I’ve switched the lightbox script that my jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries plugin uses again. v2.x used a great lightbox script, but it unfortunately did not resize large images to fit on your screen (something I didn’t realize until after I released the plugin).
The newly released v3.0.0 uses the incredibly powerful and flexible ColorBox script. You can check out a demo below (this is just a simple [gallery] shortcode with no modifications):
I’ve recoded my Regenerate Thumbnails plugin. It’s now powered by AJAX and should work better on shared hosting environments as it’s pretty much impossible now to make it run out of processing time as each resize is done from it’s own page call. It also features a fancy progress bar (I love you jQuery UI!).
Great little short video of some motorsports in slow motion: (click that HD button!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b96hBQV1GKU
(via TopGear.com)
For about the past month, I had been planning on buying the new Canon PowerShot G11. However someone on the DPReview.com forums recommend the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 instead:
Comparing it to the G11 I have noted down the following pros and cons:
LX3 PROs
1) better wide angle (24mm instead of 28mm);
2) brighter lenses (F2.0 – F2.8 instead of F2.8 – F4.5)
3) smaller;
4) 110g lighter;
5) about 100$ cheaper;(doesn’t seem to be the case)7) besides the 4:3 and 16:9 it supports the 3:2 image ratio (the G11 supports 4:3 and 16:9 only);
8) better image quality compared to the G10 (I am looking forward to see a comparison with the G11).
LX3 CONS
1) doesn’t have a swivel LCD;
2) has a short zoom range (2.5x instead of 5x)
3) doesn’t have a viewfinder.Here you can see a detailed side by side comparison:
I think I’m starting to agree with them. The 720p video is a big plus (I plan on mostly doing images but I do video from time to time) as is the other stuff.
Anyone have first hand knowledge of the LX3 and would care to provide an opinion on it? Are you happy with it? Is it’s 2.5x optical zoom a problem? This would be my only camera (I don’t own a DSLR nor do I plan on getting one).
UPDATE: I ended up getting the Canon PowerShot G11 as their interfaces are just plain awesome, the swivel screen is handy, and the additional zoom is great. For video, I picked up a Flip Mino HD so I can take 720p video. Yes, I have to carry around two devices, but I have big pockets. 🙂
This post needs updating — some things have changed since it was initially written. The Codex article is more up to date.
I’ve been working on some code for WordPress 2.9 for a while now that is designed to make embedding remote content (namely videos) into your blog a lot easier. Today the code went into the WordPress core.
If you’re into testing alpha code and would like to try it out, just checkout a copy of the WordPress trunk via SVN. You can also just wait until later this month for when the more stable WordPress 2.9 beta is planned to be released.
Using The Feature
Once you’re running the code, you’ll first want to visit Settings -> Media and check out the new “Embeds” section. The default options will work perfectly fine, but you can tweak them if you wish.
To embed something, such as a video, you have two options:
<a> tag) URL on it’s own line (that’s important) somewhere within your post. Obviously this will not work for all URLs, but more on that in a moment.[embed] shortcode. (there’s a UI for this — click the “Add Video” icon and then “From URL”)In order for the URL to actually turn into an embed, one of three conditions needs to be true:
<link> tag in the <head> of the entered URL which contains the URL to the site’s oEmbed provider. This option is only available to authors with the unfiltered_html capability.If all goes well, then it’ll embed like this:
Note that no plugins were used in the above embed and the HTML was pulled directly off of Vimeo’s servers. All I did was paste this on to it’s own line: http://www.vimeo.com/240975 WordPress connected to the URL, found the discovery tag in the <head>, and used it to get the HTML back from Vimeo’s servers. It’s then cached to the post meta to avoid slow page loads (editing a post clears the cache).
Another example is Flickr. Just paste the URL to the image’s page (the page where people can leave comments, etc.) into your post. For example, here’s a picture by Donncha: http://www.flickr.com/photos/donncha/4008546362/
Default Supported Sites
The following sites are supported out of the box for all users — you can easily add more via plugins (see below) and admins can use other sites that use the oEmbed discovery tag.
Keep reading to learn about using plugins to interact with the embed API »
This is just plain crazy. 1500 hours of work.
(via Mark)
Do you write WordPress plugins? If so, you should watch this video from WordCamp Portland a few weeks ago:
Now that I own a laptop, I needed a way to keep some folders in sync between my two computers (my web development folder for example). While there are plenty of options that use online methods (Dropbox for example), I needed one that was strictly offline. The free accounts only offer a few gigabytes (I’ll eventually be syncing a few hundred gigabytes and am currently syncing around 30,000 files) and I’m much too cheap to purchase space upgrades (they’re crazy expensive anyway).
So in comes SyncToy 2.0 from Microsoft. I installed it on my desktop (you only need it on one computer), shared the folders with my Homegroup on my laptop that I wanted to sync, and set up some folder pairs. It works awesome and only takes about a minute to check both my desktop and laptop (via wireless) for file modifications and then sync the changes.
However it has no UI for setting up automated syncing. You either have to do it manually or set up a scheduled task using the command line program that comes with SyncToy called SyncToyCmd.exe. The problem with there’s no way to hide it’s window. Every time the task runs, a command line window pops up while it’s syncing. Highly annoying and distracting, even if I’m only syncing once an hour.
Well thanks to a bit of Googling, I found a solution. It’s a little NET application someone wrote that acts as a wrapper for SyncToyCmd.exe and makes it run silently in the background.
Success! 🙂