So it’s good to be able to say that as of v2.1.1 of the plugin, you can now do this and v2.1.1 is now live and able to be downloaded from GitHub as well as from within WordPress or via the WordPress plugin repository.

As well as supporting the latest v3.3 version of the WordPress core, the complete list of changes for this latest version of the plugin is …

• Add ability to suppress the Biography Box from being displayed on posts, on pages and on posts and pages on a per user basis
• Add settings link to Settings / WP Biographia admin page from the plugin’s entry on the Dashboard / Plugins page
• Add checks for avatar display in the Biography Box being requested with avatar support not enabled in the Settings / Discussions admin page
• Add Help & Support sidebar box to Settings / WP Biographia admin page
• Handle upgrades to configuration settings gracefully; fixed bug that didn’t persist unused/unchanged configuration settings
• Cleaned up the wording for the Settings / WP Biographia admin page and made terminology consistent across all configurable options
• Tweaked admin CSS to introduce padding between the settings container and sidebar container that changed in WordPress 3.3

As always, the WP Biographia home page has the full details. Consider this, if you will, an early visit from Santa. What’s next for the plugin? Internationalisation is probably on the cards as well as converting the plugin to use classes and not a simple set of WordPress PHP functions; but all of that will have to wait until after the Holiday season.

While sitting in a hotel room about a week or so back, I realised that while vicchi.org has been the home of my blog for years and the current incarnation may have 267 pieces of bloggage tucked away in the bowels of WordPress (that’s 268 with this post), the theme has been pretty much static since sometime in 2007. The same goes for my other web presence over at garygale.com.

But back to this blog for a moment. Like a lot of people I started out with a stock WordPress install and theme. Then I went through the discovery of the WordPress theme repository, installing and uninstalling too many plugins, before finally becoming confident enough to start hacking the PHP and CSS of an existing theme into something vaguely approaching what I wanted. And thereby hangs the problem. My theme, which started out as Chandra Maharzan’s rather wonderful Cleanr, suffered from the problem that each time the theme was updated I needed to go through the changes and manually apply them to my hacked version. Scalable and fun this is not.

Enter the notion of WordPress child themes. These allow you to take an existing WordPress theme and build on top of that theme but without actually modifying or adding to the original theme. You start with just inheriting from the parent theme’s CSS and then you can add, adapt and otherwise hack as much or as little of the parent’s templates and PHP functions as you need. As you’re not actually touching the parent theme at all, any updates to that theme are automagically passed onto the child theme, so the need to keep a hacked theme in line with the original simply goes away.

I still rather liked the clean typography and colour scheme of my version of Cleanr so I was able to easily modify my child theme’s CSS to migrate this. I based the child theme on the WordPress Twenty Ten theme but changed the way in which post date formats were displayed, removed the built-in biography display so I could use my own WP Biographia plugin and modified the parent theme’s header image display to use my own imagery and to also rotate the images on page refresh.

Putting together a child theme to give my blog a long overdue facelift has been surprisingly easy; to see just how easy, the source code to the originally named Twenty Ten – Vicchi is over on GitHub to download, fork or otherwise hack around.

One web presence down, one to go. Next it was time to give my personal vanity page some facelift attention. The original design for this site was heavily influenced by Christian Heilmann’s approach to web technologies. Chris and I worked together at Yahoo! and he taught me so much about how web pages worked. The original version of this site was dynamically generated from RSS feeds fed through Yahoo’s YQL. Sadly, the YQL API got ever more flaky over the last few years and I ended up having to transition over to use the SimplePie PHP library just to keep the site up and running. It wasn’t the world’s fastest loading site but it was nice and dynamic and at the time, that was important, to me at least.

But in keeping with the clean and spare layout of my blog, I’d been intrigued by the less-is-more approach that about.me had taken. But despite having my own page on about.me’s site I wanted to host my own under my garygale.com domain.

A random browse through GitHub yielded The Personal Page, a clean, lightweight home page design that appealed to me. One GitHub fork later, plus a photo of me taken at last year’s Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco that I didn’t look too appalling in and the new, Personal Page’d version was up and running. Really, it took all of about half an hour and that’s including testing and finding a social media icon set that integrated nicely with the look and feel of the site. Of course, the web site’s code is also up on GitHub for the aforementioned hacking around.

All of the above verbiage can be boiled down to the simple fact that armed with a little knowledge of CSS, PHP and HTML it’s very, very easy to create a new and, I hope, effective web presence, all of which is powered by open source tools and techniques and that, utterly appeals to the grown up geek in me.

But despite the initial teething problems, version 2.0 is out and the list of enhancements and fixes remains unchanged from the beta version, but the official version 2.0 release of this plugin is now both on GitHub and the WordPress plugin repository and while my Codeage page still remains the official home for this plugin, there’s a nicer looking home on GitHub for WP Biographia courtesy of GitHub’s pages feature.

