So I released Ratebird 0.32 with the aforementioned überfix for the RYM site.  Took a bit of noodling to get it to happen, but it turned out simpler was better and we got there in the end.   Basically if you’re on an artist page when signed in to RYM, your ratings for that artist’s releases appear instead of the ‘rate’ text in the far right; the long-standing problem is that this doesn’t happen for split or various artist releases…until now.  Hopefully the RYM guys won’t finally fix this in the immediate future, thus denying me my…er, glory?

I then noticed a typo in the install.rdf I uploaded so pushed 0.33 up with possibly the fastest Mozilla extension feature I’ve ever written – took me less than 40min to add a context menu option for library items that opens a new tab with a basic search of the album (or artist if the album tag is null) for that track.  Works for multiple tracks and pseudoThreaded too, just in case.  Will get back on to improving the core feature for 0.4, although it won’t be for at least a couple of weeks.

And finally, I looked at the CDN stuff again and it would appear the aforementioned Google App Engine doesn’t support PHP/MySQL – putting WordPress and this site right out of the equation.  There has been some success in getting WordPress to work but it’s pretty damn fiddly and I’d probably just be better off paying for Amazon’s CDN.  Will revisit at some point.

Ratebird can be found here.

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I wanted to find an easily customisable search box plugin for my blog, as the default one is a bit boring to say the least.  I couldn’t find one that did everything I wanted, so I set about writing my own.

Features:

• Customisable title
• Customisable button text
• Choose between text button or image button
• Customisable margin between button and text box
• Choose between small or large image buttons – small image button is designed to be used with a negative margin to place the search button inside the text box
• Info boxes in the admin area explaining everything
• Change the default images for your own, with optimum margin for ‘inner button’ case dynamically calculated and displayed in the admin area

This is based on the rather obviously named Search Widget with Title, and has been fully tested on WordPress 2.7.

So, here it is…Advanced Search Widget

Instructions: Unzip the download, upload the directory within to your plugins directory.  Then, activate the plugin and add the widget to one of your sidebars.

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My very awesome Web host Dreamhost just upgraded me to unlimited disk and bandwidth, to say sorry for moving my site to a different server with no warning.  Considering nothing whatsoever broke as a result of the move, I’m rather pleased.

WordPress is also finally updated and the new version is so much nicer.  It was a bit weird that I had to comment out the entire wp-admin/admin-db.php file to get the admin area to work, but I have forgotten most of the messing about I did whilst setting up this site so it’s probably something to do with that.

I don’t really use MySpace any more, apart from to check out the odd band that don’t have any tunes on Last.fm, and gig dates (Last.fm is getting much better for gigs though).  However I found a wordpress plugin that supposedly allows crossposting of these blog entries to my MySpace account, so we shall see if that works when I hit ‘publish’.  I like the idea of my blog posts automatically being pushed around all of the different networks/apps that I’m on, I’ll see about finding one for LiveJournal (which I also barely use, but whatever…).

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Ok…so I’ve been rather silent here. I’m still alive, currently living in Edinburgh with my new lady (who is the best thing to happen to me in a very long time). The MSc and DoD (Dissertation of D0000000m) have ended and I am sans job. I’m involved in a concerted effort to get a position in web development as I’d like to work in an area that

• I’ve always been fascinated by
• I actually enjoy
• Isn’t science (I’m fed up with research after the DoD and want to see what else there is)

The site has come along a great deal since I last wrote something here, with eleventy billion bug fixes and extra features, and some actual design work has happened to ensure that it doesn’t look like a pile of junk. It’s far from finished – I have several little bits yet to do, along with the mildly irritating task of getting it to look nice in the abomination that is IE6. In fact I would have done the IE6 testing already if M$ hadn’t made it impossible to run it in Vista; as it is, I have to install 1.5+Gb of virtual OS (XP SP2) to get anywhere near IE6. So I’ve decided not to bother and to gopher the prettiest Linux ever (Kubuntu) and WINE instead. After these job applications. Job > IE6 compatibility.

Anyway, here are the main recent improvements to the site:

• Cool PHP breadcrumbs script added to generate crumbs from directory structure
• Even cooler browser-specific, dynamic PHP generated CSS and JS files – this was a lot easier than I thought it would be to implement. I’m sure this puts a hefty load on the server, but I can’t see it causing any problems, unless I start getting lots more hits.
• Tutorial for my scrollable, sortable table – hopefully *fingers crossed* I can get my GridView tutorial up here too. I also have some Perl scripts to put up, just data juggling stuff but some budding computational chemist out there might find them of use
• Clicky-sprouty hidden JS divs for code and suchlike – sadly not yet working in Opera, but that’s not so bad (sorry, Opera users)
• Vastly improved menu
• Much better Smarty code, making it far easier to change (and add) pages to the site
• Smarty templates seamlessly hooked into blog files through some carefully placed PHP includes – again a lot easier to do than I anticipated
• Nicely formatted CV page that kicks the bottom of my existing CV – I will back-port the changes to the document version shortly and put it up here for download
• Contact page that works and works well, I’m sure the JS validation script can be improved but it’ll do for the moment.

The WordPress update to 2.3 didn’t work (both 1-click & manual) so I’ll stick with 2.2.1 until I figure a workaround (probably best backing up, deleting and re-installing). More to come.

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Ok, so new blog set up with minimal customisation (everything is likely to change) and the first theme that validates properly with HTML Tidy (it also happens to be nice and green).

This is the first speed comparison of the new native JavaScript GetElementsByClassName functionality which is built into what will become Firefox 3. Very impressive, it should mean Fx3 will actually feel significantly faster when poking around sites, especially those with lots of JS.

Picture from the above link:

On a side note, I’m very impressed with WordPress so far, it’s all very well laid out, nice and intuitive. You can edit anything you want so eventually I’ll be hacking up a theme and hopefully integrating the blog with the rest of the (not yet existent) site. Oh, and the Dreamhost installation really was only one click!

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