T. Longren

WordPress Theme: Unwakeable 1.5.1

Tyler — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:10:11 +0000

Unwakeable 1.5.1 is available for download. Version 1.5.1 works much better with WordPress 2.6.

The K2 Sidebar manager has been fixed to work with WordPress 2.6 via a plugin. The plugin is a single file named k2-disable-widgets.php and is located in the app/includes folder in Unwakeable 1.5.1. Simply copy that file to the wp-content/plugins folder and activate it as you would any other plugin.

Unwakeable 1.5.1 is up-to-date with K2 revision 708. If you want to stay current with Unwakeable development, see the changes list. Head over to the Unwakeable page to download Unwakeable 1.5.1.

UPDATE: If you’re using WordPress 2.6, you get a chance to preview a theme prior to making it active. The theme preview for Unwakeable 1.5.1 is blank due to the periods in the folder name. Even though the preview appears blank, Unwakeable will still work on your site just fine. If you want to see the preview, just rename the unwakeable-1.5.1 folder to unwakeable151 or simply unwakeable.

WordPress Theme Directory

Tyler — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:01:12 +0000

There’s finally an official repository for WordPress themes! The new WordPress Theme Directory replaces themes.wordpress.net, which hasn’t been accepting new themes for quite some time now, more than a year.

WordPress theme developers can login to WordPress.org and upload their themes for review. The Theme Directory doesn’t require Subversion like the Plugin Directory does, which should make it much easier for theme developers to get their themes in the directory.

You can read more about the new WordPress Theme Directory at the WordPress blog.

My Canon Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D)

Tyler — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:00:20 +0000

I just got a new digital camera a couple weeks ago! It’s a Canon Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D). I’m still pretty excited, my new Canon is a major upgrade from my old Olympus.

My new Digital Rebel XT has been a pleasure to shoot with so far, but I still have a lot of things to learn, this is my first experience with SLR cameras. One thing I absolutely love about the camera is it’s ability to continuously shoot. It’s extremely nice for photographing fast moving children who never sit still. No more missed shots while waiting for my camera to focus.

The Digital Rebel XT is very easy to use. After receiving the camera, I immediately put the lens on, popped a cf card in, and was able to start shooting. Ashley was even able to pick it up and shoot without any instructions. I’ve been really happy with the camera so far and am very much looking forward to more opportunities to shoot with it, should be fun.

Twee60: Automatic Xbox Live To Twitter

Tyler — Fri, 16 May 2008 18:29:12 +0000

Twee60 is a web based application that tweets your status on Xbox Live to your Twitter account. The nice thing about Twee60 is there’s no software to install, unlike the Xbox Live to Twitter application I wrote about previously.

Don’t get me wrong, Martin’s Xbox Live to Twitter app does a very nice job and offers many more customization options than Twee60. Twee60 is ideal for me though because it doesn’t require any software to be installed.

Twee60 is especially nice for Linux or Mac users who don’t even have a software package they could install to tweet their Xbox Live status. I installed a Windows box at home just so I could run Martin’s Xbox Live to Twitter app. Now that I have Twee60, I can take that box down.

There’s only a few options you need to set in Twee60 before it’s ready to tweet your Xbox Live status. All you’ll need is your gamertag, twitter e-mail, twitter password, and zip code. Xbox Live members who are also Twitter users should check it out and register an account.

WordPress Theme: Unwakeable 1.5

Tyler — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:04:37 +0000

I released Unwakeable 1.5 last night. This means Unwakeable is 100% compatible with WordPress 2.5! The previous version of Unwakeable, 1.2.1, didn’t play so nicely with WordPress 2.5.

Unwakeable 1.5 was built from the ground up using K2 r687 as a starting point. I decided to start fresh for Unwakeable 1.5 and scrapped pretty much all the code from 1.2.1. Unwakeable still has all the features it had in previous versions.

Advanced navigation and live search now work in Unwakeable. Unwakeable also comes with the K2 Sidebar Manager, a superior alternative to WordPress widets. You can enable the K2 Sidebar Manager or you can use WordPress widgets, either one will work. Or, if you don’t like sidebar managers, you can continue to modify the contents of sidebar.php to get the sidebar setup you desire.

You can download Unwakeable 1.5 from the official Unwakeable page. Please let me know of any bugs or problems you run into.

K2 Release Candidate 6

Tyler — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:44:16 +0000

K2 Release Candidate 6 has been released. This release of K2 is fully compatible with WordPress 2.5.

I will be using K2 release candidate 6 as a base for Unwakeable 1.5. You can expect to see the release of Unwakeable 1.5 later on this week. You can download it from the official Unwakeable page.

Head on over to the K2 release candidate 6 announcement post for more details on the latest K2.

Unwakeable Theme And WordPress 2.5

Tyler — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:40:01 +0000

WordPress 2.5 was released on March 29th. The current version of Unwakeable (version 1.2.1) doesn’t play so well with WordPress 2.5. The only thing that’s really broken is the dashboard, which is a pretty big thing to have broken.

It seems there’s a known issue with K2 themes and the WordPress 2.5 dashboard, as explained in the K2 support forums. There’s supposedly a fix for this issue, but I could not get it to work fully. The fix works fine as long as you have K2 sidebar modules disabled from the theme options page.

Unwakeable 1.2.1 is so far broken and outdated I’m not even going to make an attempt at fixing it for WordPress 2.5. Instead, I’m working on Unwakeable 1.5, which is based off K2 Release Candidate 5. Unwakeable 1.5 is almost finished and should be up for download within a week, if not sooner.

