this fella runs a country, but still has time to follow me on twitter and move his own furniture. mr. Obama has made it 100 days- some notable moments: the whistle stop train tour, the Obama’s decline $100,000 redecoration budget. Bo. Pres’ meets the press corps (they scrum and grovel), O! shirtless, visit Carla Bruni… and her husband, our monarch is totally gay for Michelle (apparently), the YouTube addresses oh and the inauguration. but what about New Orleans.. yer, whatta’bout it?
i wanted to delete a plethora of posts on Meta Comment. mainly irrelevant and mostly useless i was close to just deleting everything pre-2009. fresh start. but i don’t like editing old posts, i hardly moderate comments- its a fun old world and reading some of my earlier stuff is always amusing (to me– and let’s get something straight it’s all about me).
the alternative plan was to separate the new posts from the (very) old… just this week i discovered a great hack for Wordpress that allows me to display a ‘this post is old’ banner on posts of a certain maturity. y’see when i switched over from iBlog there were a lot of formatting issues – not to mention missing images, broken links etc – i tried to weed them out over time, but got busy, so anything from ‘05/’06 is a real mess. yay for $date_check_age
this simple code checks the age of a post (set at 999 days or older here) then displays the ‘.expired’ element (must be defined in your CSS) only to visitors to those elderly posts… it doesn’t print (or echo?) the element in your new material. so:
< ?php
$date_check_age = '';
if (is_single()) {
$days = 999;
if (time() - strtotime($posts[0]->post_date_gmt) > ($days * 86400)) {
$date_check_age = 'this is an archived post' ;
}
}
?>
< ?php echo $date_check_age; ?>
you might find this hard to believe, but i’m not a big fan of IBM. so it makes it hard to appreciate what great tv advertisements they, or should i say their ad firm, have come up with. i love them, particularly the early eBusiness examples:
its a sustained effort, thematically and artistically, they say “we’re IBM we’re big, clever and professional”. i love the black and white and the action- it takes place in a static frame without too much jazzy music or sound fuddling up the nice neat corners. here’s another example. there’s always a smidgin’ of blue in there too which is an instantly recognisable hook for ‘old blue’ – right up to last year’s Innovation Man they’re on the same warpath.
IBM, commendably, never talk down to their customers (mainly serious corporate types you’d imagine) even in their sillier efforts, i’m thinking of a series of ads in which poorly formulated ‘blue sky thinking’ techniques replace productivity ‘STOP TALKING – START DOING’ is the simple commanding tag line. See: ‘Ideating’
‘Googlisation’ (i.e. dull business + chill out room and a drinks cabinet = productivity) is something i’m very aware of, probably because after years of being a mac user (cool kid and all round awesome guy!) i logged into a Windows Vista PC last year- and it wanted to be my friend. Rounded corners, a feedback loop, staff bloggers, dropping the ‘e’ in a verb and calling it your logo, having quirky language in your marketing material… this doesn’t make for a creative or profitable company- and i’m looking at you Virgin Media on several counts.
If your big and your blue, make big blue adverts.
[edit: i've now added Starred Review to the Wordpress Plugin Directory as version 1.1a which from now on automatically updates itself. enjoy]
I’ve added support for Wordpress Widgets to Starred Review. Along with some minor backend formatting alterations, no where near the quality it should be, but that’s for another day. I’ve also tidied-up the actual output, a bit more readable- less of that ‘classes’ jumble.
So Download Starred Review 1.1a, just overwrite the current plugin and make sure (if you’re not using widgets) you’ve got the new badge code:
<?php starred_review_badge('limit', 'category');?>
Starred Review 1.1 supports Wordpress 2.7.1, will soon have a Dashboard Widget for OS X and be listed on the WP Plugin Repository (if only they’ll email me confirmation?) all that good stuff just round the corner! Thanks to Peter at Apartment One Six for his widget tutorial.
If you’d like to see any future updates / additions, just let me know (via the comments feed or email). I’m pretty happy with this revision but let me know if you find any issues with this one!
Looking to add widget support to a wordpress plugin. There’s a lot of misinformation online, its out of date, incomplete or just wrong- I know because I’ve been working on bringing my plugin: up to date.
Peter’s Widgetizing a Wordpress Plugin was an invaluable resource- i can’t say better than that. Read his thorough and exact example for a quick way into wordpress widgets, and check out the rest of Apartment One Six.com I can see it being very helpful in the future.
