WordCamp Dallas 2009 Impressions
I spent this weekend “drinking from a firehose” as Jon Pozadzides put it on the first day. I’ve been using and developing for WordPress for the last few years so I wondered what I would actually get out of WordCamp. Several of the speakers reiterated things that I knew but have failed to act on.
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Coding and having fun with YouVersion and WordPress
Over the last month or so I have had the privilege to work with the Digerati at LifeChurch.tv on a plugin for WordPress. It allows WordPress authors to link scripture references to YouVersion, an online Bible, produced by LifeChurch.tv. You even have the option to have a text bubble appear over your reference with the verses you are referencing. You can read the official announcement here, http://blog.youversion.com/?p=138. Read more
Coder’s Block
For the last several weeks I have struggled with programming. I completed all of my large projects and found myself with only mundane and/or repetitive coding in front of me. One day it was so bad that I just clocked out early because I could not get focused. Beginning this week, I would start my day by coming up with some little personal project to get into the right mindset. For instance, I wanted to see if I could pull stats from WordPress.com via Perl scripts. I was unsuccessful but I learned some things along the way. Because of this I was able to transition to another project and get it completed.
These little distractions were helping me overcome my coder’s block but I still struggled. That began to change on Wednesday. I was listening to Buzz Out Loud and the discussion sparked an idea. I got to work and began toying with the idea for geek-maps.com. I worked on it for a little bit and then switched over to my work projects. When I got home that evening I worked for several hours on the site. When I got to work the next morning, I didn’t have as hard a time getting started.
As I continued working throughout the day Thursday and then on Friday I noticed some nice side-effects. There was this new energy for my work. I also found that each project built upon the other and solved problems inherent in both. Another side effect was the overcoming of my writer’s block. As I worked on geek-maps, I began writing about what I was doing and the problems I was trying to solve. My purpose was simple. I was writing to let visitors know what I was up to and, it helped me think things through.
Writing for geek-maps, I was not worried about the topic or my sentence structure or the tone. I just wrote. Some authors say that it is the best way to combat writer’s block. It took this experience for me to see the evidence. I have had all kinds of ideas rattling around in my head, but I have not been motivated enough to write. My hope is that with this renewed energy I will begin to put some of those ideas to paper.
jLanguage
jLanguage 2.2 is an internalization plugin from Jakob Jensen at http://jakobj.dk/blog. It allows a user to markup their posts in various languages. Update – 1/27/2010: It appears that Jakob’s blog is offline. There is a newer plugin called xLanguage available from WordPress.org.
I wanted to extend the functionality so that when the user clicked on the language link to change to the appropriate post translation it would also set the default language of WordPress so the entire site would be translated. The site owner would only need to download the language files from WordPress and make sure their theme is coded to use WordPress’s localization.
If you want to check out the files you can download them from http://www.codeoffaith.com/files/wp_plugins/jLanguage/jLanguage_patch.zip
