I just finished up the first version of johnbintz.com, the page that aggregates together a bunch of the things I do on the Internet. It has some JavaScript goodness to drive it, too. Check it out!

I was working with a script that I was loading using the Script DOM technique talked about by Steve Souders, which looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript>
var s = document.createElement("script");
s.src = "/path/to/script.js";
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(s);
</script>

Unfortunately, this was an older script and was using a document.write to put a <style> tag into the page when the script was loaded. Very bad results in Firefox with this. Had to rewrite the document.write to inject a <style> tag into the DOM like I did with the script tag. Killed two birds with one stone.

sam2p doesn’t like taking a lot of PNGs exported from Inkscape as straight input. This works around that issue by using ImageMagick convert it to an RGB (not RGBA) PNM before piping it into sam2p:

convert ${input_file} -colorspace RGB pnm:- | sam2p -c:lzw -m:dpi:$(echo "scale=5;72*(72/${dpi})" | bc) - PDF:${output_file}


Yes, the strange DPI syntax is needed. Yes, it’s totally counter-intuitive and I’d love to know why it works that way.

…and it has one million new features! Kudos to Tyler and Phil for really filling this version with awesomesauce. Go check it out! There’s also an updated version of ComicPress Manager, but there seems to be a few minor bugs and I’ll be rolling out a 1.4.7 release sometime this week.

mkdir ~/Desktop/PhotoOffload;
find . -path "*Originals*" -type d | sort | xargs du -sk |\
awk 'BEGIN {s=0}{ns=s+$1;if(ns > 680000){print "Total - " s > "/dev/stderr";exit;}else{print $0; s=ns;}}' |\
cut -f2 | while read dir; do
  t=$(echo "$dir" | sed 's#/Originals##');
  mkdir -p ~/Desktop/PhotoOffload/${t};
  rsync -vru $dir ~/Desktop/PhotoOffload/$t/;
done

I just released version 0.5.2 of Plugin Wonderful. It will now try to use the cURL extension of PHP for downloading data, and will fall back on file_get_contents only if cURL is not installed. This should greatly improve compatibility with many web hosts who block the opening of remote URLs using file_get_contents. If you couldn’t get it to work before, try it again and see if this new version functions better for you.

I just finished up version 0.5 of Plugin Wonderful, the WordPress plugin that makes it easy to add Project Wonderful advertisements to your blog. This version is almost a complete rewrite of the core of the plugin, with a full suite of unit and functional tests added (courtesy MockPress and PHPUnit). I’ve greatly improved compatibility with WordPress MU, and the plugin also takes advantage of the new WordPress 2.8 widgets API.

I want to extend a big thanks to beta tester Don Koch who helped with code and such (and made me realize that everything I had for widgets was wrong and needed rewriting). Go see the site he’s building using ComicPress.

Note: if you find issues with the plugin, file a bug over at GitHub. Comments here get lost too easily.

I’ve spent the past few days getting all of the development work on ComicPress and ComicPress Manager up on GitHub. This also includes setting up automated documentation generation and regular Zip builds of the contents of the repositories. Check out the project pages and wiki pages, and if you want to help out, drop me an email!

• https://github.com/johnbintz/comicpress-theme-core/tree
• https://github.com/johnbintz/comicpress-manager-1.4/tree
• https://github.com/johnbintz/comicpress-manager-1.5/tree

Since the code I was writing could be used with any PHP unit testing framework, and since “WordPress PHPUnit Mocks” doesn’t roll off the tongue like “MockPress” does, and because no one else is using the name for anything, my project for creating mock functions for simulating WordPress is now named MockPress. I’ve been slowly mocking up more WordPress functions as I need them. The documentation has moved, too.

I’m working on a library for WordPress plugin and theme development that simulates as many of the core WordPress functions as necessary, for use in automated unit and functional testing. It’s a work in progress as I refine it during my refactoring work for ComicPress Manager. It should work fine in both PHPUnit and SimpleTest (I’m using PHPUnit for my WP plugin unit testing now). It also includes some helper functions for checking HTML output with SimpleXML and XPath. No official releases at the moment, so check out a copy of the Git repo if you want to try it out. You can also read the API documentation that is generated every so often.