3DN Technical Blog

Post thumbnail of Add Ajax to Expertise Plugin

Add Ajax to Expertise Plugin

The Expertise plugin is nearing completion now. We still need to give experts a method to sign up as experts for the 3DN expertise areas (or to sign out should they no longer want to act as expert). We will be using some Wordpress specific Ajax constructs for this.

Posted by Fred Leeflang in Coding, Wordpress 28 February 2010 at 08:43 - Read More..
Post thumbnail of Downloading from Trac

Downloading from Trac

I would like to know if it’s possible to download a dynamically generated tar file from Trac.

Posted by Fred Leeflang in SCCM 22 February 2010 at 08:44 - Read More..
Post thumbnail of Checking Comments for Requests

Checking Comments for Requests

Disqus comments are no different from regular Wordpress comments. This means that checking the comments on an expertise page will be no different for Disqus comments as it is for standard Wordpress comments. Can we still find something special to do with Disqus comments?

Posted by Fred Leeflang in Coding, Wordpress 20 February 2010 at 15:38 - Read More..
Post thumbnail of Adding sendmail/SMTP to experts plugin

Adding sendmail/SMTP to experts plugin

The expertise plugin I’m writing and have been publishing about needs a selector in the admin screen to allow sending mail through SMTP or through sendmail. This article will include some javascript to do just that.

Posted by Fred Leeflang in Coding, Wordpress 17 February 2010 at 16:26 - Read More..
Post thumbnail of Periodic Expertise Events

Periodic Expertise Events

Earlier I wrote a few articles on creating the expertise plugin and how to add shortcodes to it. Today I want to add scheduled events to the plugin. When somebody posts a question to the expertise page, we could probably write a trigger that checks immediately who’s the expert for the section and send a notice in an email. However, I think it’s also nice to illustrate making a timed even that will check all expertise pages at once for new messages and send out all notifications right away.

Posted by Fred Leeflang in Coding, Wordpress 16 February 2010 at 12:37 - Read More..
Post thumbnail of Expertise Shortcode

Expertise Shortcode

Wordpress has a mechanism for adding ’shortcodes’ authors can use in their articles through a plugin. In an earlier article I described how to get started with writing your own Wordpress plugins. In this article I’ll show how to add a handy shortcode to the plugin that generates code in the expert pages which allows people to register as experts in a certain area of expertise.

Posted by Fred Leeflang in Coding, Wordpress 15 February 2010 at 14:25 - Read More..
Post thumbnail of Adding an Expertise Section to Wordpress

Adding an Expertise Section to Wordpress

I’ve been thinking about a way to get people to add links to our blog on their site. A friendly way to do this is by adding an ‘expertise’ section to the site where people can go after they sign up. Here people can ask questions which will be emailed to the section maintainer(s) so they can answer any questions involving their expertise as timely as possible.

Posted by Fred Leeflang in Coding, Wordpress 15 February 2010 at 08:16 - Read More..
Post thumbnail of Robot Desktop Vacuum

Robot Desktop Vacuum

If you’ve got messy eaters in the house, cleaning up the kitchen table after every meal can be a real pain.

Posted by Tracy Leeflang in Gadgets 14 February 2010 at 18:38 - Read More..
Post thumbnail of Adding Facebook Detail

Adding Facebook Detail

Recently I published a short article on how to create your own Facebook application and a somewhat longer article on implementing some basic code into it. Today I’ll tell you how to get some more Facebook gadgets in the application to make it more enticing for people to share it with others.

Posted by Fred Leeflang in Coding, Social 10 February 2010 at 20:18 - Read More..
Post thumbnail of Implementing Facebook Contest

Implementing Facebook Contest

The other day I wrote a very brief article about the basics of writing a Facebook application. Today it’s time to implement a contest.

Posted by Fred Leeflang in Coding, Social 8 February 2010 at 09:16 - Read More..