The vast majority of those 1100 odd WordPress downloads are thanks to the WordPress community itself, who’ve had some nice things to say about WP Biographia, such as Kevin Muldoon on wpmods.com  …

As you will have established by now, I think WP Biographia is a great little plugin. Being able to insert the author box directly into an RSS feed will benefit anyone who runs a multi-author blog or website (or those who accept guest posts regularly). The plugin also adds new social media profile fields to users profile and displays them in the author box automatically.

I encourage you to try it out yourselves and see what the plugin can do.

… and on Smashing Magazine’s noupe.com …

Arguably the best looking author bio plugin available for WordPress, WP Biographia gives you complete control over what is shown in the bio area and adds Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ profile fields to every users profile. You can choose whether the box is shown on posts, pages, archives and/or the home page and you can customise the colour scheme and border too.

Without a doubt the plugins best feature is the ability to display author bios in the RSS feed. 99% of blogs don’t include a link to the authors posts or website through their RSS feed therefore the guest poster loses a lot of potential traffic from RSS readers. WP Biographia corrects this by displaying a beautiful looking bio at the end of every post in the RSS feed.

… and Rick Bjarnason …

Authors like credit. Make sure you are using this plugin so everybody knows who the writer is. Adds Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus profiles, but the real killer feature is that it works in RSS feeds.

A next version of WP Biographia, which will probably end up as v2.1 is now in the works, which includes some of the additional feature requests that people have asked for on the WordPress forums as well as directly by email. Trying to keep the usual home life, work life, coding life balance in check means that quite when v2.1 will see the light of day is unclear and as the Christmas Holiday season is fast approaching it may well be sometime in early 2012, but only time will tell.

But thanks to Travis Smith getting in touch with me via Twitter and taking the time to make his changes and bug fixes on a GitHub fork there’s now a new beta version of WP Biographia up on GitHub for testing or for those who like to live on the bleeding edge.

In addition to Travis’ changes I’ve also reworked the plugin structure to reflect the recommended WordPress plugin file and directory layout and this, coupled with 6 other new features and big fixes is sufficient, I think, to up the version number straight to v2.0.0. Here’s what’s new.

• You can now set the size of the author’s Gravatar image
• The plugin now supports the [wp_biographia] shortcode
• You can now exclude the Biography Box from specific posts based on the post’s ID
• You can now place the Biography Box at the top of the post as well as the bottom of the post
• You can now further customise the behaviour of the plugin through a short circuit filter
• The issues with CSS on some WordPress installations have been fixed.

Once the beta’s been tested out and given the general community nod of approval I’ll push the new version to the WordPress Subversion repository so people who are using the plugin and don’t want to manually update the plugin or test the new version out will get the automagic update notification in their WordPress dashboard.

But despite its simplicity, a typical WordPress install is almost infinitely customisable and so is almost never what’s supplied in the installation download. People add in plugins, widgets and themes. This blog alone has 18 active plugins and a custom theme. While the plugins, widgets and themes should all play nicely together, sometimes there’s strange and unforeseen side effects; here’s two that have come to light over the first month of WP Biographia in the real world and not in the safe, sand-boxed environment of my blog.

Firstly there’s a CSS clash between WP Biographia and the WPtouch plugin, which displays a mobile optimised version of WordPress when visiting the site on a smartphone browser. The combination of the default options for WPtouch sometimes messes slightly with the CSS for the Biography Box as can be seen below.

This is something I’ll have to look into in more detail, but for now, the workaround is to enable WPtouch restricted mode; once that’s done, the CSS reverts to how it should look.

Another interesting oddity is when running WP Biographia with the Biography Box configured to be displayed on Archive pages. Some themes display this fine, but for other themes the Biography Box never appears. Each time I’ve seen this it turns out to be down to the way in which the theme renders the archive page. If the theme’s archive.php uses the_content() as part of the WordPress Loop then the Biography Box appears as it should, but if the theme uses the_excerpt() as part of the Loop, then either the first 55 characters of the post or the post’s specific excerpt will be displayed. As WP Biographia appends the Biography Box to the end of each post’s content, themes which use the_excerpt() will, sadly, never display as intended when used with WP Biographia. Thankfully, this is less a shortcoming of the plugin or of the theme, it’s simply the way in which WordPress handles post excerpts.

All of this will appear in the FAQ section of the plugin’s README on the next release, which should, if I manage to write it, make the Biography Box available as a sidebar widget as well.

Now background reading and general swotting up on a topic is all very well but to really learn how to do something you just have to roll your sleeves up and do it yourself. Though it’s probably stretching a comparison too far, you don’t learn to drive a car through reading the highway code; you actually get behind the wheel (preferably under supervision) and … drive. You don’t learn about what food tastes good from a recipe book; you … taste the stuff yourself.

And so it is with writing code and using new and unfamiliar APIs. It was definitely the case with my recent (reacquaintance of, and) foray into JavaScript and the addition of support for Nokia’s Ovi Maps API to the Mapstraction project, with the added benefit of having to teach myself how to move from my (by now very dated) knowledge of version and revision control under CVS to git.

So, first JavaScript and Mapstraction and the Nokia Maps API and now to PHP and the WordPress API. There’s a lot of WordPress plugins that do geo-related stuff with your blog but none of them actually do what I want. WP Geo comes close, but it uses Google Maps and Google Maps only. Now I have nothing against Google Maps or the Google Maps APIs but I want maps from the company I work for on my blog.

