miscellaneous, Web Design

I don’t know how many of you use Google Chrome, but I do, and I can highly recommend it.  A year after the browser’s release, they’ve come out with a new stable version (the third, I believe). I’ve been very happy with Chrome since I first downloaded it almost a year ago, and this new version is no exception.  It was already the fastest browser I’d ever worked with, and now it’s even faster.

Basically, I use Chrome for everything, and I use Firefox if I have to debug a script (their web developer add on is really wonderful).  If there’s absolutely no way around it, I’ll use Internet Explorer (damn you, microsoft.com…). As anybody who’s ever designed websites will tell you, IE is EVIL.

And we don’t negotiate with terrorists.

But sometimes the terrorists restrict functionality to proprietary software that doesn’t understand basic web standards.

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A Look at the Future: Dropdown Menus

Sep 2009
15
Posted by John Bloch in WordPress Plugins

I don’t want to jump the gun too much here, but I’m in the final stages of developing a new plugin which would enable dropdown menus for any theme.

The plugin will also feature an admin page where you can limit which pages will appear in your menus.

Toodle pip!

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First Impressions: DC Bloggers Meetup

Sep 2009
10
Posted by John Bloch in DC Blogger Meetup

The DC Bloggers Meetup group (as in, meetup.com) convened last night in Adams Morgan. The venue: Madam’s Organ (despite the establishment’s penchant for antiquarian styles of music, the name does not refer to the keyed wind instrument).

The Venue:

Madam’s Organ was a great place. The happy hour (which goes until 8 p.m.) was 1/2 price drinks, so that only served to increase my enjoyment. They had a cool little balcony for smokers which overlooked 18th Street. The decoration was eclectic and very befitting of a blues/jazz club. The darker colors of paint (dark red and black, mostly) worked with the dim lighting (very few overhead lights, candles on the table) to increase the sense of being in the group. One felt like one’s own table was the only thing there.

The upshot of my impressions of the venue are as follows: a great hole-in-the-wall place with an abundance of character. I can’t wait for the next meetup there.

The Meetup:

When I arrived, the meetup had just gotten underway. It was on the second floor of the restaurant and about 8 others had already gathered around a few tables by the window. They were talking about running. This instantly eased my fears that the group might be made up of the quasi-fictitious basement-blogger type. I signed in and grabbed a drink from the bar (don’t worry; I paid).

After a few orders of business (basic rundown of group, who the 10 most active members are), we got to introductions. One thing which delighted me was the ease with which an introduction rocketed into a tangent (“Oh, you’re that Lilu? Awesome!”). I was very pleased to see so many WordPress users there too.

After introductions, we talked about our mission statement (I’m not sure if we ever ratified it, though), and then got to plain old socializing.

It was delightful to meet all the different bloggers that I did. I had a wonderful conversation with a new blogger named Zach on the finer points of web design, and pointed him in the direction of some good resources for learning the basics. I also had a good time talking about the frustrating obsolescence of ColdFusion with a couple of bloggers.

All in all, I had a great time, met a lot of great people, and will definitely be attending more in the future.

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DC Blogger Meetup September Blogroll

Sep 2009
10
Posted by John Bloch in DC Blogger Meetup, DC Events

Last night I attended my first DC Blogger Meetup at Madam’s Organ in Adams Morgan. I’m going to write a separate post on my first impressions, but I wanted to post the blogroll from the meeting.

September 2009 Official Blogroll

We also had a reporter, Lori, and an unlisted blogger, Zach. We hope to see good things from these folks in the future.

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ONW Simple Contact v1.4.1

Sep 2009
4
Posted by John Bloch in Development, Programming, WordPress Plugins

Version 1.4.1 of ONW Simple Contact was released recently.  The new version includes full reCAPTCHA integration for the spam filter, as well as a new admin panel under the settings category.

In order for the reCAPTCHA integration to work, you have to go to reCAPTCHA.net and sign up for free to get your API keys. Then you enter them into the appropriate fields in the admin settings page. Enable it, and you’re set to go.

You can still manually override the reCAPTCHA settings in the shortcode by adding the ‘onw_recaptcha’ argument (setting it to ‘on’ or ‘off’).

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ONW v1.3 Release

Sep 2009
2
Posted by John Bloch in Development, Programming, WordPress Plugins

So I’ve gotten a couple of people telling me that they were getting the same error about the ‘filter_var’ function in PHP not being defined. My guess is that either they’re running off of an older version of PHP or their PHP settings have disabled the function. Either way, it’s out of my control.

But what I am able to do is to replace the ‘filter var’ functions with other sanitization/filtering functions.

So I did.

Version 1.3 now uses validation methods other than filter_var.

Enjoy.

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