ace’s blog

Big yay to Brandice for sending me my first piece of fanmail! Receiving positive feedback is nice; almost as nice as getting a paycheck.

Since I’m so proud of my WordPress plugin, I figured I’d go ahead and spread the word about it in the hopes of everybody in the world (that has a WordPress blog and a Vox blog) would use my plugin.
I’ve posted stories to Digg, Reddit, Netscape (not that anybody reads that crap anyway), Shoutwire and of course, WP-plugins.net.

I did it, I created my first WordPress plugin! I am one happy mofo! It was very easy relative to how difficult I thought it was going to be. I only started writing my plugin two days ago!

My plugin is much like the LiveJournal crossposter I use in that the output is the same. My original plan was to use the same code from the LJ crossposter plugin but could not.

Six Apart is the company that owns both LiveJournal and Vox. Vox is relatively new, still in beta stage and isn’t even listed on the Six Apart Products list (look here). Since Vox is so new, there is not an API available, that I can find anyway. I have looked for it on the Six Apart developers page. I got an invite to Vox and have yet to do anything with it (other than create a profile) since I don’t know anybody that does uses Vox.

Now for the part where I shut up and just offer up the link to the Vox Crossposter plugin. To install my plugin, just download the zip file and unzip it. Upload the vox-crosspost.php file to the plugins folder (generally located at http://yourhost.tld/wp-content/plugins/).

Please note the limitations to my plugin: It will not edit a post on Vox if you edit it on WordPress. I cannot do this with my plugin until an API is created and released by Six Apart (see paragraph 3).

If you have any problems with my plugin, leave a comment.

If you’re looking for a WordPress-Vox Crossposter, there isn’t one that I can find anyway.  I am currently working on creating one. 

There is a WordPress-LiveJournal crossposting plugin available here (plain-text view of source here).  It was written by Evan Broder.  It works great and is an awesome plugin.  I’m modelling my cross-poster after the LJ one since Vox and LJ were created by the same company, Six Apart.  My [attempt at creating a]cross-poster is on hold until Six Apart creates some sort of documentation like they have for LJ.  Right now there isn’t an API that I can see and consequently, there is not documentation. 

One thing that I found odd on the part of Six Apart was that they don’t even show Vox in their list of products. 

On a side note, I have two Vox invites.  If anybody is interested, email me here or post a comment.

This is a great article on creating pop ups: Perfect Popups. The code is provided and the sample popup is pretty cool. I think the nicest feature of this is the auto-resizing.

For shits and giggles, check out the “contact me” page on this guys website. He’s a bit anal don’t ya think?!

Creating new images is hard.  Not actually creating them, but making them look decent.  That is all.

EDIT: Check out my logo test page.  I’ll be updating this page in search of a decent logo.

I’ve been working on the new design for my company. It’s full of CSS beauty! Check it out and let me know what you think! Platinum Grade Consulting

My blog used to be located at blog.petewood.us.  I just moved it to www.acedanger.com.  I had some decent search engine rankings on a few keywords and I didn’t want to lose them.  I knew there was a way to rewrite the URL so that if someone clicked on a link to one of my old pages, it would redirect them to the same page on the new domain.  For example, if someone clicked on a link to blog.petewood.us/2006/07/11/vacation/, I wanted them to be redirected to www.acedanger.com/2006/07/11/vacation/.  I have never written any scripts to rewrite URLs before so I turned to google for all the answers.  I found some info from several pages and came up with this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog\.petewood\.us
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.acedanger.com/$1 [r]

What this does is exactly what I have described in my example above.  I hope this helps someone out.  To test what I wrote, just click on the blog.petewood.us link above and it should take you to the acedanger.com page.

Aaron slept in his very own bed last night.  It was insanely easy!  I read him his books and just put him in bed and he slept all night!  But then he woke up at like 5:30    I’ll be interested to hear how he does with his nap today.

We have both his new bed and his crib in his room right now.  We are hopeful that the crib will be out of there in a week.  His bedroom has way too much furniture in there now.

I’m going to be an uncle for the second time!  My nephew is only 2 weeks older than Aaron and very soon, I will have a niece!  She is due in December, on my mom’s birthday of all days.  I’m sure that due date will change but I thought that was pretty cool.

I have a bunch of stuff to talk about so I’ll just get started. Have a seat, kick your feet up, grab the adult beverage of your choice and STFU!

I changed the colors of my company site…again. My hope is to make it easy on the eyes and also to make people think “Whoa, that’s a wicked awesome site! I must give this guy/company tons of my cash to make me a wicked awesome site like that!” That hasn’t happened yet so I suppose I’ll keep designing new color schemes. Special thanks to Meri for the help this weekend; Misty for all of the “that’s hideous, change it” criticism; and Barry, for being one of the guys that I go to with my PHP/JavaScript questions; Rich for being the other guy I go to for my PHP questions.. Sincere thanks to all of you for all of your help.

My neighbors are staying with us. They are moving to the Chicago area and their house got packed up and loaded yesterday. We have been helping them quite a bit that past 2 months or so. They got us a plaque that says “Great Neighbor” award. In showing (more) appreciation, they are going to fly us up to Chicago-land to visit them whenever we want to go. That’s f***ing cool! They are in the top two neighbors that I’ve ever had, with Rich and Marion being #1.

Aaron has a new trick: climbing. And what does he like to climb you ask? His crib. He loves, absolutely loves, to climb out at nap time and go read some books. He’s quick about it too. I have pictures of him demonstrating his love of climbing out of his crib. It’s amazing. I’ll post them tonight or something. We bought him an awesome headboard and footboard set at an auction about 2 weeks ago. We were hoping to not actually use them for a while (like a year!) but Aaron is forcing our hand. We bought side-rails this weekend. Do you see where this is going? We bought him a mattress yesterday. We are going to set up the bed along-side his crib. Ugh. This is going to be a tough change for all of us, especially Meri. We are pretty sure that he won’t be taking many more naps.

I think that’s everything as of late. If it’s not, I’ll add more later.