When I came to add Nokia’s Maps API to Mapstraction I at least had a head start. I’d done some JavaScript and I was at least familiar with the Mapstraction API. But writing a WordPress plugin was another thing entirely. Despite hosting my blog on WordPress since 2004 and being able to hack a moderate amount of PHP, I’d never needed to use the WordPress API. Until now.

Bearing in mind the old adage about walking before you can run I decided the best way to tackle this was to write a WordPress plugin for something much more simplistic and this is where Matt Whatsit comes in. At the foot of each post is a nice little biography; in Matt’s case it read “Stole some Chewits in 1979. The guilt still haunts me“.

So I searched for a plugin that would give me this capability. There’s lots. But as with the desire for a geo-related plugin, none of them did exactly what I wanted. The closest I could find was Jon Bishop’s WP About Author plugin. So, as all WordPress plugins are licensed under the version 2 of the GNU Public License, I took Jon’s plugin and hacked it to do what I wanted it to do. The result is what I’ve called WP Biographia and you should be able to see the results of it at the foot of this post, if you’re reading it from this URL.

I now know, or at least understand at a conceptual level with much web searching of the WordPress Codex, how to write and structure a WordPress plugin. I still need to know how to write and structure a WordPress widget but that will form part of the next version of WP Biographia. By then, I should be armed with enough WordPress API knowledge to start to write what I really wanted to write, which is my geo-related plugin, which may, or may not be called WP Mappa. I’m only a quarter of the way there, but it’s a quarter more than when I started this.

In the meantime, WP Biographia is now part of the official WordPress plugin repository and is also up on github as well. It also now has a resident page here on my blog which I’ll update as and when I make sufficient changes and improvements to warrant a new version.

Starting to code again is addictive and I seem to have managed to rack up a few github repositories of recent. WP Biographia is but one of what I’ve christened, in line with the theme of Gary’s Bloggage, Gary’s Codeage. For now, it’s a holding pen for those code projects that live in github but for which I’ve yet to write a formal page on. These may appear sometime in the not too distant future as and when time permits.

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

… it knows that I’m browsing from my Google Nexus One and serves up the mobile version of the site, but if it sees a user-agent string like this …

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.19.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.3 Safari/533.19.4

… it knows that I’m browsing from Safari on a Mac and serves up the normal version of the site. Actually it’s not WordPress that knows how to act on a browser’s user-agent string, it’s a neat WordPress plugin called WPTouch that does the magic.

But then I tried viewing my blog on my new Windows Phone 7 handset and WPTouch doesn’t work its magic.

It turns out that there’s a clue to the solution in the name; WPTouch was designed to serve up the mobile view of a WordPress blog for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Support was then added for Android and Blackberry handsets, but not for Windows Phone 7. Luckily, the plugin supports custom user-agent strings so adding support for Windows Phone 7 should be trivial. Well maybe not that trivial. A quick web search shows that there’s at least 10 variants of the Windows Phone 7 user-agent.

But rather than list them all explicitly, simply adding “iemobile“, the lowest common denominator, as a custom user-agent string catches them all.

Armed with all this information, my blog now support Windows Phone 7 with ease, plus adding “nokia, symbian” as additional custom user-agent strings means that my Nokia N8 can also view the mobile version of my blog.

As a final footnote, if you’re wondering why I’ve used photos of Windows Phone 7 rather than screenshots, it’s because along with multi-tasking and copy-and-paste, Windows Phone 7 doesn’t currently support taking screen shots. Yet. But then again, the original version of the iPhone lacked a lot of this functionality too, which did nothing to dent the uptake of that handset. Multi-tasking and copy-and-paste is promised in the next upcoming WP 7 OS update, hopefully with screenshot taking as well.

I’ve been using Posterous for a while now, a quick trawl back through the archives shows the first post I wrote via the service was in August 2009, and I’ve been using it ever since.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

• Starting off with a serious note, Ed Parsons, my opposite number at Google, wrote a great blog post on the knots that data licensing can tie you up in and why you end up paying more for a leased digital version than you do for the physical paper version.
• WordPress started bugging me about an auto-saved version of a blog post I didn’t want to keep but couldn’t get rid of. Turns out there’s no way to do this from the WordPress dashboard but some MySQL hackery did the trick.
• “I am, and am VERY badly affected by being in close proximity to WiFi and other microwave transmission sources. Not that I’d expect you or anyone else who isn’t adversely affected to believe me“. The rest of the story on the Daily Telegraph blog is priceless.
• Ofcom confirmed what anyone with the UK ADSL line already knows, that the average UK broadband speed is just over half of what’s being advertised and paid for.
• A US highway exit sign got every word misspelled, apart from the word “exit”.
• Forget putting men on Mars or getting the Space Shuttle working; we put cheese into space, tracked it, lost it and found it again. Makes you proud to be British.
• Someone likes Nutella. A lot.
• And finally, if your iPhone gets a text message containing a single square character. Turn it off. Turn it off now.