When you release some code you've written under one of the many open source licenses that exist today, if you're lucky then you can expect to get asked for help using that code. Note that I say if you're lucky. Some people I know view giving help and support as, frankly, a pain; it gets in the way and stops them thinking about a new feature or the next big thing. I take the opposite view though, I see being asked for help as a compliment; it means someone has found the code I've written and actually thinks it might, maybe, be useful, so they're using it and need a bit of support in getting it to do what they want it to do.

So if getting asked questions about code I've written isn't a problem for me, then why am I writing this? It's not the being asked as much as it is what is being asked. Support questions such as ...

WP Biographia's always had the ability to suppress the display of the plugin's Biography Box for all users; unfortunately that's been accomplished by simply not installing the plugin. But judging from requests on the WordPress forums as well as emails hitting my Inbox, suppressing the display of the Biography Box for some users ranks highest on the list of requested features.

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.

Although I fly a lot these days, I don't fly on internal routes in the US that much and so flying Virgin America, which has onboard wifi, is still something that brings out the childish geek in me. In homage to a certain Mr. Aaron Cope, once again I am in the sky as I write this and starting to think that maybe I will only write blog posts from airplanes from now on.

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.

It's taken a while but after 20 commits on GitHub, 1000 odd lines of PHP code, 40 odd WordPress forum posts and, what to me is a staggering, 1100 odd WordPress downloads, WP Biographia finally hits version 2.0. As I've written before, this is very much an ongoing learning process and putting version 2.0 out into the wild hasn't been entirely trouble free, as this thread on the WordPress forums amply shows.

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.

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.

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.

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. It's fiendishly simple and works like this :-

• I write a blog post in my email client and send it to post@posterous.com.
• Posterous expands any links that it can, such as links to my Flickr account, and embeds the graphic inline in the text.
• Posterous autoposts any embedded photos to my Flickr account.
• Posterous looks for any tags in the subject line and autoposts to my Delicous account.
• Posterous date and timestamps the post and puts it up on my Posterous blog at https://vicchi.posterous.com/.
• Posterous autposts the entire blog post to my main, WordPress powered, blog at /.