We didn’t want that behavior so I researched how to filter out SlideDeck posts from the post loop.  At this time, it’s apparently easy to filter for content that has a custom meta-tag, but you can’t easily filter for content that doesn’t have a custom meta-tag applied to it.  It’s because when a post doesn’t have a custom met-tag attached to it that custom meta-tag doesn’t come up as “null” or “0″  it simply doesn’t come up at all.  So there’s no way to use query_posts to filter out SlideDeck posts, you have to make custom database query and use $wpdb->get_results.

This post from SlideDeck’s customer support website did most of the heavy lifting for me in putting together the exact query I needed to filter out only SlideDeck posts.  The only problem was that this gave me no insight as to how I could paginate the posts.  Thankfully google came to rescue once again and I found this post and this post which helped me piece together the script.  I posted my findings on SlideDeck’s customer service website, but I’m posted it here as well so I can easily find it again if I need it.

So for the code, inside loop.php before have_posts() I put…

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if(is_home()) {
    //query_posts(array( 'meta_key' => 'slidedeck_post_featured') );
    global $wpdb;
    $ppp = intval(get_query_var('posts_per_page'));
 
    $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
    $offset = ($paged-1) * $ppp;
    $sql = "SELECT p.*
        FROM {$wpdb->posts} AS p
        LEFT JOIN {$wpdb->postmeta} AS pm
        ON pm.post_id = p.ID AND pm.meta_key = %s
        WHERE p.post_status = %s AND p.post_type = %s AND pm.meta_value IS NULL
	ORDER BY p.post_date desc
        LIMIT $offset, $ppp";
    $posts = $wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare( $sql, '_slidedeck_post_featured', 'publish', 'post' ));
}

if(is_home())  will make it so it will only filter out SlideDeck posts on the homepage, and apparently the have_posts() works exactly as it normally does even when I change the loop using $wpdb->get_results, which means I don’t have to do much to the rest of the page in order for this to work.  WordPress, you rock <3

This will paginate the posts according to the number of items I have set in the WordPress settings, but for some reason when I did this on the last page it printed out empty posts to fill out that page.

For instance, say I only have 7 posts left on the last page, but I have it set to show a maximum of 10 posts per page – it would print out 3 empty posts on that page.

To combat this I put the following code inside have_posts() so it wouldn’t print anything if the post ID was null.

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if(get_the_ID() > 0) {
    //html for posts
}

Pretty straight forward and everything has been working great so far

References

http://support.slidedeck.com/slidedeck/topics/wp_query_a_list_of_posts_not_featured_in_the_slide_deck?from_gsfn=true

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/custom-loop-pagination

http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2011/02/23/wordpress-pagination-woes-solved-i-hope/

The interface was really simple and easy to use, but it’s difficult to draw anything really nice ^^;  I’d like to see if you could get a nice handwritten style font from this from using the iPad with a stylus.

But until I find myself with an iPad I’ll have to live with the scribbly font I made with my iPod x3

Download the App on iTunes

Download the font I made

So in order to be able to style the feed however we wanted I put together a simple Curl code in PHP to pull in the Facebook Page RSS feed (every page has a feed it’ll be formated like this => http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=245091913103&format=rss20).

This will check if there’s a link inside the body of the status update and use that, but then default to the link to the status message in Facebook if that doesn’t exist.

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<?php
        $curl = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=245091913103&format=rss20");
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 0);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3");
        $xmlTwitter = curl_exec($curl);
        curl_close($curl);
 
        $xmlObjTwitter = simplexml_load_string($xmlTwitter);
        $tempCounter = 0;
 
        foreach ($xmlObjTwitter->channel->item as $item) {                    
            if ( $tempCounter < 9 ){
                preg_match('/(http|https|ftp)(.*?) (id|target)/i', $item->description, $matches);
                $matches[0] = str_replace('" id','',$matches[0]);
                echo '<li><a href="'.($matches[0] ? $matches[0] : $item->link).'" target="_blank">'.$item->title.'</a>
                <div>'.date('F jS, Y',strtotime($item->pubDate)).'</div></li>';
            }
 
            $tempCounter += 1;
        }
 
        echo '</ul>';
?>

I was mostly impressed with all the variations of signup forms they had.  There were some interesting variations that I have seen before but it really made me think about all the different ways you can present that information by seeing so many different samples in one place.

http://www.psdstation.com/

It’s interesting to hear about how people got their start and what led up to where they are today   There may even be a few pearls of wisdom here and there throughout the interviews.

http://psftb.ryanhavoctaylor.com/

The tutorial consists of five “chapters.” Each chapter is broken up into an approximately 10 minute video and then a lab portion where you get to do exercises related to the video.  It’s really great to try out the code right after hearing about it, and I like that it doesn’t get drearily technical at the get go with needing to get Rails up and running.  A lot of RoR tutorials start with installing and runing your own local server, which a least for me is the least pleasant part.

