The answer is…

Tomorrow!

I’ve got most of UTW2 written; however, since it’s UTW2 and not UTW1-and-a-little-bit; I’ve still got a bunch of auxillary stuff to do like documenting the changes which have taken place, and rounding off some of the rough edges.

(Brief overview: there is now a “Core” class which does core tagging stuff; and an “Actions” class, which performs most of the WP action hook behaviour. The main plugin code behaves in the same way, but uses the classes.
I’ve also written a magical thing for formatting! It’s.. scary. Basically, a format is an array of formatting strings, which are used to display lists of tags. A formatting string looks kinda like “<li>%taglink% – %tagcount%</li>” That particular formatting string displays a link to the tag page with the number of occurances (not always applicable), wrapped in li tags. A format, is either a single formatting string; or an array of named formatting strings. More on that tomorrow! I’m getting sleepy (: )

Boned



Boned

Sometimes you take photographs of what you’re about to eat. And sometimes none of the photographs turn out as you’d hope. Sometimes, there’s carnage that is just about worth taking a picture of.

This (was) part of a frenched pork roast. There wasn’t anything done to it that was especially special; but gosh, it was delicious and marvellous to carve.

There’s going to be a revolution, baby

I’ve been tinkering with Ultimate Tag Warrior this weekend; but alas, nothing new in the way of releases. It’s, how you say, “explodey into a million pieces sitting in little piles waiting to be put back together again”.

So far, I’ve built; err.. one of the things on my todo list (tags with spaces). However, I’ve also been restucturing my code quite drastically, so it’s going to be a lot easier to do a bunch of the other items on the list; not to mention any other things that materialise.

(Don’t panic! You’ll be able to use UTW2 without making changes to your themes or anything else – I’m keeping everything I do compatible with UTW1.)

I guess 2.0alpha will be out in the next few days. Failing that, a few days after that.

Utensibility

Becks & Posh is running Utensibility week; wherein food-bloggers everywhere will wax lyrical about their utensiliest utensil.

I’m a little undecided on what constitutes a utencil: certainly a cooktop or oven isn’t a utencil; but what about a knife (I love my Global 6-1/4-Inch Heavyweight Chef’s Knife – not the usual 8″-10″ chefs knife; but it’s just the right size for me. Anything longer would be like waving a sabre around.)?

Alas, I don’t have any of the more common Utensibility worthy candidates; although it must be said that a bright red Kitchen Aid stand mixer is certainly on my wishlist (but not something I can really justify getting with my current kitchen layout – there’s nowhere to put the thing! It’s just not physically possible to fit one into any of the cupboards in my kitchen.)

WhiskAlthough, I do have a hand whisk! And a marvellous hand whisk it is too. It’s like an like an ordinary hand whisk, with a marble in a mesh ball that gives it superpowers. Whipping cream is easy with this whisk. Making custard is easy (in so far as making custard is easy; but that’s a whole other story. It must be said, however, that every time I’ve made custard with this whisk…. success!).

I had coveted (a little.) (perhaps.) (okay maybe a lot.) the WMF Ball whisks; but I’d always felt a little bit unsure about them. Would they work, I often pondered to myself? Or would they end up being another piece of worthless junk (I had a WMF flour sifter. It broke within a couple of months. I was so mad! Mad, I say! However, I digress). But on one fate-filled day, wandering the aisles of a kitchen store, I saw this whisk. And it made sense. And it saved me close to $30. So I took it home with me.

Ultimate Tag Warrior 1.1.1 1.1.2

There’s a new release at http://dev.wp-plugins.org/file/ultimate-tag-warrior/trunk/plugins/ultimate-tag-warrior.php.

It fixes the bugs with the most popular tags list; and it also fixes the bug where /tags/ didn’t work.

You’ll need to update your permalinks for the /tags/ bug, either by going to Options > Permalinks and refreshing; or manually changing your .htaccess file. If you’re doing this manually, you need to change the order of the rules so that the /tags/ rules comes first. I have no idea why this matters; but there you go.

I’ve also added a function for posting to del.icio.us… it’s… not very friendly, in that guard dog will bite your hand off kind of way. I have a feeling that I’m going to have to turn this into a administration function for logged in users; or ask the lovely people at del.icio.us to let the /post/ url accept tags. If you are that interested, by all means have a look.

I don’t think I’ve broken anything in the process, but if I have, sing out!

Go with 1.1.2. It turns out I did introduce a bug.

(p.s. with the other bug on my list relating to the previous page link; so far, not so good – I can’t use the post filters to do the SQL voodoo for the intersections of tags; so fixing this so that it always works, all the time isn’t going to be easy…)

Ultimate Tag Warrior: What Next?

This is my current todo list for Ultimate Tag Warrior

  • * Figure out Joshs’ problem UTW doesn’t play nice with version 1.5 of wordpress. 1.5.1 and beyond are A-OK, though
  • * Fix the Previous Entries bug (The link always shows, even when there aren’t previous entries) [This, I think will end up waiting until WordPress 1.6 comes out]
  • * Fix the /tags/ bugs (/tags/(tagname) doesn’t seem to work)
  • * Fix the really dumb bug in popular tags (Yeah. There’s a dumb bug which makes it break. Whoops!)
  • * Clean up tags when a post is deleted
  • * See if I can get UTW to work with ecto
  • * Write a converter that changes categories into tags
  • * Write a simplfied document for using UTW (I guess there is a point where too much documentation becomes daunting..)
  • * Write a thing that consolidates dupe name tags
  • * Write some things that allow tags with spaces (I’m inclined to structure this in such a way that when you edit tags, you use underscores; but when tags are displayed, they are displayed with spaces instead when it’s appropriate) 2.0a and beyond
  • * Provide a list of the existing tags on the post-editing screen, and allow clicking tags to lazy-add them 2.0a and beyond
  • * Write a thing for posting to del.icio.us (The opposite to usual del.icio.us thing.. I’ve kinda written one; but the first time you click on a “post to del.icio.us” link, del.icio.us pops up a OS-esque login box which is a little intimidating. In case you were wondering; it populates the tags with the tags of the post.. just the title/url is pretty trivial to do (: ) [Again, I think wordpress 1.6 will provide enough stuff to let me do this..]
  • * Make feeds available for tags [wordpress 1.6, I think…]
  • * Properly localise the plugin
  • * Allow unions when selecting multiple tags (Scary: allow a combination of unions and intersections)
  • * Figure out the cause of the 404 error that some people get
  • * World domination

If you have other suggestions, feel free to leave a comment here; that way it’ll be much harder for me to forget about them.

(*phew* I should have called it “Mediocre Tag Warrior and called it a day at version 1.0 (; )

Pastry Cushions



Pastry Cushions

Cushions.. Made from pastry! Genius.

This evening, we had pies for dinner. Round pies. Cutting round pie-lids from square pastry involves pastry offcuts. Delicious pastry offcuts.

This is the edges, cut into squares, placed into a woven lattice arrangement, brushed with butter, sprinkled with sugar; and baked in a 200C oven for about 15 minutes.

It’s a little bit on the bland side, though; but well suited to eating with ice-cream.