More Than Scratch The Surface - WordPress, Websites and Web Development

The other day a great comment was left on this site. When I went to answer, I realized that I wanted to be able to select part of what the commentator said and automatically turn it into a quote in my comment.

Copy and paste are too mundane for me, so I wrote a Greasemonkey script that adds the markItUp! Editor to any textarea on a page. I then extended markItUp! by adding a ‘quote’ button that wraps the currently selected text (from anywhere on the page) in blockquote tags.

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While catching up on some old podcasts, specifically Episode 82 of WordPress Weekly, I came across a discussion about WordPress beta testing. The discussion centers around the problem of bugs not being caught during beta testing because there just aren’t enough beta testers.

To me, the solution seems straightforward – but that may be because I worked in the software industry for 10 years and have experience in software release management, so I’ll take the long path and set the scene properly.

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Go to Posts -> Edit in the WordPress Admin area and you’ll see a list of all the posts you have. There is a dropdown list called View all categories, which allows you to select a single category to view posts from. But…

What if you want to view posts from more than one category, or better yet, want to exclude posts from certain categories? Can’t do it right? Well not through the WordPress interface, but you can do it through URL parameters.

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Happy New Year to all! A year ago, after looking at my Google Analytics stats for the year, I wrote a post reviewing 2008. I figure I may as well do it again for 2009 and also take the opportunity to explain the direction of this site.

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It’s been over a month since I published my notes on the Thursday session of Microsoft Tech.Ed Australia 2009. In that post, I promised to write up the SharePoint discussion session separately. Finally, here it is.

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There are a bucketload of blog posts out there about web hosting. The vast majority of these are either praising their current hosts (along with a nice little affiliate link for you to click) or berating them for poor service.

Today, I’m going to do something different: I’m going to praise a web host that I no longer use and for which I don’t have an affiliate link. Read the rest of this entry »

I was fortunate to attend Microsoft Tech.Ed Australia 2009 last week. I made copious notes during the day, so I thought I’d share them. Read the rest of this entry »

I’d like to announce the release of my second Greasemonkey script: Google Numbered Search Results; which numbers the SERP entries delivered by the Google search engine. Read the rest of this entry »

After listening to recent episodes of the WordPress Weekly podcast (episodes 67 and 68), I was surprised to learn that in future versions of WordPress, the Delete link will be replaced with Trash. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve released version 1.12 of Comment Warning overnight. It only contains a small, non critical, change – it now counts how many comments have been made from each IP address in the Log. Read the rest of this entry »