A nice take away is the free PDF download it offers, which has all the slides from the video and is a nice reference back to everything you learned from the tutorial.  You also get a coupon for some paid rails tutorials after you finish.  They have “Rails for Zombies 2″ in the works so I’m thinking of saving it for that :3

At their Code School website they also offer a “Rails best practices” class which sounds a little advanced for diving into right after Rails for Zombies, but if it’s anywhere as well put together as Rails for Zombies I’d like to come back to it later.

http://railsforzombies.org/

I’m really glad I use an outdated theme (or at least one without custom header support) so I could track this puppy down.

I have been working on building a theme that is a child theme of good ‘ol 2010 (2011 wasn’t out when I started building )

I uploaded a portrait image and noticed it got cut off in the image editor like so:

The editor’s will really need to be able to adjust that thumbnail image, so I went digging around and found that a theme called “Modfolio” had this exact same problem.  So, I figure, it’s gotta be something with the theme.  Especially since I didn’t get a whole lot of results…if it was a core issue and everyone was seeing this then I would assume there would be a lot more complaints.

I switched around from my child theme, to 2010, and even 2011, but the same error kept popping up :/  Then I figured I’d check it out in my blog here.  I’m currently using a slightly modified version of Uchilla theme – which hasn’t been updated in ages.  And lo-and-behold the image is coming up fine and dandy in the editor.  I could be wrong on this, but I believe the only file in a theme that can mess with the admin side of things is the functions.php file.  So I just kept hacking away at it until I found the bit of code that was causing me grief.

It’s lines 117 & 188 in the functions file for 2010:

define( 'HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH', apply_filters( 'twentyten_header_image_width', 940 ) );
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT', apply_filters( 'twentyten_header_image_height', 198 ) );

That was somehow adding a constraint to the editor preview and for me simply commenting out those two lines did the trick   I did have to re-upload all the affected images though…

I don’t know what effect that might have on the custom headers…I’m not using them myself so it wasn’t an issue for me.

http://layertennis.com/

It was a really impressive online tutorial set-up as a user prompt.  I really appreciate that it’s one Ruby tutorial that doesn’t require me to be download and installing packages willy-nilly to get started   It’s extremely newbie-friendly and is well written and utilizes some light humor to help you get through it   I think the last chapter was a bit clumsy…but may have just had one too many typos along the way.

Regardless, I’d say the “15 minute” bit is no lie and well worth the time if you’re trying to get better acquainted with Ruby or RoR such as myself.

http://tryruby.org/

The patterns are all fairly muted.  Nothing really crazy.  They’re very well made and look professional.  I was really happy to find this site, and I’m planning on using some of their textures in future designs.  Light textures like these are a great way to add a little more interest and depth to a piece of design without going overboard.

Plus patterns are “in” right now, and it’s always fun to be trendy

http://subtlepatterns.com/

It’s a pretty simple script built on top of jquery:

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<style type="text/css">
body {
    margin:0;
    overflow:hidden;
}
</style>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
    $("div").mousemove(function(e){
      height = $(window).height();
        width = $(window).width();
        percent = e.clientY * 100 / height;
        move = ($("#box").height()-height) * percent / 100;
        $("body").scrollTop(move);
 
        percent2 = e.clientX * 100 / width;
        move2 = ($("#box").width()-width) * percent2 / 100;
        $("body").scrollLeft(move2);
    });
});
</script>

The CSS hides the scrollbars and removes the default margins from the body.

Then the Javascipt adds an event handler that will fire every time the mouse moves on top of a div – which is always since the page is pretty much just one giant div.  After that it determines what percent of the window you cursor is currently sitting at, and then translates that to the same percentage of the size of that giant div and scrolls the window accordingly.  So regardless of the size of the window you’ll be able to move it around to see all the contents of the div.

