blogging
Wordpress Toolbar Plugin and Wordpress Prefixes: A Fix
First of all, that’s an awesome plugin that will allow your visitors to have a look at external links while retaining the ability to comment locally on your blog. Get it!
Unfortunately, if you have modified your Wordpress database prefix, for instance because you are using Wordpress MU or the Virtual Module, the toolbar will fail to display.
Here is my very modest fix that will make it work.
1. Open wordpress-toolbar/toolbar.php
2. Find, near the top of the file:
$resultset = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM wp_options where option_name in ('wordpress_toolbar_social','wordpress_toolbar_excludedomains','wordpress_toolbar_skin','wordpress_toolbar_custom')"); |
Replace with:
$resultset = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->options} where option_name in ('wordpress_toolbar_social','wordpress_toolbar_excludedomains','wordpress_toolbar_skin','wordpress_toolbar_custom')"); |
3. That’s it!
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A very geeky Holidays break
Was your break as geeky as mine? Come on, admit it: you’ve done at least one incredibly unsexy thing in the last couple weeks. I know I have. Well, in fact, I had to take a four weeks-long break and it shows in the number of silly things I’ve played with.
In no particular order:
- I improved this blog’s look — well, I like to think that I have:
- I finally created a personalized Twitter page:
- I also created a Twitter page for Twitterified:
- I created an icon set call “More Blaqua“:
- I added a drawer to the Twitterified client - you will see why sometime in January, hopefully!
(Oh, and I finally mastered transparency in Flex, too! Yay)
- I started separating nextBBS v2’s components so that the framework can be used on its own and the message board part is now a module.
It is the first MVC PHP framework that seamlessly support plug-ins.
- I added to nextBBS v2 a limited amount of compatibility with Wordpress plug-ins.
I re-read Getting Things Done by David Allen and made a new year resolution to stick with the program, this time.
So far my Inbox is empty and my tasks list still is a manageable size…
I have installed Medialink on my iMac and use it to stream Divx movies to my PS3. Works flawlessly.
I have also installed PlayOn! in Parallels to stream Netflix. I wish there was an equivalent program for OS X. Well, I “kind of” wish because Netflix’s streaming choice is not that exciting. Not to mention that Netflix innovates by being, to my knowledge, the first company to proudly blog about letting go 50 employees.
- I setup an old P4 with Nexentra. The project bills itself as “The land of free and open source distribution combining OpenSolaris kernel with Ubuntu userland.”
In fact I installed it because I wanted to create a ZFS array. Unfortunately the clunky old PC is way too noisy. Fortunately I realized that a read-write implementation of ZFS for Leopard is available at Mac OS Forge.
- I cancelled XM Radio. They had been annoying me for quite a while, inserting their stupid advertisements in talk radio channels, and now that they merged with Sirius they got rid of some channels I happened to like so, good riddance XM, welcome free radios on my iPhone! — and ironically but quite logically I have better reception in tunnels.
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Four Top Wordpress Code Highlighters Reviewed
I recently ran a whole lot of Wordpress code highlighting plug-ins through the grinder and ended up selecting four that, in my opinion, are the worthiest of the lot.
Writing a code highlighter plug-in proves to be a fairly difficult exercise. Your plug-in needs to be smart about its content, or the result will invariably be a disappointment. For instance, if the plug-in is activated using the <pre> tag, then it needs to maintain a stack/counter of <pre> and </pre> tags so that finding a <pre> tag in the code being highlighted doesn’t abruptly terminate the code parsing, disfiguring your blog in the process. I noticed the issue with SyntaxHighlighter, but the other plug-ins may also suffer from it.
SyntaxHighlighter
Tag: [sourcecode language='css']code here[/sourcecode]
My main issue with this plug-in is that it works in visual mode; hence, your source code formatting (tabs etc.) is lost. Other than that, it works well and support a wide range of languages and it offers several very nice features such as ‘copy to clipboard’ or ‘print’. My hope, right now, is that I did not use it correctly.
Rating: 
Highlight source Pro
Tag: <pre lang="enc__php" class="17">code here</pre>
I do not like the use of the class arguments, as it means “start numbering with line 17″ which totally breaks XHTML compliance.
Note the smart use of the enc__ prefix, which, when presents, means that the code being highlighted is encoded using HTML Entities. Add the prefix, you can use the higlighter in visual mode; omit it and work in HTML mode.
Rating: 
FV Code Highlighter
Tag: {code type=php}code here{/code}
Cute display, which will feel immediately familiar to Dreamweaver aficionados. Support PHP, HTML, CSS and XML.
Rating:
WP_CODEBOX
Tag: <pre lang="php" line="1" file="example.php" colla="-">code here</pre>
In my opinion, this is the winner. It works well, looks good and support more languages than any of the others — I counted about 70 different formats!
You can display the code box collapsed or expanded, offer a link to download the code, etc.
Rating:
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