I <3 WPLite
Posted by admin | Filed under Web Dev
I’m a big fan of WordPress and I just found my new favorite plugin, WPLite. As much as I think WordPress is user friendly and very intuitive the non-techy user often seems to have trouble navigating the menus.
Enter WPLite.
This nifty plugin allows me to login and disable individual menu items as well as specific sections of the post meta, ie: categories, tags or custom fields. It even works with other plugins so you can hide the options/settings menu of a plugin but still allow access to the front end. I do this frequently with the Event Calendar plugin. If you’re looking for an easy way to strip down the WordPress admin area beyond what the predefined roles give you then this might be a lifesaver.
Is Ruby the next big thing?
Posted by admin | Filed under Web Dev
I’ll admit it, I thought the Ruby on Rails framework was going to be a fad that faded away within a year or two. However it’s still here, and while I’m not sure I’ve warmed up to Rails i’ve gotten a little more curious with it’s big brother Ruby. Now I have no hands on experience with Ruby it just seems as though its come up in conversation more recently that this time last year. My headhunter friend has frequently asked if I know any Ruby programmers.
Just for fun I played around with Google Trends this afternoon to see if in fact people are searching for Ruby any more now than they were a year ago. In an effort to ignore searches for “ruby” the gemstone versus Ruby the programming language I formatted searched for the phrase “ruby programming”. I don’t claim these results really show an accurate gauge of programming language popularity (check link for that) but it was a fun experiment. I threw in PHP and Python for a comparison but left out the big guns ie:Java, it just didn’t seem fair to compare Java to Ruby.
Search Trends in the United States
Search Trends in the United States in 2008
Search Trends Worldwide in 2008
I’d describe the graphs as “slow and steady”, while there didn’t seem to be any notable influx of changes I found it interesting how close Ruby and PHP results appeared in the United States. Event more surprising to me was that Python presented considerably higher search popularity than PHP in 2008. Maybe I should have titled the article “Is Python the Next Big Thing?”.
Tags: php, python, ruby, trends
Flash 40 AJAX 3.2?
Posted by admin | Filed under Web Dev
The numbers in the title refer to the percent of web sites on the internet that make use of Adobe Flash and the percent of websites that utilize the XMLHttpRequest to calculate the AJAX figure. I came across these in an article over at Flash Magazine which referenced a survey done by the people over at Opera.
These numbers took me by surprise, maybe its the sites that I visit but I had the impression that AJAX was taking the web by storm. It’s this perception that prompted me to cut my time in the AS3 world and spend some time getting more familiar with AJAX techniques and my favorite Javascript Library, JQuery. I will continue utilizing both technologies but I just found it ironic to say the least that during a time where I’ve been very AJAX-centric that a report comes out showing such a strong flash prevalence. Then again it could simply be inflated by all those horrid “punch the monkey” banner ads.