• Firefox
• TextMate
• and something called mds

Saving my work and restarting Firefox and Textmate is a no brainer, but I didn’t know what or how to address the problem with mds. Come to find out, mds is responsible for indexing in Spotlight. If its thrashing your CPU and hogging up your RAM, you may need to verify your dives with Disk Utility.app, but for a quick fix run this in Terminal:

sudo mdutil -a -v -i off

This will turn off indexing and you should see an immediate drop in usage and let you get back to work.

There are lots of ways to go about creating them, but my favorite is with a little command line utility called png2ico. This app has no gui, but its singular purpose is to eat PNGs and spit out ICO files, which makes it perfect for making favicons.

First, let’s get it installed.

OS X or Linux users can download and compile it as normal:
tar xzvf png2ico-src-2002-12-08.tar.gz
cd ./png2ico-src-2002-12-08
./configure
make
sudo make install

OS X users, if you have MacPorts installed you can simply run this command to do make install dance for you:
sudo port install png2ico

Windows users, can download a pre-compiled binary. You’ll still have to run it from the command line, but at least all you have to do is unzip it and put it some where convenient (like Program Files or whatever they’re calling it these days).

Once installed, create your PNG files. You should create two of them, one that is 16×16 pixels and one that is 32×32 pixels. They should be exported as 8-bit or 24-bit PNGs and can include transparency. You’re going to have to play with your graphics for a little bit before you’ll be satisfied with the results, as making small graphics look good is not as easy as it looks. The general rule of thumb is that the more detail your original graphic is, the harder it will be to scale down to the size you want. I’ve also found that the more detailed it is, the worse it looks on a transparent background. YMMV.

Once you have your two PNGs, navigate to their location in your terminal window and run this command:
png2ico favicon.ico favicon-16x16.png favicon-32x32.png

Where favicon.ico is the name of the file you want output, and favicon-*.png is the path to your PNG graphics. Rinse and Repeat until your happy with the favicon. There are some other options you can play with too, in order to restrict the color palette. I just find it easier to do that in my graphics program when exporting the PNG file.

Then just place the favicon.ico in the root of your site and add something like this to your pages:
<link rel="icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico" />

Finally, upload it to your server, clear your browser cache (especially if you’re using Firefox), and admire your handy work.

Then you can get back to removing your configure file and running ./buildconf --force before you re-compile.

1. Create a new repos on github, and import the SVN repos from wp-plugins.org into github
2. Move your local working copy to a new directory: mv workingcopy/ workingcopy.svn/
3. Clone your new github repos after the import is completed (which may take a while, since the plugin repos is shared by all plugins and has thousands of commits): git clone git@github.com:user/repos.git
4. Once cloned, move the .git folder into your workingcopy.svn folder
5. Then just ignore .svn folders with .gitignore and ignore .git with svn:ignore
6. Now you can use git for your main development, and check tested changes into SVN to push your updates out to your Plugin users

There may be another way to go about this, but it wasn’t obvious to this hacker.

For developers looking to contribute to the plugin, K2 Hook Up is now on GitHub, so fork the project and send me a pull request with your changes.

I was able to address a bug pointed out by one of my users (Thanks Connor!), and also minified all of the JavaScripts, so it should also load a bit faster, too. The plugin is still in its early stages, and should be considered alpha software, but I’ve already begun to use it on some of the sites I’ve been working on lately.

XEN Carousel is purposely bare bones, and provides no style information of its own, just a small bit of semantic mark-up for you to style on your own. Future updates will include an options screen to control various aspects of the Carousel, including animation, effects, and speed, the ability to specify the order your slides play in, as well as the ability to create multiple Carousels drawing from different sets of images.

XEN Carousel, like many of my other open source WordPress plugins, has been moved to GitHub, in case there are any developers who want to contribute changes.

Almost 2 years ago, I was charged with the duty of building an integrated Blog network with WordPress, for the Parents Everywhere Network. WordPress MU wasn’t quite ready for prime time, as most plugins hadn’t been ported over, and documentation was sparse, and only the bravest of souls wanted to tangle with it. Remember, this was back before WP and MU development were in sync. So I had to come up with another way.

That’s when I ran across these little known wp-config.php keys: CUSTOM_USER_TABLE and CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE. By setting these keys to the same values in all of your wp-config.php you can have multiple WordPress installs share the same user tables and essentially create a nearly-perfect single sign-on system for your blog network.

There are limitations, of course, but by and large the shared users table trick works like a charm. I’ll show you how to set it up yourself for some newly installed blogs. You can convert existing blogs over, but that takes more DB fiddling then I’ll go into in this article. The biggest limitation is that all of the blogs have to be installed in the same Database. However, they can be on different servers, as long as they can all talk to the same Database.

1. First, install your primary blog as normal, and set your CUSTOM_USER* keys in your wp-config:define('CUSTOM_USER_TABLE', 'wp_users');
define('CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE', 'wp_usermeta');

2. Second, create the wp-config.php for your second blog, using the same DB Connection information. You also need to set AUTH_KEY, SECURE_AUTH_KEY, LOGGED_IN_KEY, NONCE_KEY, and the CUSTOM_USER* keys to the same value as the first. You will also need to set $table_prefix to a unique value.
3. Install the second blog and instead of getting a random password for the admin user, it should tell you that it found the user and is using that password.
4. Rinse and Repeat steps 2 and 3 until all blogs are successfully installed.

Now that all of the blogs are sharing the same user tables, your admin login will work on all of them, and remain the same, even when changing the password and other meta data (i.e. name, etc), but all other settings will remain distinct for all of the other blogs. However, if you allow (or force) users to sign up to comment or do other things on your blog, then you will run into the second limitation of this trick – users only get a Role assigned on the blog that they signed up on. Their account is in table and accessible to the other blogs, they just don’t have any privledges. In other words, they are orphans. This can be fixed manually in the User management screens, or automatically via a plugin.

The final limitation, and this isn’t the fault of WordPress but how the internet works, is that because your blogs are (probably) on separate domains, cookies can’t be shared between them easily and hence users will have to log-in to each blog they visit. A small price to pay for one of the cooler hidden features of WordPress.

WP-Orphanage is now available via the WordPress Plugin Directory, to take advantage of the auto-update feature. In addition, WP-Orphanage is also hosted on GitHub.com in case any developers want to contribute changes.

Spotted on WordPress TV. Lots of examples of how to make your plugin less flexible, less secure, and more prone to misbehaving.

Video After The Jump

The slides are available on slideshare.

WP-Orphanage is a WordPress plugin that automatically adopts all of your orphans automatically, and will set a Role for them on the blog they are trying to log into. You have control over which Role they are set to in wp-admin.

The v1.1 update fixes a bug introduced in the option screen in v1.0.1 and is recommended for all users of this plugin.

Many thanks to Vince from Alphak.net – Born to Be Wired for reporting this error and helping me debug the solution.