Scroll around the box below to see the random goodness:

If you’re lucky enough to have a full version of Acrobat you can even combine all the PDFs together to make your very own DRM free eBook

http://www.web2pdfconvert.com/

http://www.color-guide.com/e_index.shtml

This podcast first started as your normal weekly deal, but recently the format has been completely re-hauled to be “season” based.  Where it has a group of episodes all revolving around one main topic.  Currently they are Podcasting the entire process of redesigning the website.  I love how transparent they’re being about the process, and it’s really great to learn about each step  in detail.  I’d highly recommend giving it a listen

http://boagworld.com/

Regardless, it’s an interesting peek in to what we’ll be able to achieve once CSS 3 is fully supported

http://nicolasgallagher.com/pure-css-gui-icons/demo/

http://www.splashtop.com/remote

Mystery night by Tekashime

http://www.animepaper.net/
http://www.minitokyo.net/

You can upload an image of some text, then designate which parts of the image are what letters and the application will give you a list of fonts that are similar to the one in the picture.  A definite time saver

http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

You can check out one I put together in under a minute from this URL: http://www.dropmocks.com/mXBaV

http://www.dropmocks.com/

According to their intro video adding your branding to a captcha is much more engaging and results in a greater rate or retention for the user than traditional banner ads.  They also said that typing in slogans is faster for users than trying to type in that mushed up text that traditionally appears in captchas.  Sounds reasonable enough to me, but regardless I thought it was a really interesting concept to add in more advertising without adding more clutter.

http://www.solvemedia.com/index.html

Acid 3 test on Firefox 4.0.1

http://acid3.acidtests.org/
http://html5test.com/

What I did find was the Gild website where you can get certifications for free!

The price is right, and if I learn something along the way then I say it’s definitely time well spent.  I am still considering the w3schools certifications, but I’m going to start out with the free ones from Gild and see where that takes me.

http://www.gild.com/

http://gallery.theopalgroup.com/selectoracle/

http://fontsinuse.com/

http://www.pdftoword.com/

Also, there’s another useful online application that will let you quickly merge two PDFs together

http://www.mergepdf.net/

QR Code Generators:
http://qrcode.kaywa.com/
http://invx.com/

It’s very simple and easy to use, you can upload any photo to your computer and you’ll get an instant preview of how it will look miniaturized.  You can adjust many aspects of the blurb and designate where the focal point of your image is.  After adjusting the settings click on the preview button to see what they’ll look like before getting your final photo.  You can get a  480×640 and 720×960 size of your miniaturized photo for free or pony up some cash to get larger sizes.  I plugged in a photo I took from the Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego and here are the results:

That’s pretty gosh darn adorable if I do say so myself!

http://tiltshiftmaker.com/photo-editing.php

They break down the results into a nice and simple pie chart and discuss some of the reasons for those rates and give you some tips on how to quote your work.

A Discussion on Hourly Rates in Web Design

www.iSnare.com
www.GoArticles.com
www.eHow.com
www.EasyArticles.com
www.ArticleDashBoard.com
www.Article99.com
www.ValuableContent.com
www.EzineArticles.com

http://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html

Images shouldn’t be uploaded to the internet as CMYK anyway, but I thought it as odd how safari handled the image mode like that.

Screenshot:

http://www.pica-pic.com/

http://wefollow.com
http://www.twellow.com
http://justtweetit.com
http://www.mytwitterdirectory.com/

Could come in handy when you need to skim down some ad copy <3

http://www.ironicsans.com/thsrs/

http://free-loops.com/
http://www.flashkit.com/loops/
http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/
http://www.freesound.org/
http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/

What I like about this script is that it doesn’t save a copy to the server so folks can’t nab it if they know the entire URL, but it can be easily integrated to a web based interface.  It also uses “create table if not exists” which was missing from the other two scripts.  I think a backup should create tables in case you loose the table structure, but it shouldn’t delete the existing data.

