Category Archives: Software Development

WordPress Plugin: UltimateTagWarrior

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I’ve installed the UltimateTagWarrior plugin for WordPress in order to experiment with tagging on the site.

Installation was almost a no-brainer and consisted of unarchiving the downloaded zip file into my plugins directory and activating the plugin. I then messed around with different tag cloud types for the sidebar and wound up settling on the sized cloud. The code in the sidebar looks like this:

Tags

That got the tag cloud to display in the sidebar. Rather than go with the default tag editing that comes per post when you have local and technorati tags on in the Admin Manage/Tags screen, I turned them off and added the following code to enable Ajax based tag editing to the blog entries:

And thats it. Tagging is enabled!

Just to be clear, the almost no brainer has nothing to do with the quality of the plugin, but because I was picky as to how I wanted things to work. If you want plain vanilla tagging without Ajax, the default install and adding the code to the sidebar should suffice.

Happy tagging!

Slashdot Goes Tableless

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I read over on Dougal Campbell’s blog that Slashdot has moved to a tableless design using HTML 4.01 and CSS. The announcement on Slashdot itself also explains why they settled on HTML 4.01 rather than going full-tilt XHTML.

Interestingly enough, they are also planning on holding some kind of competition to redesign the Slashdot theme and have made their CSS available for download to enable people to participate.

Back in June I wrote two articles (Learning CSS and Finishing the CSS Prototype), about my first foray into CSS, spending a week learning as much as I could about CSS using the conversion of my companys home page to CSS in order to present the technology to our leadership team as a way to reduce page download time and reduce labor when changing layout. In one of those articles I stated that I had not been as excited about learning a new technology since starting to learn Python a year or two ago. I still feel the same way. Its very cool to see large sites like Slashdot taking the leap to complete CSS implementations. The additional separation of presentation from the markup code is an exciting concept, allowing you to both reduce code size and reduce the labor it takes to retheme your site when your branding changes without completely gutting the site each time you need to retheme.

We’ve started our conversion, incrementally, when we are touching the pages. The initial results look really good. The mandate has been made that new pages be developed with CSS implementations rather than the plethora of table and spacer tags that choke the pipe for our customers. We’re on our way. So the initial results of the prototype proved the point sufficiently.

Still, I hope bigger sites comparable to Slashdot keep making the switch, and announcing that they are doing so, so that more of us have ammo to make a move like this and spend the time to do it. Many companies just don’t want to make the leap until they see other comparable sites making it first. Its painful to do, but once its done, the labor savings and additional possibilities from a design perspective will definitely be worth it.

The other lesson from this one is one that Joel Spolsky talked about in one of his articles, Getting Things Done When Your Only A Grunt. One person can make a difference. You just have to care enought to do what it takes to make your point.

Ken Schwaber and Scott Ambler on ITConversations

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I found two excellent lectures on IT Conversations that I would like to recommend to people looking at how to learn (or justify) agile development methods. The first lecture was given by Ken Schwaber, the creator of the Scrum project management methodology, called You Thought it was Easy: Wrestling Gold from Today’s Software Projects. In this 40 minute discussion, Ken explains what Scrum is and how it works. Its a very informative lecture that has helped a lot in giving me additional ways to try to explain the advantages of Scrum as a project management methodology.

One of the interesting points that Ken brings up is that when you introduce an empirical model like Scrum, all of the things that have been wrong in your environment for such a long time come to the surface and have to be dealt with. We have definitely seen this in our environment and it has caused some discomfort on the team. For me, its very nice to have a lecture like this that I can refer team members to that explains that this is a normal part of the process. It is, however, extremely difficult to explain to some that the problems we are seeing have been around for quite a long time, but that we have been unable to quantify them until implementing Scrum.

The second lecture was given by Scott Ambler and is called Are you Agile or are you Fragile in which Scott tries to explain the advantages of Agile methods and answer some of the arguments one would get in justifying using Agile methods on actual projects. There are a couple of interesting things about this lecture. First, he runs it as an agile project, eliciting “requirements” or topics from the audience and having them prioritize them. Secondly is the passion in which Scott talks about Agile methods and his no nonsense way of explaining the advantages.

This lecture gave me a great quote that stuck with me. “A new requirement is a competitive advantage – if I can act on it”. I found this to be a brilliant reframe of the common objection to changing requirements that happens on teams which have been “raised” on the waterfall type of approach where requirements are finalized and cannot change without having been “wrong” in the first place. This lecture is a long one, weighing in at one hour and 55 minutes.

For those teams out there that are attempting to implement agile methods in an environment that has been historically waterfall and “predictive planning” based, these two lectures are definitely something you should check out.

Core Subversion Developer Moves To Google

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Ben Collins-Sussman, a core Subversion team member, announced yesterday that he will be leaving CollabNet and moving on to new opportunities, apparently at Google.

Ben was one of the first members of the Subversion team, along with Karl Fogel and Jim Blandy.

I’d like to wish Ben good luck in his new opportunity and give him a personal thanks for the work he’s done to bring the Subversion product to the point it is today. The product and community would not be where it they are today without his work — both in the code itself and the work he did in the community providing support (and even an occasional Python script) to help us out during our Subversion implemention.

Good luck Ben and thanks for all of your contributions to a great product!

By the way, you can also read the announcement on Bens weblog.

WP-DB Backup WordPress Plugin

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I just finished installing the WP-DB Backup plugin from skippy.net. This plugin allows you to perform a database backup directly from the WordPress admin screens. It’s pretty nice. It allows you to pick which database tables you would like to backup (after preselecting the core WordPress tables for you) and gives you the option of storing the backup file on the server, downloading it, or having it emailed to you. It also has a nice little progress bar that informs you of the progress of the backup.

This is much better than running my mysqldump command every time I want to take a backup of the server and manually secure copying it down from the server and sourcing it. One or two clicks, and I have my MySQL dump file on my local machine ready to be checked in.

If you’ve been looking for an easier way to backup your database, check this plugin out. It makes the task of backing up your database a lot less of a chore than it otherwise is.

Skippy’s also got a lot of other cool looking plugins on his plugin page. You might want to check them out and see if anything grabs you there.

Hey, they’re writing an SVK book!

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I didn’t notice this before (I haven’t really been to the SVK site in a while), but they are actually writing a full blown SVK book. They make quite clear that the book is still a work in progress, but I’m glad to see this kind of work going on to further explain this great tool and wanted to make sure people using SVK (or trying to use it at least) knew it was there.

It looks like the book is being authored in the the same way the Subversion book was written — authored in XML and transformed to HTML. Could an O’Reilly book be in SVK’s future as well?