Helvensteijn.com

Upgraded my WP Admin Links plugin to version 1.1. It is now also possible to remove default pages from the drop-down list.

More info Download

Looks like I found a bug in WordPress 2.3. It so happens that I have some pages in which I frequently use HTML entities. Since I upgraded to WordPress 2.3, when I try to edit such a page, all those entities are gone and replaced by their plain text counterparts. So all that escaped HTML I use so often is suddenly unescaped.
Now as long as I don’t save those pages I’m fine. But this kind of makes it impossible to edit such pages. Pretty annoying.

So I first went to the WordPress support forums to ask for advice. Seems someone else had a similar problem, but the other way round. That ultimately turned out to be a misbehaving plugin, but my problem wasn’t solved with that.

So this night, a new ticket was opened in the WordPress trac, giving my problem official bug status. Let’s just hope they fix it soon.

Update: this bug was squashed in version 2.3.1.

My WP Last Posts plugin was pretty buggy. It interfered with tings like searching (getting weird results for pages it was used in). It made me think, try, fail, think of something else, try that and fail again. Apparently, a loop inside page content just doesn’t work right.

So I regret to announce that this plugin will no longer insert posts inside pages. It now simply offers a template tag that can be put anywhere inside your template. You could now for instance display the excerpt from the last post in your sidebar. Or simply display some post excerpts underneath the page content using a custom page template.

More info Download

:-)

I know, this deserves some explanation.
Today is the 25th birthday of the :-). I stumbled upon that page a while ago, remembered it just now, and was fortunate enough to find it in my browser history.
I just thougt it was worth a little remembrance, because I use smilies all too often.
And something of a whole different matter: users can comment without registration again. I got myself an Akismet API key (why haven’t I done that sooner? ) so spam should no longer be a big issue.

I’ve been working on my WP List Files plugin. The code is completely refactored, and I’ve added a JavaScript to allow collapsing and expanding of directories. Because it’s pretty much a rewrite, I’ve raised the version number to 2.0. It can be seen in action here.

More info Download

I also made a dedicated page for my WordPress plugins, so they will no longer have to linger somewhere deep inside the blog.

I’ve added a feature to this site for those with reduced visual acuity. One can now make the text on this site larger if so desired.

In the upper right corner, there are two A’s in a small box. Clicking on the larger one makes the text on this site larger. Clicking on the smaller one changes it back to normal. A decent browser with JavaScript support will even apply the change on the fly, without a page reload.

Of course, your preference will be remembered throughout this site, even across multiple visits. Your browser must accept cookies though.

Update August 16, 2008: In the new theme, there’s a link to the right of the main menu which will increase or decrease the font size.

I’ve been messing around a bit with Growl styles. Those are just some HTML, CSS and images in a package, so it isn’t all that difficult to make your own.

All this playing around resulted in an all new Growl style. It’s inspired by the semi-transparent toolboxes found in some OS X software (iLife for instance), therefore I named it ToolBox. And this is what it looks like:

ToolBox Growl style

So you want it too, eh? Well, you’re in luck, you can download it right here!

Download

Oh, and it works best with opacity set around 90%.

Those vague vertical lines in the screenshot are probably an artifact from OS X making the screenshot. They are not there in reality. The images used for the background are fully opaque (except for the corners) and are made transparent by using the “opacity” CSS property with a value spplied by Growl (and ultimately you through the preference pane).

Since the launch of this web site, I used a theme based on WP-Andreas01.

Back then, I said that I probably wouldn’t be designing anymore themes myself, mostly because of MSIE. But you know how these things go, it started tinkling again.

So I came up with the idea to base a layout on the “graphite” look of Mac OS X Tiger. The result is a completely rewritten theme. Some basic elements have made it into this new theme virtually unchanged, so those will look familiar if you’ve visited this site before.

The most notable changes are the header — which lost its bulky image — and the menu — which is now horizontal instead of vertical, leaving some more horizontal space for real content.

Below a comparison between the old layout and the new one:

Old layout

New layout

Personally, I think this new layout looks really clean, which is exactly how I like layouts. If you have any comments or suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.

Today I received my new aluminum Apple Keyboard. I knew it would type very comfortably, because it has the same kind of keys that my MacBook has. And on top of that, it’s just gorgeous. It does have a wire, but with a keyboard that’s not really a problem since I have it laying on my lap most of the time. And with the included extension cable, it easily reaches far enough.

For those who don’t already know what it looks like, this is it:

Aluminum Apple Keyboard

Now that I have a new hosting provider which offers a lot of disk space, I could finally do what I wanted to do for a long time: make an online photo gallery.

I’ve got 9 albums online now, but that number will undoubtedly grow in the future.

The whole thing is powred by the NextGEN Gallery plugin, and of course tweaked here and there.

I also added breadcrumbs navigation — using the Breadcrumb Navigation XT plugin — and I made some tweaks to the rest of the site.