http://www.mummey.org Personal Website of Adrian Mummey Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:11:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Its been awhile since I threw up a new blog post. Been working hard and trying to finish up some grad-school applications. However I have been in the midst of creating a new Wordpress theme and have discovered that a really great functions.php file can be an enormous help for ... http://www.mummey.org/2009/10/make-an-awesome-functions-php-file-for-you-new-wordpress-template-part-1/ I have been using YAML for awhile and decided I'd like to write a post about it. YAML is an acronym for YAML Ain't Markup Language and it is a very useful and concise serialization standard. I use YAML all the time in when I am coding PHP projects that ... http://www.mummey.org/2009/04/yaml-my-favorite-non-markup-language/ Recently I had a problem where I needed to find out if a specific category was a descendant of another category, or if one category was a ancestor of another. The latest website I am working on has a top level category called "Trips we do" and below that are ... http://www.mummey.org/2009/03/finding-a-category-ancestor-descendant-wp-templates/ The time has come for me to finally publish a post about my recent foray into Wordpress plugin development. I am by no means an expert on the subject and maybe that is why this guide can be helpful for the newbie. Prior to this I have done extensive plugin ... http://www.mummey.org/2009/03/the-agony-and-ecstasy-creating-a-wordpress-plugin/ I have been working a lot lately on customizing my personal homepage theme. One thing I have not been happy about has been the right sidebar. The widget heading were just html text and didn't have the rendered look that I wanted. I decided to reformat the sidebar and use ... http://www.mummey.org/2009/02/styling-wordpress-dynamic-sidebar-dynamic_sidebar_params-filter/ One problem with the ways that Wordpress handles excerpt is that it always strips the HTML out. This is fine for most casual bloggers but when you are really trying to customize something for a client, it simply doesn't cut it. What we wanted to do was use some of ... http://www.mummey.org/2009/02/wordpress-use-nextgen-gallery-code-inside-an-excerpt/ My friend Andy recently asked me to help him redesign his website. He runs fly fishing tours here in Mongolia and wasn't happy with his current site design. He recently switched most of his websites from Joomla! over to Wordpress. When he came to me with the request I was ... http://www.mummey.org/2009/02/first-wordpress-theme-my-development-toolbox/ I just received an email from one of my old Peace Corps friends who lives in D.C. and she said that she saw me on TV yesterday. There was a big (by mongolian standards) party at Grand Khan Irish Pub for the superbowl. Me and some buddies woke up early ... http://www.mummey.org/2009/02/i-was-on-cnn/ Obviously web reporting is nothing really new; one basic approach is this: Aggregate your data and output it in some kind of structured format, usually XML Request this information and generate some visualizations of it Serve these visualizations through a web server Pretty basic stuff. All of the tools that I have seen essentially ... http://www.mummey.org/2009/02/dashboards-web-reporting-and-business-intelligence-bi/ CSS Sprites - A Background The idea of combining images into a larger one and displaying this using CSS tricks has been around for awhile. There are a couple big benefits to doing this: First it reduces the number of HTTP requests that the browser has to make, by combining say ... http://www.mummey.org/2008/12/csprites-a-dynamic-css-sprite-generator-in-php5/