ace’s blog

Holy sheep shit! I just fixed a known (to me) bug in the vox-crossposter WP plugin I wrote a LONG time ago.

All I changed was the character encoding from

$email_headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1'."\r\n";

to

$email_headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8'."\r\n";

If you look at the second “known bugs” list at http://www.acedanger.com/vox-crossposter, you will see exactly what I changed. Now I need to get home so I can update the download link and the download from the WordPress Plugin site.

Edit: I updated the source that the download link points to.

Meri and I were in bed, getting ready to fall asleep and then she started talking about work and how she didn’t want to go back tomorrow. That got me talking (and thinking) about my job. Then I started bitching…and bitching and bitching and bitching. So now, about 2 hours later (yeah, we go to bed early here), I’m online. I feel like I should redo my once-proud website.

Revisiting development on that site got me thinking about Barry‘s site: FeedBang.com. Dammit man! I was once at peace with not continuing development on PeopleArray.com and someone alright with letting my PHP skills get rusty. Now that I saw that you’ve done work to FeedBang.com, I feel like I need to get off my ass and update that site! Good work on FeedBang.com Barry; it looks pretty cool and I really like that you’ve added the ability to login with openid.

I remember my days at Terminix when I had all kinds of time to develop a site like PeopleArray.com. I once went three weeks doing absolutely nothing, besides asking my manager for something to do. Yeah, that’s right, 3 weeks…in a row!

I loved working for Terminix (both because of the people and the company) but I hated Memphis. I’m glad to be gone but I’m not happy where I ended up. I love being back in Florida but dislike my job. I have learned a lot. I’m proud to say that I know a LOT about LANSA Web! I’m just hoping that I can find a job where I can continue doing either LANSA Web or get back to some Visual LANSA.

….

Ok, so insomnia is not letting go of it’s grip and I just visited Digg.com and Reddit.com. I haven’t been to those sites in a really long time. Normally I just read them through Google Reader.

….

Is it weird to laugh at something I blogged about a long time ago? I remember writing this and even the details of the circumstances surrounding the issue. Stupid financial month reports. Anyway, I laughed about this blog entry: http://www.acedanger.com/2006/06/08/808008704-megabytes/.

….

Good night (I hope).

My plugin was in a write up about WordPress plugins on the blog Mashable.  Here is a link to the entry: http://mashable.com/2007/08/02/wordpress-readers/.   How cool is that?!

I found it by looking through some of the incoming links to my blog.  I clicked on a link from an Asian site and saw a link to Mashable.com.  I clicked on the Mashable link and then did a search on the blog entry for “vox” and found my plugin listed!  That’s freaking awesome!

First and foremost, I want to thank David Chartier for the write-up he completed for the DownloadSquad regarding my WordPress plugin, the Vox Crossposter. I didn’t think the plugin was that big of a deal until users started to email me, asking me for help installing the plugin. I received a lot of positive feedback as well some suggestions for enhancements.

I have implemented a few of the suggestions and will continue to do so if I feel that the request actually enhances the plugin or if I get many requests for the same feature.

I was first contacted by David back in Jan 2007. I was very excited (and very surprised) to know that the plugin I wrote got someone’s attention who would be able to spread the word more than I have been able to. After a while, I forgot about the proposed write-up because after all, everybody gets busy! So fast forward to tonight when I just happened to check my email and what do I see? A wonderful message from Google Alerts (yes, I receive alerts regarding my own blog and yes, I do subscribe to it via Google Reader) :

As far as future development of the plugin, I am waiting on Six Apart to create an API for Vox like they have for LiveJournal or MoveableType.

Anyway, read about the development of and the pride I have in my plugin in my WordPress Plugin category. Thanks again David for the great write-up and the recognition.

I just found this badass site for searching through the WordPress source code!  This site makes searching through the source very easy!  It is a PIA to search through the source code by hand.

I have been contacted by David Chartier of the blog DownloadSquad.com and was inquiring about writing a post there about the WordPress plugin I created to crosspost WordPress posts to Vox (I dubbed it the Vox Crossposter, pretty ingenious huh??)! That’s pretty damned exciting I think.

He also inquired about whether or not I would accept donations in order to help encourage me to further the development of my plugin. It was a difficult decision but I told him that I could indeed accept donations to continue doing what I really like to do: web development.

It is nice to get some recognition about the plugin. When I first started developing the plugin and posted it to the WordPress plugins page, I helped a few people install it and get it running. Occasionally, I will hear from a user of the plugin about a feature request. It’s nice to hear about people using the plugin, makes me feel like I can actually create usable things.

If there is a write-up regarding my plugin, I will post a link to it here.

If you are a user of the plugin, send me an email and tell me what you think, even if you hate it!

The marathon painting session is OVER.  Five rooms in five days!  One room a day makes it sound very misleading and almost simplistic.  We actually have been doing trim for the past two days so that means five rooms in three days!  It was insane.  I’m glad it is over!  Now I can just go back to being busy doing other things such as NOTHING!  What will I do with all of my free time at night while I’m not painting?!  Seriously though, painting sucks; although I am really good at it now.

Hurricane Ernesto is threatening to close down my new office tomorrow.  It’s a good thing I’m making more money and the job is in !Memphis (that’s programmer speak for not Memphis) because otherwise, I wouldn’t move into hurricane alley!

Monday, I worked on an issue that has been sitting in my queue at work for a little while now.  It actually felt good to get some coding done and not just researching other former employees code.  I spent the whole day doing that and I’m just about finished with it.

Last Friday, I did some work on the PeopleArray dev site.  I got the Lightbox Gone Wild JavaScript working for the Add Contact and Edit Contact portions of the site.

The problem I was having with that was that the “window” that opens up wasn’t large enough to cover my entire form.  The problem was that the default code specifies a specific height and width for the background window.  I must have overlooked that because I really thought I was going to have to hack up the code to get it to work like I wanted it to.

Lot’s of updating on minor things.  I’m glad you care enough to read this far.

So I spent about [insert very large number here] hours working on my plugin yesterday because someone told me that it wasn’t working for them! “That cannot be true” I thought. So I emailed (many, many times) and messaged the blogger attempting to use my plugin and after those many hours, I fixed it! Thanks in large part to her sticking with me and my plugin and not throwing in the towel. So I dub the 0.3 version of the Vox Crossposter the LuAnn version!

What was the problem you ask? Well it seems that you don’t need to include all of the normal html tags in an html email that make up a typical html page: html, head, body, and the ending tags for them. I could swear I read somewhere that you were supposed to do that. Well, you don’t! Anyway, having all those tags worked for me and everyone else I have heard from that uses the plugin except for LuAnn.

So what do I get for my hours of coding and debugging? More fan mail! This is my second piece of fanmail. Here is my post regarding my first piece of fan mail, just in case you haven’t been paying attention (or didn’t care).

On another front, I’m busy waiting for a copy of a file to be made (and it is taking forever!). Who would have thunk that it would take several hours for 200 million records to be copied?! Not me! Here’s hoping that I never screw up like that again!

I added a sidebar option in WordPress that allows you to choose whether or not you want to crosspost the entry you are creating to Vox or not. Here is a screen shot:

Beautiful ain’t it?!

For my next trick, I’m going to look into a bug that is putting a funky character (Â) in the Vox posts. See this comment. I have figured out that when you put a second space (or more) in your posts, WordPress replaces the subsequent spaces with the HTML non-breaking character to ensure that the spacing is preserved (HTML collapses white space; it will only recognize a single space unless you explicityly use the ” &nbsp” character). I need to figure out why that’s showing up as a funky character when a post is publiched in Vox.

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.