The Geeky Junkyard of kingler

Last weekend, I went to WordCamp 2007 in San Fransisco. In case you didn’t get the news, WordCamp is the annual gathering of WordPress bloggers and developers. This year’s event was packed with 2 days of great talks, but I only got the chance to attend the second day, which focused on developers and the future of WordPress. George, however, attended the first day and mentioned that the talk on SEO tips given by Matt Cutts from Google was pretty good. Wish his slides were published somewhere.

As a WordPress plugin developer and also a wp-hacker, I was quite excited about the technical stuff the core WP developer team talked about during the second day.

The first talk(view the slide here) was from Barry and Matt. Barry, the sysadmin, mentioned some amazing stats from WordPress.com and talked about the performance tuning, like APC and WP-CACHE. Matt then introduced HyperDB, the failsafe/redundant/cluster MySQL database class used in the WordPress.com backend. Although I am on the HyperDB maillist since day one, I was having doubts about HyperDB. However, from what Matt talked about, HyperDB does actually many things that I have in mind. Coupled with the new MySQL Proxy, High Availability WordPress clusters would be much easier to build now.

[to be continued...]

I was looking for a weather plugin for WordPress for the past several days, and found the following ones:

• Weather Icon 2 from Jeremiah is a well-designed plugin for WordPress based on “My Weather” module for Mamboserver, which pulls updates from National Weather Service. It comes with an admin interface and multi-language support.
• Weather Report 2.2 is another plugin based on the National Weather Service data. It is highly customizable, since it will only output text. But we like icons, don’t we?
• Lastly but not least, GetWeather written by Jeff (the author of WP-ShortStat Plugin) is a simple plugin to get weather updates from weather.com. This plugin can actually show more information than the Weather Icon 2 plugin, like current time, daily high/low temperature. Addiontionally, you can download more weather iconsets from the web, just do a search for “weather iconsets” (try this).

I like the simple feature of GetWeather, and recommend it to blog pros, because it may need a bit of hacking into the PHP code to get the effects you want. But if you just want an easy way to set up a weather information on your blog site, use Weather Icon 2 instead. It is really easy to install and configure.
In order to set up the plugin to show your local weather, you’ll need a city code:

• For Weather Icon 2, visit the city list and do a search.
• For GetWeather, you can use zip code if you are in the U.S. , for other locations, go to weather.com and search for your city. On the URL, you can find the a code looks like this : CHXX0116 (Shanghai, China).

Last note:
Because the old-fashioned Microsoft IE has some issues handling the alpha transparancy in PNG images (here is a good discussion), you may want to use GIF files to support IE users. Weather Icon 2 comes with the option of using GIF iconsets instead of the default PNG images, so if you have issues with the transparancy in IE, try using the GIF iconsets. GetWeather uses PNG images, and tries to overcome the IE issue by adding a alphaTransparancy filter in the CSS style, but if it doesn’t work for you, you’ll need to spend a lot more time hacking around…

Google Sitemap is a great plugin for WP written by Arne Brachhold.
The multi-language support in the plugin makes it really easy for me to compile this simplified Chinese language pack. Hope it is useful.

Download the zip file here

Installation:

• Unzip the file into wp-content/plugin folder.
• Modify the language setting of WordPress into Simplified Chinese: ‘zh_CN’. Refer to WordPress Localization Guide for more instructions.
• Go to admin page -> Options -> Sitemap, and you should see the config page in Simplified Chinese now.

Update: Just found out June6 made a Simplified Chinese translation just 1 day before. What a coincidence!

Just found out the Apache 2 I installed didn’t enable mod_rewrite by default. This caused a Permalink Structure failure, namely
http://kingler.is-a-geek.net/2005/07/12/cool-softwares-on-mac-os-x/ simply wouldn’t work.
Anyway, by adding in the mod and restarting Apache, the problem is fixed.