I have updated Evermore, my WordPress plugin for automatically displaying post previews on your homepage. Version 2.1 is better at detecting paragraph boundaries, so it should work even on posts generated by tools like “RSS to Blog” and Postie. Generally, it works more reliably on unusually formatted posts. The Options page is also (slightly) nicer.
You can get full details and download Evermore at the main Evermore page.
I have never understood the furore that greeted Google’s introduction of the rel=”nofollow” attribute. It seemed to me to be a perfectly sensible way of specifying the provenance of hyperlinks on a Web page. However, many people took it to be Google’s way of penalising contributors to blogs and other interactive websites. Some even thought that Google was guilty of a blanket attack on all blogs. These accusations aren’t true, but the reasons they came up are interesting: Google gave a spurious justification for nofollow; and the name “nofollow” itself is misleading. Actually there are good reasons to use nofollow, and if it had a better name it would be more widely used and less controversial.
Despite C# being several years old, there’s no official supported tool for generating human-readable documentation from C# programs. Microsoft’s C# specification describes a rather verbose form of documentation comment that programmers are supposed to use in their code, but they don’t supply the tools to do anything useful with these comments. After a bit of searching and quite a few dead ends, I finally found a simple way of generating the documenttion I needed. Here’s the full story.
Google have released the Google Web Toolkit — “Build AJAX apps in the Java language”. At first I thought this might just be their version of the Yahoo UI Library, but it turns out to be a completely different approach to the same problem. The YUI Library (and most other Ajax libraries) allow you to build a Web UI directly, using HTML and JavaScript. With GWT, you write a GUI application in Java, and GWT translates it into JavaScript and HTML for web deployment. It’s a less flexible approach, but could make it easier for Java developers to develop web applications with desktop-style GUIs — if this is what they really want.
Ajax and “Web 2.0″ have been getting more and more exposure over the last year or so. It may not be quite the revolution it’s cracked up to be, but behind the hype there are useful techniques for building better applications. When people start asking you what you’re doing with Ajax/Web 2.0, you should have a good answer — so here are some thoughts on what you can do about Ajax.
I have updated my Plaintext WordPress plugin to version 1.4. Plaintext allows you to distribute web source code (such as PHP or HTML) as plain text files, without being processed by your web server. This makes it easier for users to download your code. This new version has two important new features:
I have finally released the next generation of Evermore, my WordPress plugin for automatically displaying post previews on your homepage. Version 2 (formerly known as “More Evermore”) behaves very much like version 1 by default, but its behaviour can be adjusted through the new Options page.
The most exciting option is the ability to display more than one paragraph in the preview. You can also add special handling for very short paragraphs, and control the position of the “read more” link in the preview.
For details and download, see the main Evermore page.
I have updated Evermore, my WordPress plugin for automatically displaying just the first paragraph of posts on your homepage. I fixed an obscure problem that could cause Evermore to misbehave if a post contained a line break in its first paragraph.
And I hope shortly to bow to popular demand and release Evermore’s sequel, More Evermore. This adds a few more options, such as ignoring very short paragraphs; displaying more than one paragraph; and attaching the “more” link to the end of the paragraph rather than on a line by itself.
My Code Markup WordPress plugin has been updated to version 1.1. Code Markup makes it easy to include program code samples in your posts. You can even include HTML markup in the code sample; Code Markup magically knows which characters should be displayed as code and which should be rendered as HTML. This new version has a few nice new features:
WordPress 2 was released a couple of weeks ago, and I have now had the chance to test my plugins to see if they are compatible with the new version. Here’s the list of current plugins. All the pages for the various plugins now have compatibility information — all future plugin pages will have this information also.