10.17.08
by

More WordPress 2.7 Impacts

I updated one of my development areas to the current bleeding edge version of WordPress 2.7 this morning to see how things look.  Everything with my plugin still seems to work just fine – if you can find it!

I am torn with the new menu structure in the Dashboard.  I like the icons and how much cleaner they are but at the same time, it isn’t obvious where the menus for my plugin should live.  I expect I will have to make a new top level menu and icon.  I am glad the plugin still works but am a little concerned about the way it will integrate with the new WordPress Dashboard UI.

10.17.08
by

Windows Live Writer

A while back I installed Windows Live Writer but then didn’t use it.  Yesterday I decided to give it a try, why it cropped back into my mind I am not sure, and I am very pleased with how easy it works.  While I like WordPress a lot, I find the Dashboard interface a nuisance when all I want to do is write a post.  It is fine for doing admin work but when all I want to do is post, having to wait for the Dashboard to load is annoying.

It is particularly bad on the Wp-SwimTeam site I have hosted on SourceForge.  For what ever reason, it takes a very looooong time for the Dashboard update services to time out (SourceForge doesn’t allow the remote connections) so it isn’t uncommon to have to wait a minute or so before being able to post.

I can really see the value of Windows Live Writer for a user like my wife who needs to post updates to our Swim Team web site but doesn’t need to be burdened with the WordPress Dashboard overhead.  Based on my initial testing, I like what I see.

10.17.08
by

How to handle meet events?

Now that I have the standard events working with drag and drop reordering, I need to propagate events to each meet.  My thinking has been that a meet will start by importing the standard events and then add, delete, edit, and reorder as necessary to support a specific swim meet.

While I have had this model in my head, my first look at actually implementing it raised a bunch of questions – where I do put it?  How does it work?  The event management isn’t as simple as other meet management tasks so it sort of breaks in the way that I implemented the meet data.  I have an idea how to solve it but it will take some experimenting to see if it will work.

10.16.08
by

I just love Newark Airport ….

I had to go to New Jersey yesterday for a meeting and had a 6:10 PM flight scheduled to continue on to Orlando for another meeting today.  I was flying Continental and while their planes are newer, the seat pitch just isn’t what American’s is.  That 2-3 inches makes a huge difference.  Anyway – when I got to Newark my flight was showing on time but by the time i got to the gate, it was clear it wouldn’t be.  There was still a flight at my scheduled gate so we were moved one gate down the terminal.  Then we were delayed.  By the time we started boarding it was about 6:40 and since the flight was full, it took a while to board.  After departing the gate we sat on the runway for another hour, maybe more.  The pilot made up some time in the air – and we finally landed about 10:30, about an hour late so he made up at least 30 minutes.  Just a typical Newark experience!

10.13.08
by

Golf game heads south again

I have played twice since my last golf posting and unfortunately my results have more like the 2nd 9 in my Tale of two 9’s as opposed tot he 1st 9.  I didn’t even break 100 much less get close to 90 the  last two times out.  In both cases I was really spraying the ball off the tee and here where we have the nice thick bermuda rough, once you are in trouble, it is hard to get out of it.

I think I know what I was doing wrong – I let some old bad habits creep in.  My stance was too wide and my grip was too weak.  I went out one evening and played a couple holes and hit the ball much better.  Not sure I can play this week though, I’ll be out of town for a couple of days for work.

10.09.08
by

Need a new approach for Event Ordering

After getting the Portlet drag and drop working, or so I thought, it looks like I am going to have to abandon that approach.  It turns out the drag and drop works just find – it does what it is supposed to.  However, getting the new arrangement information so it can be sent back to the server as an Ajax post does not.  I am unable to get any sort of serialization to work and even the Portlet example indicates it is obsolete and references jQuery UI.

I have subsequently found a jQuery based Table Drag-and-Drop solution which looks like it will do what I want.  I am now in the process of implementing this in hopes that it will be a little easier to work with.  Stay tuned …

10.01.08
by

A tale of two 9's

I played at MDCC yesterday with Dr. Bob and two other Dad’s from our Y-Princess tribe.  It was a tale of two 9’s me.  I shot 43 on the front nine and hit the ball well.  I actually hit the flag with my tee shot on #8 and got a Sergio bounce out it – the ball rolled back about 40 feet!  We took about an hour break between 9’s – long story – two of the guys had to attend a school program in the middle of our round so we took a break for lunch and watied for them to get back.  Unfortunately I lost all my rythm and shot 51 on the back and it was a bad 51.  I think I only had two decent drives oh the back 9.  Once again, I was unable to close when I had a good chance to break 90.  I’m playing again on Friday, we’ll see if I can do a little better.

09.28.08
by

Running WordPress on SourceForge

Running WordPress under SourceForge project web hosting service can be frustrating.  It just doesn’t work as seamlessly as it WordPress normally does.  When I first installed WordPress, the Akismet anti-spam plugin wouldn’t work (still doesn’t) because SourceForge doesn’t allow remote connections.  Yesterday I wanted to include an image in a post only to find that I couldn’t upload an image due to a permissions problem.

It took a while to figure it out and with the reorganiztion of SourceForge, a lot of their documentation is either wrong or missing.  SourceForge allows a “persistent” directory for uploads but it isn’t in the htdocs tree – it is in a different area of the file system.  To get uploads working I had to create a uploads directory in the persistent file system space for my project and then create a symbolic link from wp-contents/uploads to the uploads directory in the persistent directory.  Certainly not real striaight forward but at least it is now working.  It shouldn’t be this hard.  I did all of this with sftp, I couldn’t figure out a way to get a shell open via SSH.

While I was at it I also  updated WordPress to the latest (2.6.2) version.

09.27.08
by

Phase 1 of Drag and Drop Event Ordering

Today I got the first part of Ajax based Drag and Drop Event Ordering working.  A few weeks ago when I was skimming the Internet looking for some Ajax tips I found this interesting jQuery demo called Portlets.  You really need to see the example to get the idea of how it works.  When I found it I knew it was exactly what I was looking for to do event order (and hopefully heat sheets at some point).

I finally got some cycles to work on it yesterday and earlier today I got the first phase of it working.  I can display the events to the user and they can drag and drop them to order them however they see fit.  This part of it works as I hoped it would.  Now that it is working, I need to get Ajax handshaking worked out so the database gets updated with the new sort order.  Hopefully that won’t be to difficult but working with this type of Ajax problem is new ground for me.

Drag and Drop Event Ordering

Drag and Drop Event Ordering