Welcome to Redradar!

I'm Kelly, and I'll be your host today. I'm a recent grad trying to figure out life. I have interests and a resume, if you're looking for web developer (preferably in the Western MA area). I also have wordpress plugins & other projects; and sometimes I talk about interesting tech topics. I hope you enjoy your stay, and come back often! (alternately you can follow me on twitter, or grab my RSS feed)

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post-from-site v2.0.1

Posted on Jul 16, 2010 at 06:58 PM

I’ve just released post-from-site v2.0.1, which fixes the unintentional bit of code left from development (that I left a path absolute from my dev environment). It should be working for everyone now, but let me know if something else is broken.

Download!

Any support questions should be asked here for v2.0.0+.

And now I’m going to ask you all for help: I have this plugin installed here, but for some reason, the stylesheet is 404ing. It exists, and I’ve looked in firebug and the response text is the correct CSS, so I don’t understand why the browser is telling me the file doesn’t exist. Any ideas? I also had a similar problem with a JS file for a work project, and I never really solved it, just worked around it. They’re on different servers, so that’s not it. Any ideas?

Plugins, Plugins Featured Comments (7)

My Weekend @ WordCamp NYC

Posted on Nov 15, 2009 at 11:23 PM

I wrote the first half of this on the train back from the city on Saturday night, so if tenses and time references are confusing, that’s why (though I tried to correct all). After a rough start (missing the 8:40a train by two minutes & having to wait for the 9:40, meaning I didn’t get to Baruch ’til 11:30, missing the morning panel I wanted to see), the first day turned out to be very nice. After lunch there was something I wanted to go to every timeslot, which to me makes the day a success.
So what panels did I go to, anyway?
(more…)

General, Meta, Personal Comments (0)

Ubuntu 9.10 on MSI Wind

Posted on Nov 05, 2009 at 09:16 PM

Apparently it just doesn’t work.

There’s a bug in the uvcvideo driver that kills the other USB ports, and causes suspend and hibernate to fail. You can apparently fix this by being ninja and hitting fn+f6 before it loads, but I’m not that good, so I just blacklisted uvcvideo. If you’re having the same problem, you can stop the driver from loading by blacklisting it.
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
and add the line
blacklist uvcvideo
anywhere in the file (to the end would be easiest, so if there is a fix you’ll be able to find it & unblacklist it). Of course, this disables the webcam. On one hand I’d been using 8.04, which also lacked (native) driver support for the webcam, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything really (after I reinstalled the OS I didn’t bother recompiling the driver, so I’ve been without it for a while). Still rather annoying, and I can’t tell if they’re working to fix it or not -but I certainly hope so.

The other main issue I had was a very, very annoying bug in the screen brightness. On startup, and whenever I adjusted the brightness, it would oscillate between the set brightness and a level or two below, making the screen flicker. There was apparently some magic where you could hold your right mouse button down for a while & it’d stop, but I’m not doing that every time. The fix mentioned in the release notes worked for me, which was to “edit /etc/default/grub and add nomodeset to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX, then run sudo update-grub“. Restarted, and there was no flickering. I could change my brightness, and no flickering. What a relief. I have yet to figure out if doing this has any negative effects.
Positives and some screenshots…

Tech Comments (1)

Housekeeping

Posted on Oct 23, 2009 at 01:07 PM

Over the past few days I’ve been poking around here updating a few things, and generally making things more shiny (I hope). The biggest change is that I’ve moved the blog down to the root directory, that is, to see this page the URL used to be redradar.net/wp/, and it is now just redradar.net. /wp/ will still get you where you want to go, but if you’re linking here I’d appreciate if you would update your links. Thanks!

