Category Archives: Code

Fun With Programming Languages

Code, , , , ,

Tonight, a Facebook thread got a little out of control after I posted a status update that I was “mentally bankrupt.” It was a long day working on client work – a project that is just about done but past due.

After some commentary by Facebook friends, we got to writing little scripts that would take a random selection from a group of adjectives and adverbs and put similar phrases together randomly.

What came of this exercise was a fun little jaunt into a variety of programming languages.

PHP

<?php
$adverbs = array(
    'mentally',
    'morally',
    'emotionally',
    'socially',
    'psychologically'
);

$adjectives = array(
    'devoid',
    'bankrupt',
    'empty',
    'hollow',
    'vacant',
    'sleeping with fishes',
    'taking a dirt nap',
    'shallow'
);

echo $adverbs[array_rand( $adverbs )] . ' '
    . $adjectives[array_rand( $adjectives )];
?>

Ruby

adj = [ "mentally", "morally",
    "emotionally", "socially",
    "psychologically" ]

adv = [ "devoid","bankrupt",
    "empty", "hollow","vacant",
    "sleeping with fishes",
    "taking a dirt nap","shallow" ]

print adj[rand(adj.length)] + " "
    + adv[rand(adv.length)] + "\n"

Python

import random

def popchoice(seq):
    return seq.pop(random.randrange(len(seq)))

adj = [ 'mentally', 'morally',
    'emotionally', 'socially',
    'psychologically' ]

adv = [ 'devoid','bankrupt','empty',
    'hollow','vacant','sleeping with fishes',
    'taking a dirt nap','shallow' ]

print popchoice(adj) + " "
    + popchoice(adv)

SQL

CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE adjectives (
    adjective VARCHAR (30) NOT NULL
    );

CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE adverbs (
    adverb VARCHAR (30) NOT NULL
    );
   
INSERT INTO adjectives (adjective)
    VALUES
    ('mentally'),
    ('morally'),
    ('emotionally'),
    ('socially'),
    ('psychologically');
   
INSERT INTO adverbs (adverb)
    VALUES
    ('devoid'),
    ('bankrupt'),
    ('empty'),
    ('hollow'),
    ('vacant'),
    ('sleeping with fishes'),
    ('taking a dirt nap'),
    ('shallow');
   
SELECT CONCAT_WS(
    ' ',
        ( SELECT adjective FROM adjectives ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1 ),
        ( SELECT adverb FROM adverbs ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1 ) )
    AS RandomStuff;

Exporting Textile2 Content with WordPress

Code, Movie Reviews, Sports, ,

A friend of mine approached me recently to help him out. He had tons of archives in his WordPress blog that had been created using the Textile2 plugin. Textile is a form of markup that is wiki-like. In other words, it’s not straight HTML. The Textile2 plugin interprets the markup and renders HTML that browsers can understand when the post is actually called.

I created a small plugin for him that, on WordPress export, translates Textiled content into standard HTML format. It depends on the Textile2 plugin, so if you are going to use this, make sure you have that.



&lt;?php

/*

Plugin Name: Textile Friendly Export

Version: 1.0

Plugin URI: http://technosailor.com

Description: Translates Textile 2 Content to HTML on WXR Export

Author: Aaron Brazell

Author URI: http://technosailor.com

Disclaimer: This Plugin comes with no warranty, expressed or implied

*/



function textile2_export( $content )

{

    global $myTextile2;

    

    if( !class_exists('Textile2_New') )

        return $content;

    

    return $myTextile2->do_textile( $content );

}

add_filter( 'the_excerpt_export', 'textile2_export' );

add_filter( 'the_content_export', 'textile2_export' );

?&gt;

Maintaining WordPress on SVN: Adding Plugins

Code, WordPress, , ,

Thank you for joining me again for this series on maintaing WordPress from subversion. We talked previously about creating an SVN repository and then about importing WordPress into the SVN repository.

