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Any support questions should be asked here for v2.0.0+. I can only help if you give me information about your error: what error message you get, where in the process it’s failing, etc. I can’t do anything if you just tell me “it’s not working”.

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?

EDIT 8/11/10 First thing: A co-worker figured out the 404 problem, which might be affecting others. The stylesheet calls a require_once on wp-blog-header.php which apparently does something to mess with the headers of the stylesheet (and the other files I had trouble with), so changing that to wp-load.php seems to include all the necessary functions. I’ll upload a fixed version tonight, also changing the div back to an a tag, since I got a few comments questioning that move (there honestly wasn’t much thought behind it, other than I usually ended up putting the link in a div so it would theoretically save code? Well, it’ll be an a again).
Second thing: Custom fields seem to be a much-requested item, so I’ll see what I can do. Widgetizing it also seems popular, but I’m not sure how that works so I’ll look into it before promising anything.

Fast forward to Sunday (no travel issues today, for the most part). Rather disappointed in the unconference sessions, ended up at PowerPress because I had no idea what that was. Turns out it’s a podcasting plugin, and actually looks interesting. If I had any use for it, it’d be great. I kind of wish I’d suggested a women in open source thing, since the planned session apparently disappeared off the schedule some point last week.

The afternoon was better – plugin/theme competition; rapid-fire presentations from Saturday sessions; 2.9 preview; and a Q&A with Matt Mullenweg (the co-creator of wordpress). I like seeing other people’s work, so the competition was interesting. The competitors can all be found here, since I’m not sure they’re released yet. The two themes tied, and the plugin that won was Conversation Starter. The rapid fire presentations were fun – in which presenters try to condense 45min panels into 5 minutes. Can’t forget the WordPress as a CMS song, as performed by Scott Kingsley Clark. Matt then had a Q&A session, with attendees asking everything from ‘how do I deal with trackbacks’ to ‘what is the future of wordpress’. For some reason I didn’t think he’d be a geek, but he was, and he was also a good (and funny) speaker. I couldn’t begin to summarize all that was said -I didn’t take notes because I got random inspiration for my class project website (so I was sketching that out) and my laptop had no battery. Knew I should’ve gotten the giant battery.

The day was over after that (though it was another three hours before I was home). Overall it was a good trip – a lot of information to process, saw a lot of people (didn’t actually talk to nearly enough of them), and had a nice weekend in NYC.

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.

Other than that I really like this release. I have native wireless again! [after a glitch, I had downgraded from 9.04 to 8.04, which didn't.] It does seem faster, though maybe not as fast as I’d heard. It also seems like my battery has slightly better life, not sure if that’s either true or related, however – I only installed it yesterday, after all. I’ve got a few screenshots, if anyone is interested. On a purely aesthetic note I’m very happy with the installed themes, it took very little tweaking for me to find something I liked. And usually I have to go an play with the panel backgrounds, edit the gtk config file…

click to enlarge: 1024×600

Not sure if these are actually interesting to anyone, but… First is my empty desktop (well, the USB drive I was using to transfer the screenshots to this computer is there, but otherwise). Next is the file browser, a few changes but nothing amazing. Third is fake-using GIMP – obviously when I have a 1600×900 monitor I don’t really *want* to use GIMP on a netbook, but it’s not impossible at all. Finally, we have the Ubuntu Software Center, which I’m not that impressed with. I mean, I understand the reasoning behind consolidating package management and all, so I guess that’s cool. And not everything can be shiny. It is super easy to use, just like Add/Remove Applications. I guess I’ve crossed some sort of elitist line, or something, since I prefer command line. But I can say that about a few things (like command line twitter, that was odd).

So there’s my view on things. A bit of trouble to start with, but overall shiny. I’ve got Geany, Exaile, and a LAMP setup, so I’ll be happy.

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.

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.

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.

• 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!

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. Sure, my webcam & wireless card are supported natively, but now all video players and cheese crash when trying to display video (this could be an easy fix, I haven’t had time to research it). It does handle multiple displays (which is better than 8.04), but I can’t tell if the slow-down is an effect of that, or if it’s actually the OS. This monitor is higher resolution than the one I used to use with 8.04, but I’m getting delays just typing this, and all I’m running is geany, pidgin, and firefox. Actually, if all I’m getting out of this is support for my webcam (I already had wireless support, just not natively), it’s very much not worth it (esp with cheese crashing!). Sorry Ubuntu, I was thrilled when I saw the Wind as a supported machine, but I expected better.

Not to mention that I forgot to sync up my bookmarks before doing the install, and so lost my recently-reorganized collection which had included a few grad school programs and jobs. And I don’t need every new window automatically maximized, especially not settings windows and pop-up alerts.

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).

Just put the function in your template file wherever you want to quickpost link to show up, and there it will be! Once clicked on, a box will pop up and you can type your post there. You need to give it a title and content (or else it won’t post), you can also choose to add it to categories, or (if allowed in the settings) attach an image. After hitting post you may need to refresh to see the new post, but your post will be there.

The code snippet you need is (this is also written on the settings page):

<?php if (function_exists('post_from_site')) {post_from_site();} ?>

On the settings page, you can customize the link text, background color, title/text color, and even add your own CSS to tailor pfs to your site.

In v1.6.20+, you can also generate custom links for posting to a specific category. These can be generated at the bottom of the settings page.

As for permissions, you can limit the categories pfs can post t0 and allow/disallow uploading of images. If you’d rather have pfs’s posts approved before they are visible, you can set the post status to ‘pending’ or ‘draft’. Same with the comment status, it can default to ‘open’ (allowing comments) or ‘closed’ (not allowing comments).

Adding images – custom placement

1.9.0 introduced a new tag, [!--image--], which you can type into your post content to control the placement of your image. Just add

[!--image--]

wherever you want the image to appear. You can even use the tag multiple times, if you want the image to show up in multiple places.

History/Notes/Changelog:

6.03.09: First version released!
6.22.09: 1.6.20 released – added/improved image support, added auto-detection of plugin file to avoid the error reported on v1.6.3, added category-specific links, cleaned up the code.

9.22.09: 1.9.0 released – continued improving image support, added ability to tag posts, create new categories and tags.

If you have any comments or questions, or requested features, let me know!

Current proposed features are (stared * features should be avalible in the next release):

• AJAX form submission *
• Multiple image support *
• Integration with the WP gallery
• A login box, so you truly never have to see the wordpress admin pages
• Make a widget for even simpler integration.

If you’re commenting for help with an error, I can’t help unless you give me either a detailed description or a link to the not-working site. I do want to help, but I can’t if I don’t know what went wrong!

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.