$('#item-cont').jParse({
    ajaxOpts: {url: 'digg-feed.xml'},
    count: '#item-count'
});

The script’s biggest limitation is that you can’t request an XML file from another domain, because of JavaScript’s Cross-Site Scripting taboo. You could, if you wanted, get around that with a PHP proxy or similar trick.

Fortunately, there is a way around it in some cases. If you have a function in your template, you can do something like this:

<!--mfunc function_name( 'parameter', 'another_parameter' ) -->
 <?php function_name( 'parameter', 'another_parameter' ) ?>
 <!--/mfunc-->

You take a function call and surround it by the “mfunc” comments, in which the first contains a duplicate of the function. This will (somehow) instruct WP Super Cache to allow the function to execute, even in the static cached version of the page.

Of course, when it comes to the security of your WordPress site, these techniques are merely the beginning. As you continue in your WordPress travels, you will discover many, many more ways to increase the security of your site. By implementing the methods presented in this article during the setup process, you will be strengthening the security of your site’s foundation, providing yourself a solid platform on which to build.

Definitely worth a read if you haven’t already looked into the techniques.

How to Secure Your New WordPress Installation [Digging into WordPress]

The syntax is like this:

#mydiv {
white-space: nowrap;
}

The above example is fairly self-exaplanatory; it prevents the text inside the #mydiv div from wrapping. If #mydiv had a fixed width, the text would spill out of the container. However, there are practical uses for this behavior. Have you ever wanted to have an inline element (perhaps a span containing the category a blog post is assigned to) automatically move down to the next line instead of appearing across two if it were too big? Give the element nowrap.

The other major value for white-space is pre, which forces the text to appear as it was entered, leaving spaces, carriage returns and tabs intact. The counterpart is pre-wrap, which works the same way, except it will wrap the text if the containing element is too narrow. So if you use code samples in <pre> elements on a regular basis, but want to keep long lines from spilling out of their containers and creating horizontal scrollbars on your page, you can just use this:

 pre {
 white-space: pre-wrap;
 }
 

Now your preformatted text will wrap down if the line is just too long.

Glassical is a nice clean theme with a good attention to detail. It’s light and modern, and it has support for threaded comments and other neat WordPress features. The typography is nice, and I particularly like the slick, glassy search bar.

The metadata section on post pages is interesting. I like the tags’ styling, though I’m not too crazy about expending so much room for showing which categories are applied to a post. (Ideally a post should only be assigned to one category, as per the “categories = binders, tags = an index” argument.) Oh well, it’s tweakable.

The comments are pretty good as well, with support for nesting and Gravatars included.

What exactly are they doing? They’ve set up a site reminiscent of the WordPress.org plugin repository, but for commercial plugins. As a customer, you can browse potentially useful plugins, and pay a flat fee (which the author chooses) to download the files. You can also opt to pay a subscription fee to gain access to an exclusive support forum, and instant access to upgrades to the plugin. (Those who pay the one-time fee instead of subscribing have to pay for the upgrades.) The plugins are all GPL, as WP Plugins requires it of all submissions.

As a plugin developer, you can put your plugins up for sale for a price you choose. You set the download price, and a subscription price if you wish to offer the option, enter a description, and then upload the plugin. WP Plugins takes a 10% cut of the sales, and you keep the rest.

What do you think? Is this a good option for commercial plugins to do with? It certainly takes a lot of worries away from individual developers, and could potentially put a lot of plugins in one easy to find place. It doesn’t necessarily seem too bad for the consumer either. I think it’s interesting, and I’ll be watching the site to see how things develop.

ThickBox, if you are unaware, is a UI script for creating pseudo-modal dialog boxes to display images, IFRAME’d content, AJAX data, etc.

The ThickBox homepage suggests some alternate scripts, of which ColorBox and jQuery UI Dialog are probably my favorites. ColorBox, especially, seems to match the functionality and extendability of ThickBox quite nicely. (It’s also a comfortably small 9kb in size.)

One more parting thought: Is a fork of ThickBox not out of the question, or at least someone taking over development? It would be nice to see someone pick up and continue work on the script.

While Subversion is undergoing incubation at the ASF, CollabNet will continue to host the project at http://subversion.tigris.org. In addition, third party-certified binaries of the software configuration management system will continue to be available from CollabNet, as well as from other vendors, both during and after the incubation period.

This was brought to my attention by @ArtemR on Twitter. It’s interesting, and certainly important to the project. I think that it can only make things more efficient though. I highly doubt that the ASF is going to cause the sky to fall, or whatever it is everyone’s afraid of.