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<?php
function datadump ($table) {
    $result .= "# Dump of $table \n";
    $result .= "# Dump DATE : " . date("d-M-Y") ."\n\n";
    
    $row2 = mysql_fetch_row(mysql_query('SHOW CREATE TABLE '.$table));
    $result .= "\n\n".str_replace('CREATE TABLE','CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS',$row2[1]).";\n\n";
    
    $query = mysql_query("select * from $table");
    $num_fields = @mysql_num_fields($query);
    $numrow = mysql_num_rows($query);
    
    for ($i =0; $i<$numrow; $i++) {
        while($row = mysql_fetch_row($query)) {
            $result .= "INSERT INTO ".$table." VALUES(";
            for($j=0; $j<$num_fields; $j++) {
                $row[$j] = addslashes($row[$j]);
                $row[$j] = ereg_replace("\n","\\n",$row[$j]);
                
                if (isset($row[$j])) $result .= "\"$row[$j]\"" ; else $result .= "\"\"";
                if ($j<($num_fields-1)) $result .= ",";
            }
            $result .= ");\n";
        }
    }
    return $result . "\n\n\n";
}
 
$content = datadump('table_1').datadump('table_2');
 
$file_name = "database_backup.sql";
Header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
Header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$file_name");
echo $content;
?>

http://twitdom.com/
http://twitterlittlestar.com/
http://twittown.com
http://oneforty.com/
http://tw1tter.com/
http://bustatweet.com/
http://www.twit-apps.com/
http://www.twtbase.com/

Know any other directories?  Please let me know in the comments

How it works is that you scan in barcodes from items you’ve bought and if no one has ever scanned that barcode before you can generate a Kanojo (Girlfriend), but if someone has already scanned in that barcode you can follow their generated Kanojo and try to steal her away!  Also, when you scan in the barcode you can take a photo of the item itself.  Then you can see your item as well as other peoples photos of the same thing.

In order to steal other’s Kanojos you can visit them and flirt with them to make their love for their boyfriend drop and when it’s all gone their yours   Every 4 hours your energy is recharged and you can use it to create new Kanojo’s, spend time with you Kanojos(so they won’t get stolen!), and spend time with other’s Kanojos to try and steal them away.  I seems you’ll eventually level up, and there’s a “collections” portion of the game, but I haven’t gotten that far yet.

I can see myself getting bored of this pretty quickly…but for now it’s a fun distraction, and I really like how they’ve working in the multi-player portions of the game.

www.barcodekanojo.com

I recently just finished a project called “Twitter Critter” It’s a simple program that works with Twitter to generate an avatar.  All you have to do is enter in your own username, or anyone’s username, and it will create an avatar based on your Tweets.

It searches through your latest 200 tweets and uses those words to determine what color, critter, and what accessories your Twitter Critter will have.  It also generates a cute bio for that Critter based on those choices.  There are thousands of possible combinations, and if you come back after doing some Tweeting your result will change!  You can also Tweet out a permalink to the specific Twitter Critter your generated, and with one click you can set it as you avatar on Twitter.

Click here to get started!  http://twitter-critter.contropa.com/

Related Blogs:

http://rakugakiman.blog6.fc2.com/blog-entry-2827.html

Ge.tt is a new “unlimited” file sharing service.  It’s super simple, no size limits, no sign-up required.  If it sounds too good to be true, then we’re on the same page.  This is not the first “unlimited” file sharing service to come around, but hopefully this one will last longer than it’s predecessors.  The ability to send large files without hassle or cost would be a huge convenience.

http://workinmypajamas.com/give-a-little-gain-a-lot/
http://www.contestlisting.com/
http://www.tweetgiveaway.com/about/
http://www.squidoo.com/online_contests
http://www.contestblogger.com/
http://www.myblogcontest.com/post-your-contest/
http://www.contestbeat.com/contest-submission/
http://www.submityourcontest.com/submit-contest/
http://theblackcell.com/blogs/index.php/submit-a-giveawaysweepscontest/
http://doubleprizes.com/
http://acontestblog.com
http://www.contest-corner.com
http://mommosttraveled.com
http://www.momstakeonthings.com/?page_id=7
http://www.contestcanada.net/get-involved/add-contest/
http://www.sweepstakeslovers.com/suggest-a-sweepstakes/
http://www.econtests.tv/
http://www.grandmajam.com/submit.htm
http://www.bigsweeps.com
http://freebloggiveaways.com/
http://www.shoppingbookmarks.com/deals/
http://www.100megsfree3.com/arlana/form4.htm
http://www.bloggerlinkup.com/giveaway
http://www.hypersweep.com/
http://www.sweepsgoat.com/upcoming/UnlimitedEntry
http://www.sweepstakes.bz/addasweeps.asp

http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?folderId=15&listMode=13&nav=messages&webtag=ab-contests
http://blogconteststation.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Contest-Listing/143921791266?v=wall
http://enteronlinesweeps.com/category/giveaways/

Interestingly enough when I first ran this test the server that it pinged was provided by Dreamhost! Same people who host my website – it’s nice to see them out there doing digital good

