My theory is that the longer they take to get where they’re going, the less incentive their supervisors have to send them home without pay. I mean, they’re getting paid by the hour, so why drive faster than 15mph to get anywhere? Especially when you’re only looking forward to removing skunk roadkill or something.
If you’re ever followed a yellow PennDOT truck, you know what I’m talking about.
From this point forward, all commenters are required to participate in The Commonly Confused Words Test and score within 10% of my own score:
Everyone in my age group scored lower than I did, which is pretty darn sad.
I should write more of these because people might like to see what’s going on. Some of this stuff is too cool not to share. So here’s a preview of some of the stuff that’s already in the Exhibit 2.0 source code. (No, you still can’t download it because I’m still writing it.)
By the way, for the uninitiated: What is Exhibit? Exhibit is an extensive image management plugin for WordPress. I think it kicks butt, but I wrote it, so I would think that.
But what’s new in 2.0? The incessant reloading during common operations is over. Check out this screencam:
Let me explain a little about what is happening here. I have selected a subdirectory in the server’s file system which contains a single photo, h_parade18.jpg. Just this week I rewrote the file system routines to better isolate them. The local file system is now handled by a separate WordPress plugin that links into the main Exhibit plugin. Additional plugins could let you, for example, browse and select images from your Flickr account, or search for images in stock photo libraries. – I digress.
In the h_parade18.jpg image, you see Abby in her Halloween costume. I click the Rotate Left button and - here’s the important and slightly indistinguishable bit - the thumbnail changes without reloading the Media Browser. In fact, without reloading the Media Browser, all of the relevant photos (thumbnail, medium-, and full-sized) have been rotated accordingly on the server.
After that, I rotate the image back to its original orientation, and choose the Set Thumbnail button. The (possibly) familiar cropper appears, and I set a new crop area. Only the thumbnail is cropped, the other sizes show the full image.
On the Settings panel (this is a new thing) I’m provided with several options for inserting the image into the page content. This lets you do things that were difficult before, like inserting a column-width photo (that’s what the preset “medium” size is for) that links to the full-size. There are a couple of behaviors that I need to add to the dropdown yet. One behavior is the ability for the inserted image, when clicked, to exchange another photo on the page for the clicked one. Another is to link to the post gallery page for that post. These are highly-anticipated features, I’m sure.
That’s just the screencam. There are some other things that are “working”.
The one weakness I see of the WordPress SVN Plugin Repository is that there is no way to easily deploy your plugin from that space after you’ve written it.
I susppose that there is some utility in “releasing” your plugins from your own site, but it seems like there should be an easier way to deploy plugins than the currently required process. (Something like: zipping your own working directory, uploading it to your site, telling everyone it’s there and not at the repo even though that’s where the code usually is, blah blah blah…)
I get asked pretty regularly what plugins I use on this WordPress site
to achieve these “impressive” features. Sometimes it’s a custom plugin, sometimes it’s not a plugin at all. I have written many plugins for WordPress, most of which you can download from the wp-hacks page.
After the break is a list of all of the plugins in use here at Asymptomatic. This list should update dynamically when I change which plugins are active.