June 2009

After some beta testing and subsequent bug squashing, WP-Feedly is ready for prime-time, and available for download.

I’ve been working on my profesionnal portfolio these days, and I’m thinking about releasing the theme. It’s a very clean and white design, with a jQuery carousel to present my past work. You can see a demo on Jonathan Foucher’s portfolio. So, should I release it? Do you like it?

UPDATE : A post sort plugin already exists, take a look at this one.

You’ve probably noticed that there is no option to sort posts any other way than by date in Wordpress. I’ve had several requests to be able to sort post from the oldest to the newest, which Wordpress cannot do with a simple one button option.

I think I can hear the critics already : “What, but that is sacrilegious! It’s not a blog anymore then!” but maybe these users do not want a blog per se, but only an easy to maintain, good looking and accessible website, for whatever purpose. If you had written a novel and wanted to publish it in installments, it would only be logical to start with the first chapter, right? And if you wanted a glossary, the only viable option is to have it sorted alphabetically.

So, what about a plugin that allows you to sort in date order, reverse date order, and alphabetically? Should it have the ability to sort posts on other criteria? Does something like this already exists?

I’ll await some feedback before starting work on this, so don’t hesitate to post a comment.

The Feedly-like theme for Wordpress has reached the beta stages. I would like to do a limited round of testing before releasing this theme. Feedly changes so quickly that I’m having trouble keeping up! Only today, I noticed they added the date in a little box on the left hand side, I must admit it’s quite useful to see at a glance when the posts were published. I implemented it straight away on WP-feedly, of course!

Below is a video showing how window size changes are handled, using adaptive CSS with Javascript. I  think this is quite useful for users with smaller screen, or for people who do not use their browser full screen. For mobile users, however, this might not be the best solution.

The official page for WP-Feedly: More information on WP-Feedly. To sign up for the limited private beta, go there, thanks!

I  really like feedly, which I use to read my feeds in Firefox. The appearance and the functionnality are great. It’s a pity it’s only available for Firefox, as I tend to use Chromium more often now.

Anyway, I decided I could make a Wordpress theme that would mimic the looks and functionality of Feedly.  I think I’m getting there, I’d say I’m at about 70% of what I want to achieve. Of course, not all the features of feedly will be available, as some, such as the ability to mark an item read, to not make sense for a blog. Others will come little by little in future release, as I don’t think they are that important to usability, such as the popup boxes when posting to Twitter or delicious, for example.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of what I have at the moment, so please tell me what you think !

EDIT: It’s ready ! Download it now

You’ve probably already tried this web site, that allows you to create a caricature of yourself, manga style. It’s pretty well done, and I don’t think there’s another equivalent. The only problem is that you only get a small, low quality image by email when you’re done editing your avatar. This image is 178×178 pixels, which is fine to use as an avatar on most sites, and even to display on the web.

But I have to admit I’m a high res addict, and just had to find a way to get a better resolution picture.

The solution is easy if you’re using Firefox as your browser. I made use of the zoom feature to zoom in on the flash where the avatar creation occurs, and as flash does not lose resoution as you zoom in on it, you just have to print your screen when you are at the size you want and voilà! your high(er) res mangatar!

Click on the image on the right to view the full resolution version of my avatar. Once you get your own high-res avatar, it is much easier to vectorize it properly, using for example Inkscape or Vector Magic.

You can also download my own avatar in svgz format

I just wrote a simple plugin to auto tag new posts. It sends the content to tagthe.net and yahoo and gets back related tags. I must say these
work quite well and can be left on auto pilot if you’re like me and not a big fan of tagging your posts…

I use it on Renewable Energies from the Web, and it seems to be doing quite well.

Download