Halo 3 Screenshot Site

Tyler — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:42:24 +0000

There’s some truly amazing looking screenshots people have taken in Halo 3. I absolutely love the fact that you can take screenshots from Halo 3 matches, I could spend hours watching movies looking for good screenshots to take.

i <3 halo 3 is a site that features some of the best Halo 3 screenshots I’ve ever seen. If you want your screenshots featured on the site, just get in touch with bs angel, the site operator. bs angel will browse through your screenshots at bungie.net. If she finds something good, she may post the screenshot to the blog. Now, go check it out!

K2 Release Candidate 5

Tyler — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:43:10 +0000

K2 release candidate 3 was released a little over four months ago. Today, as I was going through all my feeds, I saw there were some commits to the K2 SVN. The log for one of the commits stated that the version for K2 has been bumped up to release candidate 5. Here’s a piece from the commit:

Author: Heilemann
Date: Mon Feb 25 22:57:53 2008
New Revision: 636

Modified:
trunk/style.css

Log:
Upped version to RC5. Preparing release.

This is rather exciting for me, especially the “preparing release” portion of that. I’m hoping “preparing release” means they’re getting ready to drop K2 1.0 as opposed to getting ready to release a download for K2 release candidate 5. As you probably know, Unwakeable is based on K2. Once K2 1.0 is out, I’ll start building Unwakeable 2.0.

Gears of War 2 is official

Tyler — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:45:44 +0000

I’m a bit late and it’s been covered a lot already, but since this is the first official teaser video for Gears of War 2, I had to post it.

I got so excited last night when I watched this on my Xbox 360. There’s only been one other game I’ve been this excited for, and that game was Halo 3. Gears of War is one of my favorite games of all time. The other day, I had an urge to play some Gears. A buddy and I sat down played through the whole campaign on Casual in a few hours. It was lovely.

I can’t wait for Gears of War 2.

Xbox Live To Twitter

Tyler — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:57:58 +0000

Duncan Mackenzie released an application in May of 2007 that checks your Xbox Live status and sends your status to Twitter so all your followers on Twitter can see what you’re playing on your Xbox 360.

A short while after the initial release, Microsoft made some changes to Xbox Live that broke Duncan’s software, so he came out with an update. Then, a short while later, both Xbox Live and Twitter made some changes which totally broke Duncan’s software. It hasn’t worked since those updates were made.

Since then, I’ve been looking for something similar every few weeks or so. The other day, I set out to find a replacement for Duncan’s software and I came across Martin Hinshelwood’s blog.

Martin has picked up where Duncan left off with his Xbox Live to Twitter application. Martin was having trouble getting Duncan’s software to work, so he just wrote his own. I’ve been using Martin’s Xbox Live to Twitter app for a few days now and haven’t had any problems with it. It’s been posting my Xbox Live status to Twitter like mad.

If you use Twitter and have Xbox Live, you should give Xbox Live to Twitter a try. You can download the Windows installer or the source code at the CodePlex.

WordPress 2.3.3 Security Release

Tyler — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:40:04 +0000

WordPress version 2.3.3 has been released. This release, like the previous one, addresses an urgent security vulnerability that was found in the WordPress XML-RPC implementation. The flaw could allow any valid user on your blog to edit posts made by other users on your blog.

WordPress 2.3.3 also fixes some other minor bugs. If you don’t care about those minor bug fixes and just want to patch your blog against the XML-RPC vulnerability, you can download a fixed copy of xmlrpc.php and copy it to your WordPress installation directory, replacing the existing xmlrpc.php file.

You’re probably better off just downloading WordPress 2.3.3 and doing the full upgrade.

WordPress 2.3.2 Urgent Security Release

Tyler — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 03:10:04 +0000

The WordPress folks have released WordPress 2.3.2, describing it as an urgent security release. This latest version fixes a bug that can be exploited to display your draft posts. Some changes have also been made to prevent certain error messages from giving away more information about your database than they need to. I would strongly advise that WordPress users install 2.3.2 ASAP.

WordPress 2.3.2 includes a new feature to allow you to customize the error page that’s displayed when WordPress can’t connect to your database. You can see the full list of changes between 2.3.1 and 2.3.2, you can also see which bugs are fixed in WordPress 2.3.2.

Head over to the 2.3.2 announcement post on the Dev Blog for the full story on WordPress 2.3.2. If you don’t care about any of that, you can just head straight to the download.

MySQL Cheatsheet By Example

Tyler — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 16:29:20 +0000

Tech-Evangelist has put together an excellent cheatsheet for MySQL. There’s lots of other MySQL cheatsheets out there, but this one is unique in the fact that it gives examples of usage rather than just snippets of code.

This cheatsheet also includes a summary of commonly used MySQL data types, which will be really helpful to me. I can’t tell you how many times in a week I hit the MySQL website looking for specs on a certain data type.

If you think this cheatsheet would be useful to you, head on over to Tech-Evangelist to download the PDF.

Using .aspx With IIS 5.0

Tyler — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:17:21 +0000

I’m posting this here mostly so I can refer back to it later if I ever have the need to. I recently had to setup a Windows server running IIS 5.0 at work. It will be hosting a web application that will be used to verify all orders.

Anyway, I had IIS up and running but couldn’t get it to execute pages with a .aspx extension. It would just offer up the .aspx file for download instead of executing it and displaying in the browser. Turns out this is due to the ASP.NET ISAPI extension not being registered with IIS. To register the extension with IIS, open a command prompt and issue the following commands:

cd C:\winnt\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727
aspnet_regiis -i

In that example, I registered the ASP.NET 2.0 framework with IIS. If you want to use a different version of .NET, replace v2.0.50727 with whatever version you want to use. The various versions installed will be listed in the C:\winnt\Microsoft.Net\Framework\ folder.

After running the apsnet_regiis command, my .aspx files loaded right away. I discovered all this at the Channel9 MSDN forums.