Bloggy Hell

I, like most other people in the world receive a lot of spam. I do have a spam filter, but it isn’t perfect, and errs on the side of caution - and for good reason. It is my business account and I don’t want to miss any potential leads. This does mean that I still receive a number of spam emails a day. Now most of these are obvoious spam mails, but a couple have come through that were legitimate. The only reason I opened them is because something about the name or subject triggered a response. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case.
So here are a couple of things to think about when sending emails out to other people:

1. Use your FULL name. That includes both a first name and surname. Getting an email from “Joe” makes me think it is spam. “Joe Bloggs” is better. This is especially important if you have a common name and if you are emailling someone for the first time.
2. Take some time thinking about a decent subject line. Avoid common spam terms like “Hey” or “Hi
3. To take the subject line thing further - don’t just reply to an un-related email. It makes searching a pain in the arse. I had one client who would do this and when I was searching for a particular email I had to sift through 400 emails all entitled “Re: “.

Anyone think of any more?

Ok, after going away and thinking about the problem, I came up with a quick and dirty (But seemingly effective and compliant) way of doing the indenting. It does require a small modification to the GeSHi code. I’m going to use an empty inline tag (ins tag - which stands for insert - how appropriate…)
Open the geshi.php file (See my previous post about code highlighting in WordPress 2.0 if you have no idea what I’m talking about) and find the indent function. Search for all the nbsp elements and replace with:

Now open the insertcode.css file and the style.css (in your theme) and add:

Voila! indenting. The output looks like this:

A few more notes: html and xml highlighting is pretty well broken unless you add a erroneous space between the angle bracket and the tag (See this example) and don’t try to use special characters. I’m currently tweaking the colour coding classes to make them look nicer too. I’ll post these when they are done.

I have complained before about not being able to insert source code into WordPress when using the TinyMCE Rich Text Editor. Sure, I could switch to plain text mode, but frankly I would prefer an RTE as it makes entering posts much quicker. There is a TinyMCE plugin called insertcode written by by Maxime Lardenois which does exactly what I wanted. In fact, it even uses the GeSHI cde highlighter class (written in PHP) to do code highlighting. There is something like 50 different languages which are supported - Very cool.

Unfortunately, installation was not quite as simple as I hoped. Here is what I had to do (Substitute [blog_root] with the absolute path to your wordpress install):

1. Untar the GeSHI tarball and copy the geshi.php files and geshi directory to [blog_root]/wp-includes
2. Unrar (yes rar) the insertcode RAR file to [blog_root]/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/insertcode (Create the insertcode directory first)
3. THe RAR file I go didn’t have a directory structure - I don’t know whether I just messed up or what, but I had to create the following directories: config, css, images, jscripts, langs, webservice
4. Copy config.php into the config directory, insertcode.css into the css directory, insertcode.gif into the images directory, insertcode.js into the jscripts directory all the php files into the webservice directory and all of the language files (e.g. en.js) into the langs directory. You should only have editor_plugin.js editor_plugin_src.js and insertcode.htm files in the insertcode dir.
5. Open get_highlighted_code.php and change the $geshi->set_header_type(GESHI_HEADER_PRE) to $geshi->set_header_type(GESHI_HEADER_DIV)
6. Open [blog_root]/wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce.gzip.php and find the line $plugins = apply_filters - add ‘insertcode’ to the array
7. Still in tiny_mce.gzip.php add ‘insertcode’ to the line that starts with $mce_buttons = apply_filters
8. Finally add the following to lines to the initArray javascript array:

content_css : “/[blog_url_path]/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/insertcode/css/insertcode.css”,
encoding : “xhtml”,
This should add a new button to your toolbar with the letter “C” into. Pressing the button should pop a dialog box in which you can cut and paste code.

To make it look nice on the front end cut and paste the contents of insertcode.css into you themes’ style.css file:

That SHOULD be it.

You will notice that the indentation gets stripped - this is (I think) a Wordpress thing. I’ll post a solution once I figure one out Also, it can be a little tempermental - you have been warned. And as always: YMMV.

Edit: I’ve fixed the indent bug: check out this post.

The Edith Cowan University journalism students have launched the first edition of 3rd Degree - an online e-news site. The site was designed by Paul Bui and was developed by me in CakePHP.

The site allows the 3rd year students to understand the pressure of publishing a weekly news publication, with different teams controlling different parts of the process. If you would like to receive the weekly newsletter, you can register here.

3rd Degree is the brainchild of Kayt Davies, who is the lecturer in the unit.

Port80 - the Australian Web Industry, of which I’m the membership officer has announced the next event - Ideas3.

The event features John Allsop from Sydney, who is a directory of Westciv, creators of Stylemaster; and Mark Boulton from the UK who is a noted typographer and designer who is currently working at the BBC.

For those of you who aren’t in Perth for the event on April 11, we will be posting the podcasts and photos after the event.

As an aside, the new Port80 site, which drives the event and memeber management systems was written by me in CakePHP.

Interested in starting a Port80 group in your local area? We are currently preparing an information pack. Port80 started as a way for web designers and developers in Perth could catch up in a casual, informal environment - usually at a pub. It is amazing how well it works - it’s a great way to meet other like minded people. You can read a better history on the Port80 website. Don’t forget to check out the port80 forums too!