Gary Gale

Posts tagged as "code"

WP Biographia v2.0 Goes Into Beta

I continue to be genuinely gobsmacked at the reception that WP Biographia has received since I first released it in August of this year. People are downloading it; people are emailing me about it; people are discussing it and asking for new features on the WordPress forums and since I put the code up on GitHub, people are even forking it, improving on it and sending me pull requests. But I've been buried deep in my day job over the last month or so and as a result coding has had to play second fiddle to what I do for a living.

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WP Biographia In The Real World

It's been almost a month since I released the first version of WP Biographia and in that time, according to the stats on the WordPress plugin page, it's been downloaded 212 times. That's rather gratifying. Several people have also emailed me to tell me that they're using the plugin. That's even more gratifying.

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.

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WP Biographia Is But A Quarter Of The Way To WP Mappa

In a way, this was all Matt Whatsit's fault; he writes very profane and very funny blog posts and reading his recent The Five Stages Of P****d Wife (which you should read if you haven't already, err, read it) made me laugh, hell, it made me ROFL and LMAO at the same time but it also made me think, though not necessarily about wives or drunkenness ...

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.

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Mapstraction, Maps and Me

It's been a while since my last blog post; my day job at Nokia has been taking up almost all of my time and what little time has been left has been spent with my family. But in between day job and family time there's evenings spent in a hotel room and hours spent on a plane, mainly between London's Heathrow and Berlin's Tegel airports. It's in these periods of time that a combination of my MacBook Pro, running a combo of Apache/MySQL/PHP with MAMP and TextMate has allowed me to rediscover the pleasure of what I used to do for my day job before Yahoo! and before Nokia ... and that's to write code.

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