[WordPress] Pressmark: Bookmarks with WordPress CMS

Pressmark with a WordPress installation with all you need to start a social bookmarking website (like del.icio.us, sabros.us, …).

You can see a demo of Pressmark installation on bookmark.alexgirard.com

Pressmark includes WordPress Prologue theme, which has been used by WordPress team to have a twitter-like dev-blog.
Prologue include Gravatar support, so go to upload your avatar on gravatar.com to have a nicer output!

If you feel like adding your own modification to the code, you can clone/fork the project on Github: http://github.com/alx/pressmark/. All contributions will be welcomed!

Ideas to extend Pressmark:

Bookmarlet, Jabber bot for easy posting;
Import from bigger social-bookmark accounts (delicious, magnolia, …)
Cross-blogging to decentralized bookmark management in various blog spaces

Installation

Get Pressmark sources:
- Download it from Github
- If you’ve got git installed, clone it from Github (to easily get last updated)
  git clone git://github.com/alx/pressmark.git pressmark
Move the source to your webserver, ask a geek how to do it if you don’t know 🙂
WordPress configuration: copy ‘wp-config-sample.php‘ to ‘wp-config.php‘ and fill up the MySQL database information.
Access to the website where you’ve installed Pressmark, and begin the « 2 min. installation » from WordPress
Now that your website is ready, go in the administration pages and activate the following options:
- In ‘Design‘: select ‘Prologue‘ theme;
- In ‘Setting‘: select ‘Anyone can register‘ and set the ‘New User Default Role‘ to ‘Author‘ if you want your users to post links;
- In ‘Plugins‘: activate ‘WP-OpenID‘ plugin

[Textmate] Arduino Bundle

After first days with the Darwin machine, it became clear that something was needed to replace the current Arduino software and upload the RepRap firmware directly from Textmate.

So here comes my first Textmate Bundle, thanks to the elegant work of Arduino team to make it easier to upload program from command line:

Arduino.tmbundle

Once installed, only one shortcut is available to make and upload your program on the Arduino board: Command-Shift-A

You can clone/fork the project from Github too, make your own repository and I’ll be glad to add your patch to the current simple bundle.
And come back during the week, you’ll surely see some update during the intensive RepRap hack session!

[WordPress] Register hooks hacks

On the way to launch Live ClÃ¶thing, I had to hack this morning the register action hooks for WordPress, that don’t work as simply as excepted.

‘register_post’ action

You won’t be able to add more errors in $errors if you do not make it global in register_new_user() of wp-login.php:
function register_new_user($user_login, $user_email) { global $errors;

‘user_register’ action

For some strange reason, $user_id is not available, you’ll need to add this hack to read it in your hook function:
$user_id = (int) func_get_arg( 0 );

[RepRap] Mechanical machine and Wii hacks

Great news today for RepRap at Las Indias: the mechanical machine has just been ordered from BitsFromBytes, and it should arrive in Madrid in 3-4 weeks.

Fully assembled and tested, in a wooden crate for easier transportation, I’ll hope to have the time to make some demo at the end of the month.

What’s missing:

electronic: we already have all electronics, but it has became a bit obsolete over the last few month, it would be great to upgrade it to Arduino platform;
experimenting: we’ll need to melt stuff then, and see how it reacts. Faboroni, another fabbing project, has made a recent experiement with various cooking material (chocolate, cheeze, …). And I’ll need to find a source to buy some plastic polymers, or make our own.

Then, will it be possible to plug your wiimote in RepRap?

Johnny Chung Lee has release a lot of really cool wiimote hacks, and the Reprap Forum is now looking how they could be used

[Arduino] BBVA blogs-blinker

After a lot of debugging on bbvablogs.com, I needed serious fun to keep it up, and suddently I found the perfect project to remove the dust on my arduino board: a blinking led that would tell us when someone is visiting the website!

[CCC] 24C3 best conferences so far

The issue with decentralizing my living place it’s really hard to be at the right place at the right time. As an example I missed the 24C3 conference in Berlin last week, which was replaced by Wii session, not too bad 🙂

Hopefully, all these lost moments tends to be more and more digitalized, so here are the conferences I found the most interesting so far:

What is terrorism?: a german woman speaking about the experience to see the police busting her house to take her boyfriend away, under the suspicion of terrorims, with various accounts about the intelligence methods in place to monitor her family and friends. Conclusion: keep your mobile phone switched on if you don’t want to be suspected as a terrorist. [mp3]
Hacking in the age of declining everything: a hacking environmentalist session, where everyhting on Earth seems to go to disaster, and how certain societies deal with it, or not. A climate-change speech, oriented to geek audience, with a great speaker. [mp3]
Design noir: Electronic engineering is easy enough today to provide some power to individual purpose: someone launches an idea like tv-be-gone, and anyone can modify it to his/her own benefit. Repeat the process to switch of your own external world annoyance. [mp3]

There are plenty more of conference I want to listen, mostly concerning Storm malware which made a big buzz during 2007. Here comes interesting links from 24C3 if you want to discover other interesting sessions:

[WordPress-Mu] Community Tag Cloud

A new and better plugin, MuTags by MrHenry, is now available on WordPress Mu forums

Because the last version of WordPress-mu is quite new, there is no proper plugin to start using new tag system available with WordPress 2.3 system.

Here is a quick hack I’ve put in wpmu-functions.php to display a proper tag cloud of all blogs, please send me feedback and tell me if you find any bugs:

Code for get_community_tag_cloud()

Copy this funtion in your /wp-include/wpmu-functions.php and then add to your theme:

get_community_tag_cloud($display=true);

For more updates, please follow the Mu Forum thread about this hack.

[Idea] Twitter Timezone

One of the interesting part with Twitter is its worldwide use. On my Twitter, I usually get European twitts at the end of the afternoon, and South-American twitts during the night.

Comparing my twitting habits with those of my friends, each one of us could have a twitting timezone, that we’ll be surely different even if you live in the same ‘real’ timezone.

Here is a screenshot of what could be the result:

It could be easily done using the API, unfortunatly, Twitter reduce the API use to one request per minute, so it’ll take one hour to build such a timezone with all your 60 friends… but I’m pretty sure someone will have fun to do something like this soon.

[Arduino] 3D LED Cube

After a first try with tiny space between LEDs (see last post), here is another try with enough space to build a proper cube, still following MakeZine instructions.

The fun parts were to add transistors to the board, allowing to get more power for each led level, and the programming: Persistance-Of-Vision and binary manipulation for led on/off switching.

If you need it, you can download the arduino program related to this circuit.

[Arduino] Playing with LEDs

Arduino led-matrix The original project for tonight was to build a 3D LED cube, and the not-so-clever idea was to compact it the size of a normal dice.

Big mistake: first it was hell to solder all the tiny intersection of led cathods, then there is no way to pile up the array of leds if you don’t let space between them… maybe there’s a solution to that, and I’ve not find it yet.

Anyway, it was ready to connect to Arduino board, and to try to program this new led-matrix. Easy and fun, only problem is debugging messages while verifying source code on Arduino software that doesn’t help much, I’ll have to learn more about its syntax limitations.

Here is the result, 5 days before returning to Toulouse to visit Claire:

YAB – Yet Another Blog

Un site utilisant WordPress

hack