Ennovy.org

See this?

This is a screenshot of my EE control panel. I’ve written this extension and module combo that crossposts entries from EE into LiveJournal. The module part deals with the setup, and the extension part does the cross posting. I can pick a userpic option from the dropdown box, and the picture on the left immediately updates! It’s pretty darn cool if I do say so myself.

It’s finished but I have to fix up some of the language files and also the documentation.

I’m switching hosts. I feel like this site runs way too slowly and it’s time to move on. More details later after I switch over!

In the meantime go read Rick Ellis’ blog.

Merry Christmas everyone. Or Happy Holidays. In a few minutes I’m heading down to my relative’s house for dinner. (I’m running late, we’re supposed to be there at 7…)

Here’s a picture of our Christmas tree:

I updated the poll module to the newest version, 1.5. Let’s see if it works!

The poll question of the week month is: how many phone numbers do you have memorized? The total number for me is 17. A lot of those numbers are old numbers though.

With the new version of ExpressionEngine 1.4 there were some changes to the control panel stylesheet. I’ve updated my control panel themes to reflect this. To update the theme, replace the existing css file, and upload the new image bg_cell_hover.jpg into the images folder of the theme.

The keywords plugin is broken with this new release, which means I have to finally start using the newer keywords module.

Also, if you log in to the site, you’ll see a message saying that your username and password is incorrect, but you still get logged in. You can’t access the member restricted content in subdomain pages either (even I can’t, as the admin). I’m aware of this problem (it existed pre-1.4) and I’m working on fixing it.

On Friday the folks at pMachine released ExpressionEngine 1.4. This was a big release with many changes and enhancements. I upgraded and browsed through the changes right after I found out, but I didn’t get a chance to really play with the new features until today.

Here are some of my favourite new features (see the changelog for all of them):

• The Extensions Manager. Extensions are hooks into the EE core, and you can use them to extend EE’s capabilities. There’s more information about extensions at Paul’s developer blog entry and in the documentation. The complete list of extension hooks available should be out soon.
• Advanced Conditionals. In past versions of EE, there was only basic support for conditionals using EE tags, and advanced condtionals had to be done using php. Now there are powerful comparison operators built into EE.
• Relational Capability. You can relate contents of a field in one weblog to a field in another weblog or gallery. Right now I’m still digesting how I can use this feature for my own site. The documentation has a good example of how you can have a weblog containing events and another containing performers, and tie information from these two weblogs together.
• Entry tracking. You can now track hits to individual entries. There are four hit counters so that you can track views in different scenarios.
• Static and javascript template types. Yes!!! The static template type is for templates that don’t contain any EE tags. The javascript template type is for javascript code. I used to put javascript code in CSS templates, which isn’t optimal..
• Dynamic Parameters. With this feature, you can display content in different ways by submitting a form. You can kind of do this using segments, but the dynamic parameters should make things much easier.
• Date custom field type. Custom fields can now contain dates. This should be useful for event calendars. And it’‘ll work great in my media log – I can specify a start date and end date for books I read and so on.
• Custom fields for the image gallery. There are now 6 new custom fields, plus the caption.
• Redesigned sections in the control panel. The Templates section and the Admin section have a new interface.
• Pagination in the query module. Now data retrieved using a query can be paginated.
• Entry Versioning. EE now stores past versions of an entry and you can view and revert to past versions. This is not a feature I’ll be using that often, but it’ll be very useful for others who are collaborating on an article and so on.

In addition to this new release, there were more announcements. First, the price for a personal license has been dropped to $99.95. And, there’s now a limited version of EE, called ExpressionEngine Core, that’s FREE! You can check out the pricing page for a feature comparison. I think there are quite a lot of people who want to try out EE but can’t justify the pricing – this is your chance.

The core version has a lot of great features and you don’t even need to upgrade. But in my opinion, the major features that aren’t in EE Core but are in EE Personal/Commercial are the member management, the tech support and maybe the query module. Go check it out now! Note: this last link is an affiliate link.

I’m so impressed with the EE folks for this release and all of the new stuff! It’s a wonderful early holiday gift!

Bloglines has this feature where you can subscribe to RSS feeds and set it to private. You could presumably use this to subscribe to feeds intended only for yourself, and no one would know about the feed. But I’ve seen the contents of those ‘private’ feeds show up in the Bloglines search results. I’m subscribed to some keyword searches in Bloglines, and have seen some interesting search results:

• RSS feeds for referrals picked up by the Mint stats program
• An RSS feed with items from someone’s POP3 account. When I looked at the feed URL, it showed the POP3 server, username, and password all in plain text.
• An RSS feed with items from someone’s Yahoo mail inbox. There was a username and password in the feed URL but it was encrypted.

You can tell that they’re meant to be private feeds because there’s usually only one subscriber to the feed and when you try to find out who subscribed to it, it says “There Are No Subscribers To This Feed With Public Profiles”.

A couple of months ago I created this custom feed using Feedshake, and added it into my Bloglines subscriptions. I set the feed to private because I wasn’t sure I’d be using Feedshake yet. A week later I noticed someone else had subscribed to the feed, but they had set it to private too so I couldn’t tell who it was. He/she must have found it through a search!

So … don’t add private feeds into Bloglines.

The Winter Skin is here! You can change skins by clicking the links in the sidebar. It uses the Lucida Grande font, so if you don’t have it and you’re on Windows, I recommend you get it – it’s used on a lot of other sites too.

I originally envisioned this skin to have

• Light text on a dark background
• A fluid, full-width layout

After I coded it I realized I hated it. Most of my weblog entries are short, and it doesn’t look good when the text is stretched to the full width of the screen. And my eyes are way too accustomed to dark text on a light background. So I changed it to look like it does now.

• Stalker:: Night
• Outrageous:: Event
• Carrying:: Bag
• Spirited:: Away (that movie I haven’t watched yet)
• Oh!:: Noes!
• Grid:: Matrix
• Country:: Garden
• Karen:: on Will and Grace
• Candles:: Melt
• Relationship:: Love

(from Unconscious Mutterings)

I went shopping at Lush today. I loooove going in the store and smelling all of the products. Usually I browse around and leave without buying anything. But today, the store had this promotion where if you spent $30 or more, you got a chance to throw a dart at a dartboard and win prizes. I splurged and spent the $30 (on Dream Cream and Aqua Mirabilis) and then threw the dart. The first try, I completely missed the board, but they let me try again. On the second try I got 80 points (100 being bullseye)!

There were a bunch of prizes with different points. The 80 point prize was a bar of Snowcake soap, but I didn’t want that. The salesperson said I could pick some of the other prizes so that the points added up to 80. In the end, I chose:

• Each Peach massage bar
• Hollywood bubble bar
• Mr Butterball bath bomb

I’m really happy with what I chose. Two of them are bath products, and I’d never tried their bath products before (I’m a shower person). It’s a great chance to try ‘em, especially since there are so many bath products at Lush!