Today, we get into customizations. It does us no good to have an SVN repository with WordPress if we don’t change it to be something other than what it is. In this episode I talk about adding plugins (and you can add any file, really) by adding it to the working copy folder and then checking it in.

I also touched quickly on svn:externals, although I note that I goofed in the screencast and typed

svn propedit svn:external .

instead of using the correct

svn propedit svn:externals .

(note the plural externals).

Maintaining WordPress on SVN: Create Your Repository

Code, WordPress, ,

A lot of people know that I’ve done a bit with maintenance of WordPress using subversion. Alot of those same people have asked me to show how it’s done. It’s not very difficult, really, but I encourage you to work with a host like Dreamhost that provides one click installs of svn. It’s the easiest way to get web accessible repositories to use for maintenance of all your various WordPress blog.

Here’s video 1 in this series, which demonstrates the creation of an SVN repository and the basic file structure that is best practice for a repository.

Expression Engine WXR Export Class

Code, WordPress, , ,

Earlier, I shared with you a new base class I’m releasing into the wild. While that was a conceptually nice piece of code, and potentially useful, it didn’t really translate in usefulness without some actual code.

As mentioned, I just moved Shai to WordPress from Expression Engine and it required writing a custom export routine. Instead, I wrote the base class in conjunction with this extension class.

This could very well be a very good example for someone wanting to write their own routine. While it is custom to Expression Engine and would look different for other platforms, the bottom line is that the methods in the base class have to be fed certain data.

As with the base class, this is meant for advanced WordPress hackery and is not a plugin nor for rookies. I don’t mean to sound condescending, but it took me years to wrap my head around object oriented PHP and so please don’t ask me. :-)

I can say that if you dive into this code, you will find the roadmap to your own importer. This is fully functional. It works. It’s for Expression Engine, but it works. Your methods should return similar data.

One day I’ll get around to documenting it, but my mind is mush after working on this all weekend. :-)

Update: Oops, forgot where you can download. Subversion it is again:

svn co http://svn.aaronbrazell.com/wpwxr/tags/expression-engine/ expression-engine

WordPress WXR Class

Code, WordPress, , , , ,

One of the most frustrating things to me in my years of working with WordPress and b5media has been migrating blogs into WordPress. Every blog platform does things differently and although WordPress has import support for a large number of blog platforms, it always seems like I get the job of migrating from platforms that don’t have any way of exporting posts to take to a different platform, such as WordPress.

I’ve done a number of these migrations now – Nucleus, Drupal, Serendipity and others. The latest was Expression Engine – needed to move Shai’s blog over to WordPress. This was the catalyst I needed to write a base class for the WordPress import/export format known as WXR, or WordPress eXtended RSS.

For casual users, this is not for you. For developers, this may be a life saver for you.

The class can be downloaded via SVN:

svn co http://svn.aaronbrazell.com/wpwxr/trunk wpwxr

Included in this repository is the base

class.wxr.php

class along with sample code to build your own apps from.

Reference: Complete WordPress WXR Base Class documentation is online.

Instantiation: This is a base class. Therefore, you should never extantiate it directly – only via another class via extending.



class myNewClass extends WXR_export {



    function myfunction()

    {

        echo "Hello World!";

    }

}

Debug mode: If you wish to use debug mode, you can set the

$debug

property of the class to true. The default is false. If debug mode is on, output will be sent to the screen as opposed the the WXR file.

Example:



$n = new myNewClass;

$n->debug = true;

Export Filename: By default, the name of the WXR file is date based (e.g wxr-2008-01-26.xml). You can change this by changing the

$export_filename

property.



$w = new myNewClass();

$w->export_filename = 'file-movabletype.xml';

I’d love to get patches if you want to contribute. You should send them to emmensetech [at] gmail [dot] com. In addition, if you use this and create extension classes, I’m more than happy to host them. I’ll be seeding the pot with the Expression Engine class I used this weekend.

Exporters Built