Why geniosity goes unappreciated at work!
Here’s a moment of enlightenment from my favourite comic at XKCD.com
(click to enlarge)
Archive for 'Musings'
Generic Stats WordPress Plugin on version 1.2
Just another short little note to say that the Generic Stats plugin has been upgraded.
There are no MAJOR changes.
Here are the changes that HAVE been made:
- * Updated look & feel of admin page
- * Changed to use new “get options” methods
- * Added pretty little “Plugin Appreciation” box on the Admin page
- * Updated links to the plugin’s pages
Go read more about this plugin here:
Please Link 2 Me Plugin updated to version 1.5
So, just a short post to say that the “Please Link 2 Me” WordPress plugin has been updated to version 1.5
Here’s a copy of the “changelog” section in the readme.txt:
= 1.5 =
* 2009/11/01
* Fixed changelog= 1.4 =
* 2009/11/01
* Recoded to use new Options methods
* Changed look & feel of admin section
* Added option to modify size of TextArea (the box for link code)
* Changed main URLs for the plugin
* Added ability to add the box to a Page
I had 2 updates today because I had a copy/paste issue with the documentation. It’s been a long day.
You can read more about it the plugin here: Please Link 2 Me WordPress Plugin
EXCLUSIVE: Google Buys WordPress!
This was obviously an attempt at an April Fool’s Joke. I must say, I’m quite impressed with my WordPress/Google Logo 
I was chatting to my cousin a couple of hours ago via IM, and he let slip about the news that Automattic had sold off WordPress to Google.
He knows this because he works with Matt Mullenweg, but he obviously doesn’t want me to “reveal his name” until the news is made public (which is going to happen in a few hours time apparently). So, for the purpose of this post, let’s call him Byron.
I asked if he minded if I copied and pasted a part of our conversation about it and he said he didn’t mind because the news would be released later today anyway. (I’m guessing it has something to do with the fact that by the time anybody reads my blog, it will have been announced already).
Shell Script for Automating WordPress updates for multiple blogs
Many moons ago I read Joost de Valk’s blog post about upgrading and installing WordPress from SVN. Since then, every blog I maintain I use the WordPress svn repository to check out, and to update using the simple command of “svn sw“.
But even with that ease, it can get a bit tedious to upgrade 10 blogs, for instance.
So, as all “script writers” that are in between TV Series do, I wrote a script to automate this.
Read more
Stop Excel Using Scientific Notation on Numbers
Excel is brilliant!
It is so brilliant, that it’s helpful.
Excel is SO helpful THAT IT SUCKS!!!
Probably for 99.9% of the general population, all of Microsoft Excel’s cool features that help you format your data into something legible are something really cool. But I think Excel should have a “data only” setting.
What do I mean by “data only”? Have you ever tried debugging data in excel using all the cool functions, etc. to find duplicates, or sort the data only to find that Excel has gone and removed a leading “0″, or changed the number into Scientific Notation?
Apparently Excel has a 15 digit precision limit. But most of the time, I’d prefer it if Excel just treated the number as text until I want it sorted. Am I being TOO fussy?
Anyway, I found a great way to do this in 4 easy steps (once you’ve imported the data as text):
Creating your Google Reader Application with Google Chrome
Google Chrome was finally released, and I’ve been playing around with it for a few hours.
I decided to try out creating a “Google Reader Application” by making use of the “Chromeless Chrome” functionality.
In the images (click on them for a larger look) you will see the 4 basic steps to creating the Chrome-less application:
1 – The initial web site (Google Reader) in a basic/standard Google Chrome browser. You can see it’s still in the normal browser chrome because of the tabs and URL bar, etc.
2 – Click on the “page” icon to the right of the URL bar and click on “Create application Shortctuts…”
3 – You will then have a couple of prompts to answer and you can save your shortcut to the desktop. You can see that Google Chrome has chosen the Favicon as the “application icon”.
4 – In this last screenshot you can see what the Google Reader app will look like, now that it doesn’t have the usual “browser chrome”. (See my previous article about Google Chrome for more info on that).
And, we now have a “Google Reader Application“, especially since we don’t really need an internet connection if you’ve enabled Google Gears for this site.
