Ignite Blog by Ruxton

It seems there may have been a minor issue in the last release of my iTunes Affiliate Link Maker wordpress plugin. Quite simply, if you had an existing install and didn’t have any links in it yet, you may continue to see the upgrade warning/notification no matter what you do.  The man known to me only as daykilla has found the bug and nailed a quick solution (top work!) that’ll get you going for now.

If you need to work out what’s going on and how to fix it, head over and check out the post describing it. In the mean time I’ll be releasing an updated 0.5.2 later this evening with that fix and maybe a few extras.

I’ve just pushed version 0.5.1 of my WordPress plugin iTALM into the WordPress SVN, it should arrive soon enough.  If you have any problems please let me know.

The system now works around the shortag [itunes] with the following attributes:

• url – a mandatory attribute, this a clean itms store url, fetched via link maker or your itunes client
• title – the string in this field is passed into the output link as the alt tag on the image/title of the link
• content – if you don’t use this field, the itms link image from the settings page is displayed, if you do use this attribute the string is output instead.

Saying all that you don’t need to type this stuff anyway, because that’s the beauty of the button being in both editors. Select text (it’ll be output as the content attribute) or don’t, click the button, search for what you want (or click manual url) and be quickly prompted through the process.  If you enter nothing in the box? It’ll still enter someting like <Artist Name>-<Album name> out for you.

I think this is a nice step forward for the plugin, your feedback is appreciated, the general consensus seems to be to drop feedback over at the article page but i’m now closing that, so please leave your feedback on this post.

Through some work of magic i dragged myself out of bed at 6am this morning so i could get into the city by 8am to goto the PayPal Developer Day, a half day event put on by PayPal to engage the web developer community. While the day was great and I learnt alot about PayPal’s products, a few issues come to mind.

I wrote this little post quite some time ago, around the weekend my first 2 sites were accepted into the Woopra Beta.
If you’re wondering how to pronounce Woopra, i like to think it has an exclamation mark on the end (Woopra!) and that it’s the sound Bruce Lee makes when he karate chops your arse. Because I get the impression thats exactly what Woopra is going to do to online analytics.

Got a worpdress blog? do you link to the iTunes Store with or without an affiliate program? this plugins for you!

The plugin adds an itunes button to the visual editor which when clicked brings forward a dialog containing a search for the iTunes store link maker.

After searching, clicking on any link will ask for a title for the link and insert it into the content editor. The link also enables the ability to directly link to albums, something the standard link generator does not normally do.

Enough gaff, if you want it, it’s here.  It’ll be on wordpress.org soon enough.

I’m not sure if this is all new or if I’m slow and everyone else already knew this or if there’s a select niche of people who have realised what I’m about to talk about.  I always see a huge problem in PHP Web Apps, the total and utter eradication of local caching.  It’s the ‘bomb them all’ method of ensuring your site is always serving the most up to date copy and everyone uses it.  Frankly, it’s bad form, it’s not cool and it has to stop.  Unless you have a compelling reason for serving fresh pages EVERY single hit and you have the server to handle it, i suggest you learn from our mistakes.

I’ve been a little delayed in writing about this one for a number of reasons, but it’s time to put it out there now.  Myself & Chris Messina from PerthWeb (not this or this Chris Messina, but a whole new one) have recently launched two new online comics.  “What?” i hear you say, “more online comics? is there enough already” sure theres plenty of online comics out there, some crap, some great, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try and do it better.

Just kinda finished up some work on a new Wordpress widget i’ve been thinking about for a while. Last night i pulled the gloves off and started building the Steam Community Widget .