Blogs for Bands » News

Comment Bankrupcy

Dan — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 03:51:55 +0000

I’ve got to declare comment bankrupcy. I am going to do my best to answer any comment posted in the last two months, but I’ve got a bunch of older ones that I never got around to responding to, so I’m going to approve the remaining ones in my queue but I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to answering the old ones. If you still have a question, leave a new comment.

Here are some things you can do to help me answer your questions quickly:

Double-check your email address. Too many people misspell their own email address and I will never really be able to get back in touch with them.
Don’t comment on an old version’s post. Many people seem to just come in and comment on the first post Google sent them to. Find the appropriate post for the latest version of the plugin. If you’re not using the latest version of the plugin, you need to upgrade anyway.
Provide a link to an example of the problem you’re having.

Sorry for not getting back to so many comments. I’ll do my best to answer them in a timely fashion in the future.

Just FYI

Dan — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:47:14 +0000

If I am slow responding to any comments or emails this week, it’s because I am without internet at home. I won’t have any internet until AT&T sends me a new DSL modem. I apologize if I miss any important issues because of this.

A little cross promotion

Dan — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:23:31 +0000

I’ve just released a new WordPress plugin. If you use Flickr and want to incorporate the photos into your blog, this is a great way to do it. I’m going to be entering the plugin in the WordPress plugin competition tonight (the voting starts tomorrow) so any feedback I can get soon would be fantastic.

Flickr Gallery

I know it’s not strictly music related, but I know that many bands use Flickr, so hopefully this plugin is useful too.

How to translate Gigs Calendar

Dan — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:36:46 +0000

There’s a new tutorial up at my development site about translating Gigs Calendar (or other WordPress plugins). If you’ve been wanting to translate Gigs Calendar and I hadn’t gotten back to you, check it out.

Translating Plugins

Google problems sorted out

Dan — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:29:51 +0000

Somehow, the WordPress option to hide this blog from search engines was checked. I don’t know why I would have checked that, but I can unhappily report that it does work very well to keep you out of Google. I should be showing up soon, hopefully with decent PageRank because of all of the awesome links I’ve gotten from you guys! Thanks!

Auto-Upgrading in WordPress 2.5

Dan — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:13:41 +0000

WordPress 2.5 comes with a cool feature that lets you automatically upgrade plugins from the admin panel via FTP. This is very handy for most people, but there’s a problem with it. If you’ve done any customization in the “templates” folder, all of your changes will be lost. Forever.

Be sure to backup all of your customizations before you upgrade your plugin from the WordPress plugins admin page. If you’re uploading the new files yourself, or upgrading via SVN, you shouldn’t have any problems.

No time like the present

Dan — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:11:13 +0000

Dougal Campbell, a developer of WordPress, posts about the importance of upgrading. Hackers are actively exploiting security problems on versions of WordPress older than 2.3.3 (the latest release was 2.5).

If you’re running an older version of WordPress, you could be putting yourself at risk. If you aren’t comfortable upgrading your WordPress install, make some geeky friends and get them to do it for you. If you need professional help upgrading, including testing themes and plugins against the new version, you know where to find me.

I should have complained sooner

Dan — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:12:41 +0000

It figures that my files come back immediately after I posted about my problems. Well, that makes fixing this site a lot easier. Once I get a few more things done, I’ll probably work on some more bug fixes. It might be some time next week before I get a release out as I haven’t returned from London yet and the jet lag will probably knock me out for a few days.

Gigs Calendar 0.3!

Dan — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:05:03 +0000

Ok, because of time constraints, I’ve put version 0.3 up without sending it out to testers. I doubt it’ll screw anyone’s stuff up, but it might be prudent to backup your gigs tables before you start playing around with it. There is going to be some documentation on the new features coming in a future version, but the features themselves are there.

The time constraints I’m talking about are namely that I’m traveling to London this weekend and tonight was my last chance to do major work on the plugin until I get back. If there are critical bugs, I’ll fix those when I get the chance, but if I’m slow to respond to emails, surely you will forgive me.

New features:

WordPress 2.5 compatibility – I didn’t have to change much, but I’ve updated a few styles to make it work a little better in the next version of WordPress (due out in less than a week). For now, I’m committed to supporting everything above WP 2.2.
Gig tagging - Using WordPress’ tagging system, you can apply tags to your post that get added to your gigs as CSS classes and let you search for gigs based on tags. Since I used WP’s built in tagging system, you can’t use this feature on versions of WP less than 2.3.
Tours - This is a big one. You can now set gigs into “tours” of your creation. That way you can split up gigs into more manageable lists. I will be surprised if the way I’ve implemented this is 100% ideal, so I need your feedback on this feature.
Templating system - Now it will be easy for you to create your own templates without too much PHP knowledge by following the examples I include. There is no documentation on this. That and a few more templates should be coming before too long.
Custom locations of gig listings - No documentation here! It’s a pretty cool feature, but I haven’t documented it yet. I’ll hopefully have time to do that soon.
Customizable values in the “Ages” drop down - Is the drinking age different in your country? Now you don’t have to use my America-centric “21+”.
Speaking of being America-centric… Internationalization - This is a big feature that I know a lot of people want to help out with. That’s good because I only speak one language. If you know what to do, grab the .po file out of the install package and have at it! If you don’t, let me know and I’ll send you instructions. I’ll probably put up a translation FAQ at some point. Right now, two incomplete translations are provided. If you see that your locale isn’t represented, I’d love to have you translate it for me.

A few notes

Dan — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 03:15:24 +0000

Some observant individuals may have spotted the “Dev Feed” on the sidebar. If you click on the link, you’ll end up on a little site that has more information than you probably ever want. In fact, it automatically posts all of my Subversion commit messages, so you’ll know when I’m making changes and what I’m doing. I’ll also be posting little status updates as well.

Also, if you’re using the plugins, or you’ve installed them for someone else and you’ve got a blog of your own, I’d appreciate it if you could write a short post mentioning the plugins and linking back here. This site still hasn’t shown up in the Google Index (though I think I’m almost out of the “sandbox”). Any links from other blogs could certainly help tip the scales in my favor and help other people find the plugins.