For those of you who don’t know (which may very well be all of you right now), I will be presenting a talk at WordCamp Montreal July 12th. The title of the presentation, if you haven’t guessed, is “Hacking WordPress: Introduction to custom plugins and advanced templating“. I’ll explain how you can use your own plugins and functions to make your WordPress site sing. In other words, it will basically be a relatively improvised primer on the following things:

• Introduction to creating WordPress plugins
• Managing your sidebars and widgets
• Using WordPress’ Codex and API documentation
• Hacking up your templates to use all the power provided by WordPress

If you’re not registered yet, you have until July 9th to do so on EventBrite. For more information regarding WordPress Montreal 2009, check out the official site, mailing list, blog, Facebook group and Twitter account or see what’s going on by looking up the #wcmtl tag.

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Lots has changed since the last article I made about WP-prettyPhoto usage, and so it is time to revamp the instructions, explain new features and hopefully be a bit more thorough. First off, let me first mention the following thing:  prettyPhoto is written by Stéphane Caron. Here are some related links to avoid repeating them throughout this article: Stéphane’s blog, prettyPhoto’s project page, prettyPhoto on GitHub, Stéphane on Twitter.

Revision History: This article is intended to document the current WP-prettyPhoto (1.3.2) & prettyPhoto (2.4.3) versions.
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Soooo… I was bored earlier today and decided to code a plugin just for kicks. So, lo and behold, I give you WP-Konami! Hey I never said it was useful. WP-Konami uses jQuery to add a hook listening for a Konami Code input sequence, and redirects successful sequences to a URL you specify in the options. You can get your site listed at Konami Code Sites once you have it installed, too!

Enjoy!

It’s been a while since any activity has happened with prettyPhoto and WP-prettyPhoto. I was waiting for some changes to the prettyPhoto code to release a new version, and Stéphane Caron has released version 2.3 of his prettyPhoto jQuery plugin recently, so it was time to roll out a new WP-prettyPhoto version, 1.2, with all the changes and features that have been suggested since the last release. To skip the blah blah and go straight to downloading, head over to WordPress Extend. more…

About that whole Pirates-going-to-jail thing…

You can show your support for the Pirate Bay by flying the Music Pirate Flag at half mast on your blog/website/forehead. Right-click and take it away!

Props to Atom X for creating it for me and you.
Music Pirate Half Mast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.makeitfall.com.

The original SVG version is here.

“Revolution is not an apple that falls from the tree when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

-Che Guevara

I’ve been rocking a jailbroken iPhone for a few months now, and I must say I absolutely love it. It feels just like when I switched to Linux: power to the community, freedom of choice and usage, open source spirit… and you’re pretty much on your own if shit hits the fan. I’ve blogged about the best Cydia applications I found in the past (Top 10 Cydia Apps and Top 10 Cydia Apps Redux), but I feel it’s time to update that list and share it with you all. “Why?” might you ask. Simple. My needs and interests change regularly. The software source being Cydia, applications can be harder to find than with the centralized Apple App Store. New apps are added to Cydia on a daily basis, and new repositories are created daily, so new stuff is easy to find – good stuff is harder. There are a few tools on the interwebs to help you by attempting to centralize the Cydia apps information (appRater, ModMyi, hackint0sh, iPhoneFreakz, BigBoss, iSpazio), but it’s still more challenging than your search-and-tap routine.

Here goes a revamped list of my current essential Cydia apps for your jailbroken iPhone in no particular order. I’m gonna leave out the obvious like Cydia and OpenSSH.

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I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 (”Jaunty Jackalope”) from 8.10 (”Intrepid Ibex”) about a week ago and was surprised how smooth it went. Jaunty’s still in its alpha stage (Alpha 3 as of now) yet it’s surprisingly stable. One thing that Jaunty, once officially released, will add to the regular Ubuntu is ext4 support. Ext4 is an upgrade from (wait for it…. you’ll never guess!) ext3, which is starting to show its age in the filesystem world. Ext4 provides better performance than ext3, mostly due to its delayed allocation and more file support (like you’ll ever have files bigger than 2 or 16 Terabytes?). Anyway, I felt like risking an in-place conversion of my two ext3 partitions for the sake of performance… and it went relatively smooth. I’ll explain how I’ve done it so you can give it a whirl as well. One thing worth noting though is that once a filesystem is converted to ext4, there’s no going back. You can’t convert it in-place to ext3, you must format the whole thing and start over. So obviously, back your shit up.

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You’ve all been annoyed at the default iPhone sounds sooner or later. They’re pretty ordinary, I’ll agree with you. One of the extremely useful features of JailBreaking your device is that you have the power to change the default sounds for pretty much any event. Today, I’ll show you how to replace your default SMS tones with custom ones of your choosing. In order to do so, you’ll need a jailbroken iPhone (running 2.x), Cydia, OpenSSH and optionally WinterBoard. You’ll also need the audio file you want to use (obviously) an SSH client (ideally a graphical SFTP frontend like FireFTP) and an audio editing application like Audacity. Ready? Here goes! more…

I’m a huge music enthusiast. An audiophile, even. However, and this is not so uncommon I hear, I much prefer the consistence of a song’s lyrics than its melody. I love knowing what the singer says and feels, and you can only truly understand with a good understanding of how emotions translate into music and words. The music part is mostly instinctive, a bass line triggering a feeling in your guts, a guitar riff flipping your heart around, you can’t really learn that. However, it’s within everyone’s grasp to understand what a song says, and I believe it’s important. That’s why I’m going to give you a tip to get the lyrics from every song you love onto your iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s really easy, you don’t have to do much.

First off, I’ll assume you’re using iTunes since you own an iPod or an iPhone. Apple made it so that synchronizing that baby on any other platform is a real bitch, and they’ve greatly succeeded. So open up your iTunes, select a song you like in your library and right-click it to “Get Info”. If you look at the tabs near the top of the popup window, you’ll see a “Lyrics” tab. Clicking on that should simply open the tab with a big empty text area. What we’ll do here is we’ll fill up that box with the song’s lyrics.

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About a month ago, I jailbroke my iPhone and made a list of my top 10 Cydia apps at the time. As everything else in life, that list has since evolved, and looking back at it today I felt like it needed to be revisited. The main reason why I need to write about that list is because some of the apps that I found cool at the time turned out to be inadequate in the long run. So I’ll give you my current top 10 Cydia apps, now with 100% more knowledge! more…