Helvensteijn.com

As of today, I no longer offer support for my WordPress plugins, pretty much because I lost interest. I did fix a long lasting issue with one of them.

If anyone would like to take over, just download the code and do with it as you see fit. It’s all released under a BSD style license.

Last Friday, I installed Leopard, the sixth major release of Apple’s Mac OS X.

After 2 days of playing around with it, all I can say is: Incredible! Not only is it notably faster than Tiger (Leopard’s predecessor), its new features are simply fantastic. Of course, I’ve used things like backup software (Time Machine) and virtual desktops (Spaces) before, but somehow, Apple always manages to implement things just a little more streamlined and polished than the rest.

I’m very happy, and Leopard once again remembers me why I love OS X so much.

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’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 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).

If you’re like me, you probably hate the nasty look MSIE has gotten with version 7, especially when using Windows’ classic look.

Of course one could simply say “then don’t use it”, but unfortunately, somtimes I have no choice. If you agree to design a site for someone else, it should simply work, even in MSIE. So it needs testing in that browser (if you can call it a browser ).

So, I have to use MSIE 7, and I absolutely loathe its user interface. Then there was Sean Rozekrans, who pointed out that MSIE 7 can be made to look like MSIE 6. Like a blessing form heaven. Here’s proof:

MSIE 7 disguised as MSIE 6

The only drawback is the lack of tabs this way. But that’s not really something I miss, because if I have MSIE open, there’s only the page I’m testing, nothing else.

So how can you make this miracle happen for your self? Quite simple actually, just make a shortcut to C:\WINDOWS\ie7\iexplore.exe (note that that directory is hidden). It might be necessary to create an empty file named iexplore.exe.local in that same directory to make this work, but for me it wasn’t.