Ross Hanney: Hello. I'm a web developer from the UK, specialising in WordPress, PHP and stuff like that.: Page 3

Google Calendar Events, 0.2

I’m really pleased with the response to my plugin so far. I never thought that it would get over a thousand downloads in a few days. Also, traffic to my website has increased by 20,000% in the last week! Although, that’s 20,000% of a very low number… so perhaps not as good as it sounds

Anyway, quite a few people in the comments on the plugin homepage requested more information in the tooltips, and others asked for the ability to hide certain bits of information (the start time of an event, for example). Well, these things are addressed in 0.2!

First Attempt at a WordPress Plugin, Release!

Google Calendar Events is released!

It took a lot longer than I expected and I think I should have started out with something simpler. I’m reasonably pleased with it, but I can see that there is a lot more work to do yet before it is polished.

Latest Tweet in WordPress, Error Handling

I have found that the method for displaying your latest Tweet that I previously posted about works nicely, if Twitter is working properly. Unfortunately, that seems to be a pretty big if. Recently, it is over capacity quite regularly or just doesn’t appear to work for some unknown reason.

The method I described fails completely if it doesn’t get a good response from Twitter. In fact, I found that it stops the rest of the page from executing, which is rubbish.

Luckily, preventing this is pretty simple. Here’s the original code:

First Attempt at a WordPress Plugin, Starting to Code

After my last post, I spent quite a while looking for and reading resources on writing WordPress plugins. There’s a lot of good information out there, but I found that it doesn’t all agree and it seems that there are several ways of accomplishing things. Anyway, here’s a few resources I found that helped me get started:

First Attempt at a WordPress Plugin, the Idea

As I mentioned earlier, I’m having a go at writing a WordPress plugin, which is something I’ve never done before. The reason I’m doing this is that I can’t find a plugin or other solution that will display Google Calendar data on a WordPress site I am developing quite the way I want.

The functionality I need is fairly similar to the ICS Calendar plugin, in that I need a full page calendar grid, containing events. However, I may also need a widget type thing to display a smaller grid or list of a few upcoming events and ICS Calendar can’t do this.

Google Calendar and WordPress, the options

A website that I’m currently working on redesigning uses Google Calendar to keep it’s visitors up-to-date with events. I’m building the site on WordPress and have been looking at the various options for combining the two. I realise that there are event calendar plugins, which would allow the site admins to manage events from WordPress itself, but as they are already using Google Calendar it wouldn’t make sense to confuse them with a new calendar system.

So, here’s a run-through of the various solutions I have discovered:

Latest Tweet in WordPress, now with Links!

Yesterday, in my geeky excitement at discovering how nice and easy it is to display your latest tweet in WordPress, I sort of neglected to mention that the method I described does not automatically link your @mentions, #hashtags or ordinary URLs, which is somewhat lame.

Luckily, shortly after posting I found this post, which provides an excellent little function that finds and creates the links in your tweets using regular expressions.

Latest Tweet in WordPress

Whilst looking for a plugin that would display my latest tweet on my homepage, I came across this post. I hadn’t realised it was such an easy task, hardly requiring an entire plugin.

I decided to adapt the code a bit, as fetch_rss() is now deprecated and I also wanted to display the date and time of the tweet, which this code doesn’t do as is.

I’m sure this isn’t really anything new, but I was just pleased with how simple it is to do. Here’s the code I came up with:

Wobbly Links with jQuery

(Update – 22nd February 2012 – I’m no longer using this on my site. The effect described should still work, but I’m not sure it was a particularly good idea in the first place!)

As I was putting my site together, I was looking for a nice mouse-over effect for the main navigation links, something a bit different.

I came up with an idea for a sort of ‘wobble’ effect that would repeat while the mouse is over a link (as seen in the clouds above). I was just getting started with learning jQuery, so thought I would attempt to use it to produce the wobble.

I’ll explain the code I came up with below.

Up and Running

Hello!

So, I’m up and running on the webternets. As I said on the homepage, this site will be a portfolio, a blog and a place for me to test out ideas and suchlike.

I’ll mainly talk about web design and development stuff on my blog, but I suspect other topics may come up as and when the inspiration arises.

Here’s a few notes about the construction of the site itself:

Ross Hanney

Google Calendar Events, 0.2

First Attempt at a WordPress Plugin, Release!

Latest Tweet in WordPress, Error Handling

First Attempt at a WordPress Plugin, Starting to Code

First Attempt at a WordPress Plugin, the Idea

Google Calendar and WordPress, the options

Latest Tweet in WordPress, now with Links!

Latest Tweet in WordPress

Wobbly Links with jQuery

Up and Running

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