I tried it out with two different providers and here are the results:

SAVVIS communtiations: Download 33Mbs Upload 28Mbs
Road Runner: Download 12Mbs Upload .86Mbs

http://www.speedtest.net/

The first dictionary I want to talk about is Jisho.org.  It’s one of the best designed Japanese dictionaries I’ve seen.  And 90% of the time I’ll get the result I’m looking for when searching it’s database, it also checks for you if you’re using Romanji and will find results based on that without you needing to specify if you’re searching for English or Romanji words.  You can search by radicals, and it has stroke order for all the Kanji in the Database.  One thing though, it’s error messages could use a little work.  When you search for a word that it’s doesn’t have any entries for instead of saying something like “No matches found” it goes to an error page that says “Please come back later.”  When I first saw this I thought the site had gone down, but I had simply misspelled the word  was looking for.

The other dictionary I want to talk about is Kotoba for the iPhone.  It’s just as good as Jisho with all the same features, but with better error messages.  This one is only available on the iPhone though.  It’s great when you’re away from home and you don’t need an internet connection to use it so you can search away on you iPod Touch without worry of WiFi.  The only issue I have with Kotoba is when I’m using an App that has a word I want to look up I have to close that out and then open up Kotoba to check it.  That is why I have Jisho as a backup – so I can have it open on a computer while using an App on my iPod.

So if you’re looking for more reading materials on a tight budget – you’ll know where to go

I recently picked up an app called “Ninja Words“  It’s normally $2.99, but I got it on special for $.99   It has a free version too, so you can get a feel for it before putting any money down.

It’s a very nice game for studying Kanji, I’ve played Slime Forest Adventure before and the quality and price of Ninja Words is a lot better.  Although, Ninja Words only goes over 500 Kanji and no Kana.  The graphics and storyline and very cute, and I’m finding that the typical grinding style RPG gameplay is pretty well suited for studying.  I really like that it has a storyline involved so there’s some motivation to move through the game.

There’s one bad thing though, that I’ve noticed with other Kanji studying tools too.  It doesn’t have any sample words or furigana   If you care to learn how to speak the words you’ll have to keep a dictionary handy.

Still, it’s free and super easy to set-up.  And you might discover some interesting reactions to your website.

http://www.clueapp.com/

In the past the best prevention I’ve found against spammers is to use spam lists.  One I like in particular is FSpamlist.com.  You have to sign-up to get an API key, but after that using it is very straight forward.   Stop Forum Spam is a big one too, you don’t need an API key to check for spammers so it was even easier to add.  I put a simple WordPress plugin together to integrate the lists with my blog.

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<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Spamlist
Plugin URI: http://wannabe.contropa.com/fspamlist-and-wordpress/351/
Description: Uses spamlists to stop spammers
Version: 1.0
Author: Foxumon
Author URI: http://www.contropa.com
License: GPL2
*/
 
add_action('wp_blacklist_check', 'spamlist', 10 , 6);
 
function spamlist($author, $email, $url, $comment, $user_ip, $user_agent) {
    $username = $author;
    $email = $email;
    //$ip = $user_ip;
    
    $fspamcheck = file_get_contents('http://www.fspamlist.com/xml.php?key=######&spammer='.$email.','.$username.','.$ip);
    if (strpos($fspamcheck, '<isspammer>true</isspammer>') !== FALSE) {
        wp_die('Your e-mail address has been marked as spam.  You may request that it be removed here: http://www.temerc.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=72','spam');
    }
    
    $fspamcheck = file_get_contents('http://www.stopforumspam.com/api?email='.$email.'&username='.$username);
    if (strpos($fspamcheck, '<appears>yes</appears>') !== FALSE) {
        wp_die('Your e-mail address has been marked as spam.  You may request that it be removed here: http://stopforumspam.com/removal','spam');
    }
}
?>

I’m currently not planning on submitting it to the WordPress plugins directory or anything like that, but you want to try it out too you just save the code as “spamlist.php” add it to a “spamlist” folder in your plug-ins directory and then it ought to show up in your admin where you can active it.

It’s currently not set to report the spam that it blocks in any way…I’m not sure if I want it to or not.  I’m currently looking at over 3k of spam comments that are just sitting around taking up room in my database, but at the same time I don’t want to get any legitimate posters blocked without anyway of knowing.  Anyways, I’m going to test it out for now and see how it goes