Kythin's Rants

Hiya WordSpinner fans,

I’d like to say thank you to the thousands of people who have downloaded and used WordSpinner. As my first ever WordPress Plugin it means a lot to me that so many people find it as valuable as I do. With the release of WordPress 3.0 earlier this week, I thought something special was in order. So, without further adieu, I give you WordSpinner v2.0 – now fully capable of handeling a pretty much infinite number of levels of spinners (providing you use the correct syntax).

Get it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordspinner/

Enjoy, and please send me feedback or comment on this article if you have questions.

Happy Spinnin’

Love, Kythin.

EDIT: Thanks to XWipeoutX for the performance improvement tweaks in 2.1, you rock!

I had to figure out how to upgrade Mootools from Joomla 1.5′s default, horribly outdated 1.11 to 1.2 in order to use some funky scripts in a new client template today, and after a bit of stress and searching I found this:

http://www.dwightjack.com/diary/2009/02/23/upgrade-mootools-to-v12x-in-joomla-15/

It seems that the admin dropdown menu’s stop working if you just overwrite the old Mootools files, so Dwight has come up with a quick and easy frontend solution to keep the admin section loading 1.11 and allow the template to load 1.2 instead!

Thanks Dwight!

I spent a bit of time yesterday rolling out a new version of Wordspinner for WordPress. Nothing much really, but now it comes with a widget that you can use to add spinnable text to sidebars without having to make a change to the wordpress text widget manually.

Grab it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordspinner/

And now, an update! *gasp*

I just finished putting the final little touches on an idea I’ve been kicking around for years. It’s just a little ap to visually build lists (or teams, etc). It’s got no database, no login/username requirements, and a very simple way to save the state of your workspace to come back to later.

The basic idea is that you can add things to the ‘table’ and then move them around as if they were scraps of paper. So if you’re in a WoW guild with 30+ active raiders and need a way to build 10man Ulduar teams, this is here to help you out.

Check it out, I’m pretty happy with it: Kythin’s WoW Teambuilder and Generic List Builder

And ofcourse if you like it enough to want to support my random programming project habbit, you can always buy me a beer!

Hiya Wordspinner fans;

I’ve had a couple of emails lately about this little addon, and I do want to put some more work into it (e.g. nesting brackets, and not needing manual code changes to enable it) but I just haven’t had time lately. If anyone out there wants to make some mods to it, you’re welcome to, just send me your updates and I’ll go through SVN hell again to put it on the wordpress server.

Seriously, have they not heard of an FTP server? geez.

A while ago a friend of mine, an SEO guy, told me about the concept of ‘spinning’ content. Basically the idea is to get many articles out of one article, by adding replacement words or phrases to the one article you write. Then, every time you refresh the page, the same – but different – article is displayed. It’s mostly a way to confuse search engines into thinking you have more content than you do, but sometimes it’s useful; E.g. if you have a summary of an article which is ripped straight from the main article, you might get a duplicate content penalty from Google every time it looks at your site.

It’s always struck me as odd than nobody seems to have written anything (freely available anyway. $97? Bugger that!) for such a simple task, so I thought what the heck, I’ve got an hour or two, why don’t I write it myself? So I did, and here it is; (more…)