WordcampNYC I also finally got around to making a blurb for the slide-down header thing, and will continue to add in sharing links. All this housecleaning isn’t just because I’m avoiding schoolwork, surprisingly enough. November will be a busy month, so I’m preparing. I’m going to be attending WordCamp NYC, and I plan on releasing post-from-site v 2.0 sometime before then*. I’m excited for wordcamp, not just because it gives me an excuse to go into NYC (for someone who grew up on LI I didn’t go nearly as much as I would have liked), but also because of the tracks – they’ve got an advanced developer track & a hacker room. Also I’ve never been to a developer conference, so it’ll be a new experience (though I guess it’s not strictly a dev conference).

*Hopefully the week before. New features will be multiple file uploads, submission using AJAX, and better support for internationalization.

In other geekery, I got my windows 7 key, so I can install that whenever I get a chance, and Ubuntu 9.10 is coming out soon so I’ll have to install that too… Now I’m not sure if I want to leave my old laptop alone, just update the Ubuntu partition & leave XP, and install Win7 on my Wind. Apparently it can handle it? So says a few reviews of the beta, that’s all I get from a quick google search. And then there’s the question of whether I want to dual boot Win7/Ubuntu there… Decisions, decisions… Whatever I do, I’ll make sure to post about it here.

General, Personal, Tech Comments (7)

I exist!

Posted on Sep 22, 2009 at 10:22 PM

Also, post-from-site v1.9.0 is out! I think I caught all the small bugs, but I am just me, so let me know if I missed anything. I’ve been working (slowly) on figuring out what exactly I’m doing here with pfs, and now I’ve got a better roadmap than the vague ‘do stuff’ idea that I had before. So you should be expecting a v2.0 within… a month? Perhaps longer, as I’m back in classes again. Anyway, this update includes tag support, the ability to create categories and tags, functional (& not hacked-together) image uploading, and a bunch of cleanup/bugfixes. And likely things I’m missing here, as I have been working on it on and off for nearly two months. The changelog should have all the information, and I’ll update the main post here to reflect the new changes tomorrow.

As I said, still planning on 2.0 being out by November (it’s nearly October already, wow) with either (or both) image integration with the media library (so your uploads show up in the library – I tried that for this release but couldn’t get it working, which is part of why it took so long), or AJAX-style image uploads & multiple uploads. I don’t know yet how that would affect the rest of the form (I might have to make everything AJAXy, which is shiny but intimidating), so to avoid the 2 months with no update thing, I’m only going to aim for one of these to happen. Other media support is also a possibility, but really WP likes to be difficult in this aspect.

As for my real life, I’m back in classes & am optimistic about them – I’m at UMass now, as a non-degree student. I’m applying for ‘proper’ grad school for fall ’10, so if anyone has any statement of purpose tips (the hardest part for me), I’d welcome them. I still have a job but no time for it, and I’m involved in various student activities – pretty much the same as last year. I’m also getting over a cold, so I should probably get off the computer & go to sleep at a somewhat reasonable hour.

Personal, Plugins Comments (3)

I did say adventures, didn’t I…

Posted on Jul 16, 2009 at 10:40 PM

So, I guess I’m learning a few things as I go along in developing pfs. And I mean things I know in theory – like not to release something that’s not properly tested – but for some reason don’t think about when I’m working. Doesn’t help that I don’t really know anyone who’d be a tester for me. But anyway, its undergoing a big(ish) update now – added tag support, image placement (via a fake tag), potentially the ability to upload multiple images, potentially integration with the media gallery (these haven’t been implemented yet, so they might be next release), a version-number system that actually makes sense, and a few stupid fixes. I like the ‘template system’ suggested in the comments, maybe for v2.0. Thanks for all the suggestions and downloads, by the way!

Also a learning experience is trying to balance having a ‘real’ job (recent grad, what can I say) with doing on-the-side plugin stuff, with having time to be social and sleep/eat. And not spending all my waking time on the computer. I know it’s possible, but finding the right balance is difficult.

