January 24th, 2010

Comment Policy

This really has not been a problem in the past, but one feels compelled to spell this out due to the actions of a few commenters in the past month or so. On this site, one reserves the right to delete or modify any comment deemed unacceptable. Modifications may include, but are not limited to:

Changing name
Removal of offensive language
Removal of information that may compromise the security of the commenter’s web server
Removal of excessive links

When selecting a name, please use either your real name (e.g. John, John Doe, John D., or J. Doe) or an appropriate pseudonym (e.g. miller). Do not use overly generic names, or names that look to be SEO baiting in nature (e.g. friend, buddy, Plugin Developer, WordPress Experts, etc.). Do not impersonate the admin, or any registered users (e.g. admin, mtekk, John Havlik). Failure to adhere to these guidelines will result in your name being changed (if one values the content of your comment) or your comment being deleted.

Although this site’s primary audience is over 18, please keep your comments suitable for work. One does not need this site to be blacklisted by the likes of Websense. Remember, anyone can read these comments, including current or future employers.

When posting errors presented by PHP, please reduce strings like “/var/www/sitename/htdocs/wp-contents/plugins/breadcrumb-navxt/breadcrumb_navxt_class.php” to “…/wp-contents/plugins/breadcrumb-navxt/breadcrumb_navxt_class.php”.

Unless the link pertains to the content of your comment, please leave it out.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

January 16th, 2010

Mixed Colorspace

Posted by John Havlik in Art

Colors are important, having the correct one can make or break a design. That is why professionals and even some enthusiasts spend copious amounts of money (well maybe not quite that much) on devices to ensure that when a color is picked, it looks the same on print and on the screen. Even with these devices, there are many pitfalls on the computer side.

Case in point: what looks like a rich crimson in improperly color managed FireFox, The Gimp, and Windows Paint is actually a rusty maroon in color managed Windows Explorer, and FireFox (when set to manage CSS colors in conjunction with profiled images). While this is better than in Windows XP, it is still annoying.

When Microsoft redid the graphics driver framework for Vista, they should have forced color correction onto the graphics drivers. That way, all applications would use the same color translation LUT and individual applications would not have to be aware of color profiles. Maybe they could do this for Windows 8 (then one could be in one of those “Windows 8 feature was my idea” commercials).

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

January 2nd, 2010

A New Year

Posted by John Havlik in General

With the changing of years, months, and the forthcoming changing of seasons a change in design and accompanying style is immanent. Originally, these changes were to take affect last summer. Yet, somehow they were delayed, as have other projects. This comes from a desire to separate more professional content and personal content (well, it would allow the posting of more personal content as of late little has been posted). While being the self proclaimed “Enemy of the Spammers”, one has not made proper use of this tagline. So there are two options, earn the title, or relinquish it. One’s choice will be apparent in the coming weeks.

Now to talk about a neglected project. WP Trainer, still hasn’t seen the light of day, even though its code base size is equivalent to that of Breadcrumb NavXT. Lack of direction is really the reason for the delay. There is almost too much to do with it, after a concise scope is defined work will resume. The other hold up is that some portions rely on things that are possible in WordPress but are quite hackish to implement (many of these problems went away in WP 2.8, and more went away in 2.9). Currently, WP 3.0 is the target platform. Finally, some work being done at the moment on Breadcrumb NavXT will benefit this project.

Breadcrumb NavXT will probably have 3 feature adding releases in 2010 (3.5, 3.6, and 3.7). The current version in development, 3.5, will add support for custom post types and will contain many “under the hood” improvements which will be detailed at a later date. The release time frame for this around mid to late Q1. Version 3.6 will add extended support for WPMU/WP 3.0, essentially covering the one thing that makes WPMU a different animal. This release will correspond to the WP 3.0 release (probably in late H1).

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

December 23rd, 2009

Breadcrumb NavXT 3.4.1

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Plugins

This is the first bug fix release for the 3.4 branch of Breadcrumb NavXT. Those with PHP short tags disabled should no longer get the unexpected $end on line 1567 in breadcrumb_navxt_admin.php error. Using the paged option will no longer cause a WP_Error to string conversion error. Finally, flat taxonomies leading up to a post will become linked again. Hopefully this covers all of the bugs in Breadcrumb NavXT 3.4.0, if you are still experiencing problems with 3.4.1, leave a comment below in the comments section.

You can grab the latest version of Breadcrumb NavXT from the Breadcrumb NavXT page.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]