Dammit Jim!

I just graduated a few months back and I figure it’s about (past) time I start looking for a job. I’ve been meaning to look into microformats and they have a resume microformat so I figured I’d give them a try and get my resume done at the same time. As far as I can gather, microformatting is basically just hiding some machine readable information in text meant for humans (usually in the class attribute of html tags e.g. <p class="someMicroformat" >). This means people can read the page quiet happily one moment and a computer can come along the next and parse the page much better using the microformatting hints. The big microformats seem to be calendar and addressbook entries (also tags, licensing, and external links but these seem to me to be in a different, simpler class). It seems like a smart idea so although I’m not sure there’s any actual benefit (yet), I figured if I’m going to make an html resume I might as well make a microformatted html resume.

Things went pretty smooth after I figured out the basic formatting since it’s just adding the same annotation for calendar events for all the dates and same addressbook format for the employers/universities. It was really helpful to refer to the resume of someone who knew what they were doing for any questions. The only hitch was when I hit things unexpected in the microformat (like a job that started and stopped a couple times or more than one employer for one job). I guess in those cases you either have to sacrifice human readability or the microformat clarity so I just marked it up as best as I could. The only other complaint would be that they give publications the short shrift without any microformatting. Seems like a citation microformat would be really handy on the internet.

So anyway here’s the resume. If you’re actually curious and look at the source, there’s all kinds of microformatting goodness going on behind the scenes with all the employers as hCards and the job times as hCalendars. If you want to be able to see microformats in action without looking at the source of every page you visit there’s the handy Operator plugin for Firefox that automatically puts a little indicator in the title bar (like the little orange RSS indicator) and allows appropriate actions (like adding to a calender or address book). You can start to see how useful microformats could be using that plugin. I think Firefox is planning to push microformats in their next version so here’s hoping they catch on.

Aziz of metaBLOG suggests that the new tags in WordPress 2.3 can be used to create a “folksonomy” on WordPress blogs. For those not in the know (including me until a couple days ago), a folksonomy is is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content according to Wikipedia. Basically it’s letting normal people (versus say artificial intelligence or an administrator) help describe things. For example, adding a tag on flickr or using del.icio.us.

So since WordPress doesn’t currently have anything like a public “Add a Tag” and I haven’t coded a WordPress plugin recently (although I did upgrade WP_MonsterID if anyone is using it), I thought I would code up a quick plugin to see how it works. So here is WP_Folksonomy. It’s fairly basic at the moment but I’d like to get it out there to see if it’s useful and if anyone is interested in it.

Since it uses WordPress’s tagging features WP it’s only going to be compatible with WordPress 2.3 and up.

For a while, I’ve been a bit annoyed with WordPress losing pings (those automatic links on your blog when someone links to you) that should be coming to my posts. I noticed that when I or an external blog link to more than one of my posts only one ping would register in my comments. For example, if someone writes that:

Scott has written WordPress plugins to make it easier to write about code, generate monster avatars and generate unique geometric shapes for each commentor.

I would want a ping to appear on each of those linked posts, both to thank the linking blog for writing about me and to provide useful information to the reader (and to increase my comment counts). Yet WordPress only puts a ping on the first linked page.

It took me a little while to figure out why WordPress kept losing my pings since I wasn’t even sure if it was a problem on the sending or receiving end but it turns out WordPress is filtering pings because it thinks the comments are coming too fast. I’ll put the details below but if you just want to make sure all the pings intended for your blog actually reach it then here is the plugin for you.

I was looking to create a fake page in a WordPress plugin I’m working on in my (all too limited) spare time. It may seem a little silly to try to create a fake page with a plugin but this could be useful for any plugin that will display information to the readers of the blog (outside the admin panel), like statistics, contact pages or about pages. Luckily there is a handy tutorial for creating a fake posts. But although the plugin cleverly tricks WordPress into displaying a post created dynamically by the plugin itself, WordPress is clever enough to know something is wrong and sends a 404 error before sending the plugin-created content. Although many browsers will still display the page, this is a problem for any text-based browser or if you want the page to be indexed by search engines and (for me at least) just kind of grates to know my magnificent new plugin isn’t actually performing correctly. Anyway, this happens because WP->handle_404() called by WP->main() in classes.php checks how many posts were found which, in this case, is 0 since there is no real post for the requested URL. To get around this problem, we need to make sure we trick WordPress before this function is called. Luckily we can catch WordPress immediately after it (unsuccessfully) looks for posts before any other function can figure out anything is wrong by using the the_posts filter.

I’ve been burned a few times in WordPress when posting something like:

This is how you make text italic: This is italic.

when I actually wanted:

This is how you make text italic: <em>This is italic.</em>

Of course it’s not too hard to remember to encode the special characters but this is WordPress and things are supposed to be easy. So I thought I would throw together a simple WordPress plugin to convert HTML special characters inside <code></code> tags. That was a few months ago and I got the plugin most of the way done and then got distracted with other things. But after reading about another person having the same annoyance, I decided I should finish the plugin.