Simon trades as Sweet Interaction Ltd
WARNING: Of interest only to those involved in translating the Wordcamp UK 2009 theme into Welsh!
WordCamp UK 2009 POT file – for translating the theme into Welsh (or any other language). For more information, see the WordPress Internationalisation information.
I’ve got a couple of projects coming up which are going to require scheduling tasks in WordPress either to go off and get stuff, or to check whether posts displayed are still accurate, etc. Luckily, WordPress has a pseudo-Cron implementation which I plan to use to .
Let’s take a step back first and remember what Cron is: Cron is the scheduling service for UNIX-like systems which can set tasks occur at specific times or to recur at specific intervals. So you can use Cron to tell your system to do something at 12:47 on the 14th April, 2009 or to perform a task at 12 minutes past midnight every Monday, it’s a very useful service.
WordPress is not naturally a proactive beast, so unfortunately your WP site will not spend it’s day checking the time and seeing if it’s got anything to do. This is where the pseudo come in, with the WordPress pseudo-Cron we’re relying on a constant flow of visitors to trigger WordPress into checking for scheduled tasks. The upshot of this is that we cannot rely on WordPress to precisely schedule events, but the system is good enough for most things. (We can always increase the frequency of visitors artificially by targetting the site with five minute checks by Pingdom or similar, with the added benefit that the site is now monitored for downtime.)
So let’s get into the details of how all this stuff works, shall we? Continue reading ‘Experiments with WP Cron’
I am finding myself using this function a lot now, and I constantly forget the function name:
add_query_arg();
It allows you to pass in some additional parameters, and a URL, and receive back the URL with the query string params added. For example:
$some_url = "http://simonwheatley.co.uk/?stuff=whatever";
$params = array( 'wp_siteurl' => "http://www.example.com" );
$some_url = add_query_arg( $params, $some_url );
This will result in a url something like this:
http://simonwheatley.co.uk/?stuff=whatever&wp_siteurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com
Pretty cool, huh? So now you don’t need to worry about what parameters are already in the URL, you can just hand all that hassle to add_query_arg.
Update: See also remove_query_arg.
There’s an irritating bug on Firefox for OSX when you’re using it with dual monitors. If you plugin the monitor after you’ve started Firefox, and it is in the secondary monitor, the autocomplete for URLs and for search queries will appear on the primary monitor. Very confusing. The solution is to restart Firefox (which retains the current set of opened websites in tabs and windows), for which I use the Restart Firefox plugin recommended by Sam Clark.
With a lot of help with Ross Barkman‘s handy modem scripts, I’ve managed to create a bluetooth modem connection with my Nokia 6300 on (UK) Orange. On the off chance that this is useful to someone else, here’s what I did…
Continue reading ‘Configuring Apple OS X to use a Nokia 6300 as a bluetooth modem’
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