Noteworthy things: I recently installed a few new programs (on ubuntu) – exaile and gnome-do. Gnome-do is shiny, not sure how much more useful it’ll be than the generic run-app dialog, but I like the fact that it gives my windows button something useful to do. Exaile initially seems like any other music player, though it has an odd method of organizing my music – which isn’t to say I don’t like it. I went from iTunes to Rhythmbox, which both use panels of genre-artist-album. So anything different is interesting. Anyway, the bit I just discovered and like best? The ‘dynamic’ option to extrapolate a playlist based on the current song (via last.fm) Great for me, since I’ve got like 15GB of music (not that that’s an excessive amount, but it’s enough that I forget what I have).

As far as firefox plugins, I’m probably late in getting on the bandwagon for Firebug, but it’s also incredibly useful – specifically the item layout bit, and the network analysis.

I don’t think I’ve added anything awesome to my windows computer lately. I freaked out a little because I only had 1GB of hd space left, so I may be removing the Ubuntu partition on that laptop. I don’t use it anymore, not now that I’ve got another laptop that’s strictly linux.

I’d also like to eventually finish the new theme idea I have for this site, but it’s relatively low priority, so. We’ll see – the idea is continuing the alien-abduction theme, but a different setting. I should maybe get on designing a logo too. Branding and SEO-type things are much lower on my priorities list than maybe they should be.

Personal, Plugins, Tech Comments (0)

Final test before release

Posted on Jun 19, 2009 at 11:45 PM

This post is the last test of PFS before release. If you’re reading it, then v1.6.20 should be available for download sometime tomorrow (Saturday). Some new things:

  • Proper image support
  • Ability to create custom links for posting to individual categories (like suggested here)
  • Better documentation and cleaner code

Probably more things too, but it’s near 3am and I can’t think. So, look for the release tomorrow!

Uncategorized Comments (3)

pfs update

Posted on Jun 11, 2009 at 11:53 PM

Image support is nearly done. I’m glad WP is so well documented, it makes things like this much easier. I’d love to get the uploader working all AJAX-y, but I’m less confident in my ability there. So perhaps I’ll learn, and get back to it.

Support for making ‘Post to X category’ links is now coded and will be tested soon.

Theoretically none of the changes in wp2.8 should break pfs, but I’ll install it and test this weekend. I’m also considering installing BuddyPress and forking pfs for it after a suggestion in the comments.

This last week’s been somewhat hectic – I was moving into my new apartment. I finally got all my furniture (though the bookcase has yet to be assembled), and I can get back to normal life. On a somewhat unrelated note, Ubuntu Netbook Remix? Not really worth it. (more…)

Personal, Plugins Comments (0)

Unveiling Post-From-Site!

Posted on Jun 03, 2009 at 09:31 PM

“Post-From-Site: Add a new post directly from your website – no need to go to the admin side.”

Version 1.9.0

Released 9.22.09

Download!

This new wordpress plugin allows you to post straight from your front-end (i.e. website) – perfect for a quick update! Also useful if you have multiple users and don’t need them to see the admin side of things (this is the reason the plugin was initially developed). (more…)

Plugins Comments (133)

Post From Site, a new plugin!

Posted on May 13, 2009 at 11:38 AM

Over the last few days I’ve been avoiding my last final writing a new plugin. You may have noticed significantly more ‘falling code’ than usual. This one is currently very customized to a specific client site, but as soon as I get it installed and running for them I’m planning on making it much more customizable.

I had originally planned to use a lot more ajax fanciness in getting it to work, but since I’m not familiar with most of what’s involved there, I moved all the functionality over to the server side in PHP. Time was an issue, but isn’t so much anymore, so I might poke at that again. My current plans on getting this together are:

  • Making a settings tab in the admin side to let the user customize:
    • The look of the popup: background, header image
    • Permissions: Ability to upload images
  • Adding AJAX shininess, with the help of jQuery?

I’ll probably update this further as I finish installing it on the client’s site.

Plugins Comments (3)
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