Google Chrome – Google’s Free Web Browser
Looks like all the MANY, MANY rumours of Google releasing their own web browser have finally come true.
Welcome, Google Chrome. (the link is live, go download Google Chrome)
Some Cool Features in Google Chrome
The developers of Chrome have really gone all out on the performance of this browser, especially with regards to JavaScript. Which is a GREAT thing, considering Google’s biggest apps use AJAX/JavaScript heavily.
One of the things I’m looking forward to seeing is the “Task Manager“. This window shows which tabs (and therefore, which sites) are causing the most CPU usage and memory usage. FireFox 3 really improved it’s memory handling, but every now and again, when I have about 15 tabs open (which I often do, while I’m writing this I have 9 open) FireFox hangs when opening GMail and Google Reader…
Here’s a screenshot of the Google Chrome Task Manager at work (click the image for a full-sized version):
The world has really been “raving” about IE8’s “porn mode“, which Microsoft have officially named “InPrivate”. While browsing in this mode your session will be undetectable (theoretically), and no trace of that session will be left on your computer. Google Chrome seems to have a similar feature, except you can select a specific tab that will browse without leaving any trace of it’s session on your computer. Great stuff if you’re reading personal ads while on your work’s computer. 
Tabs and the way we use them have also completely changed. They’ve been inverted so they appear at the top of the browser, but that’s not just a UI change. You can now drag tabs between browser windows, and all of their history goes along with it. Effectively, each tab is it’s own browser (with it’s own URL bar, named “The OmniBox“), so it doesn’t matter where it sits…
Talking about the OmniBox, personally it looks like Mozilla’s Ubiquity has some similarities, being able to search and translate and complete your bookmarks…
Chrome without Chrome
The “Chrome” of a browser is the actual window with the toolbar, the URL bar, the bookmarks/links area.
Google Chrome looks like it now allows you to “create a GMail application”, in that it removes the browser chrome, so that you only see GMail’s website. This means that you hopefully won’t realise you’re using GMail inside a browser.
And, with the speed of the JavaScript rendering engine (and broadband), hopefully it won’t feel like you’re on the internet as well.
Of course, what about if you CAN’T connect to the internet? Well, there’s always Google Gears, which is built into the browser. Now, we only need GMail to support Google Gears. (If you’re looking for an example of the benefits of Google Gears, read my article “WordPress 2.6 and Google Gears“).
Here’s a pic of an example with Google Reader (so that I didn’t have to go blanking out all my email addresses for a GMail example). Click for a full-size version of the image:
(All these features are obviously available for any website, not just GMail).
The Usual Suspects
And, of course, along with the 2 cool features above, there seem to be some other more expected features, like “Autocomplete in your address bar”, funky favourites, and built in functionality that you needed extensions in FireFox to do.
Interesting Notes about the Development
You could probably just read all this from the comic (linked to below), but here are a few things that stood out.
The testing of the browser took place on millions of websites. But, probably not only the little lame homepages that would obviously look good (or look bad?). Because Google caches so many web pages while crawling the internet, AND, because they rank web pages, they know which ones have more chances of being visited, and they have easy access to them. So they were able to run automatic (and manual) tests against MILLIONS of sites.
The JavaScript Virtual Machine is supposedly SUPER FAST! Of course, that means browsing your mail in GMail and reading my blog in Google Reader just got a whole lot faster.
References
So, to see other people’s opinions on this, go visit Philipp Lenssen’s “Google Blogoscoped” blog.
You can also read Google’s official announcement.
Or, read the comic from Google with more info about Google Chrome: Google Chrome Comic (or download the PDF version – which doesn’t seem to work, oh well).
And, I’m eagerly awaiting Matt Cutts’ post with more info for advanced users (which I would consider myself 
). He’s apparently been using the browser for a while now, so he should definitely know his stuff.
Final Thoughts
I guess it’s a good thing that Google and Mozilla signed their ad deal recently, renewing the deal until 2011, because with Google’s brand behind them, this will DEFINITELY give FireFox and hopefully Internet Explorer a run for their money.
It all benefits us, because the more competition, the more we’ll get from the browsers while trying to be won over…
Speaking of competition, I can’t wait for a Mobile Google Chrome. All I can say is, when that comes out, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini (which I love) better watch out…