URL: http://www.timberlinelodge.com
Agency: Nemo
Role: Lead Developer
Technology: PHP / Wordpress

Featured in the Wordpress Showcase

This video makes me feel all warm and nostalgic on the inside, like a cup of hot cocoa. Congrats to the team @ STRUCK! I miss you guys… especially GareBear!

Just drop this code in your theme file:

<?php
    $project_list = get_posts('numberposts=5&order=ASC&orderby=menu_order&post_type=page&post_parent='.$post->ID);
 
    foreach($project_list as $post):
    setup_postdata($post);
?>
    <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
    </div>
 
<?php 
    endforeach; 
?>

URL: http://www.nemohq.com
AGENCY: Nemo
ROLE: Technical Architect, Wordpress Integration
TECHNOLOGIES: Flash, Ruby on Rails

Over the years I’ve come up with many tricks to help deal with this – some more effective than others. Today I found the best solution to date. It’s not 100% effective, but it’s much better than any of the other options that I used.

I decided to try using the jQuery hover method to detect when the mouse leaves the Flash’s containing DIV element in the DOM.

The AJAX code looked something like this:

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$('document').ready(function()
{
    $('#flashNavReplace').hover(
        function()
        {
	    //rollover functionality here
        },
        function()
        {
            getFlashMovie("flashNavReplace").jsCloseNavigation();
        });
});
 
function getFlashMovie(movieName) 
{
    var isIE = navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft") != -1;
    return (isIE) ? window[movieName] : document[movieName];
}

and then the Flash side uses some code like this:

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import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
 
/**************************************************************************
* 
* CONSTRUCTOR
* 
**************************************************************************/
public function TopNavigation()
{
    //setup the JS callback
    ExternalInterface.addCallback("jsCloseNavigation", jsClose);
}
 
function jsClose():void
{
    Logger.log("CALLED FROM JS");
    //close the nav
}

This works for me pretty much all of the time… I can break it if I really try, but it works great for normal usage.

In a current project I’m reading in a user’s Twitter feed and displaying it on the hompage of their Wordpress blog. I know that there are a thousand plug-ins that exist to do this exact thing, but I wanted to write my own.

Using the official Twitter API the contents of the individual were returned as plain text, meaning that all HTML links were totally dead. I wanted a way to automatically add the HTML to enable URL’s as well as twitter “@” profile links. I found some regular expressions and with some tweaking came up with these 2 functions.

To activate the URLs in block of text pass it to the following function:

function activateURLS($tweet)
{
    return preg_replace("@(https?://([-\w\.]+)+(:\d+)?(/([\w/_\.]*(\?\S+)?)?)?)@", 
        "<a href="$1" target="_blank">$1</a>", 
        $tweet);
}

To activate Twitter @ profile links using the following PHP block:

function activateTwitterProfiles($tweet)
{
    return preg_replace("/@([^ ,.!#$%^&]+)/", 
        "<a href="http://twitter.com/$1" target="_blank">@$1</a>", 
        $tweet);
}

They’re super easy to use, just call them like this:

activateTwitterProfiles(activateLinks($tweet->text))