I’ve pushed out a few updates to my homepage.

It’s now got its own navbar (now integrated with the blog) and there are some new pages up and online.

Check it out now!

New version of WPGet available too.

Enjoy!

A couple of things today.

Gizbuzz has been given a fancy new redesign by our good friend Chris Van Patten (of PodDev and Comitar fame). The new theme is awesome and big thanks to Chris for the redesign!

And in other news, PodDev Episode 2 was recorded last night (after last week’s technical problems), so once it’s been through post production it will be ready for listening.

Until then…

It’s here. After some time of actually finding a free moment in which to do this, finding the strength to carry on despite my apparent inability to understand the stylesheet of this WordPress theme and finding the strength to avoid having an anti-Microsoft week following IE’s refusal to correctly render some of my tweaked CSS, it is here.

What am I talking about? Well, as you might have noticed, this blog is on peter.upfold.org.uk/blog. Not just peter.upfold.org.uk/. There was a reason, and this is it.

My homepage. It’s amazing to think how long I have been doing web design/development and still I haven’t actually ever had a homepage of my own, only a blog. So I built it and integrated it with the blog and used the WordPress style to help me a bit.

I’ll stop rambling and let you see it – my new shiny homepage.

What do you think? (I know, there’s an annoying message, but it can’t be called finished yet, can it? And “Peter Upfold Beta” sounds a bit too Web 2.0)

I guess one of the reasons I haven’t had a homepage per se up until now was lack of content. Website without content is a rubbish website, and eventually my homepage will have my blog, projects and scripts and stuff and various other content (“Me around the web” will get bigger) until it is in a state where it can be called 1.0.

Well, I’ll keep you posted on the upgrades as and when they happen, and any feedback is greatly appreciated.

This tutorial which shows you how to build a KDE application in C++ using Kdevelop and QT Designer is very good. As part of my attempt (can I emphasise attempt here) to learn not only C++, but to be good enough to build a KDE application, I tried it.

It’s very well written, but I think I strayed a little too much off the course of the tutorial and I ended up being unable to build my application. Something about some error somewhere. Still, there is source code for a version which does work, so I might take a look at that and see where I went wrong. I swear I did something wrong with the Automake Manager… Ah well, I’ll have another crack at it later and hopefully I’ll be able to build a KDE application Sometime Real Soon.

Hey, at least I’m making progress, albeit slow progress. This post comes to you courtesy of my SUSE 10.1 software development installation.

I’ve updated the WordPress Get script (you might need to Ctrl-F5 on that page to retrieve the latest version) so it now handles ‘smart quotes’ in the post body correctly. Thanks to Chris Shiflett for the smart quote to entity conversion function and to Adam at Concept:Sublime for being the first person (I think) to implement WPGet on his personal page, and of course to telling me about the smart quote bug.

I’m now going to set up a little Projects page on the blog to temporarily house scripts and mini-projects like these until my main site arrives (which will use the WPGet integration on the home page).

Oh, and another thing – WordPress Get is now officially licensed under the GPL and LGPL (so you can integrate it into a closed site design), despite the fact that there’s only the GPL header in the script. Just make sure to mention WPGet, Peter Upfold (and link to peter.upfold.org.uk please).

Oh, and if you do choose to use this script, thanks!

I’ve just started writing a small project which is (at the moment) called WordPress Get. The idea is that it can be integrated into site designs to pull out the latest few WordPress blog posts, so you can display them in a small sidebar/box or whatever.

At the moment, this version is very embryonic and has a few features that are missing, namely email error log reporting and a nicer error message if it should go wrong. Also, at the moment all this script does is print the whole array of WP data that is fetched, you’ll need to adapt it to print just post titles, or extracts of the posts or whatever suits you.

I was going to need something like this anyway for my future site here (which will be a portal to all my stuff around the web) which will include a small box with the latest blog post or something (and a link to the main blog).

It was this post at TeenDev that motivated me to actually get started, and I’ve GPL’d this code so that you can adapt it for another FOSS project. If you want to use it in a closed design, I might consider LGPL-ing the code at some point, when it’s matured a bit more.

• Download the script here

Thanks and enjoy.

Finally managed to get a bit more web development (as opposed to getting pre-developed stuff online), as I’m continuing work on Hybrid Accounts. And my recent meddling with integrating phpBB into web designs, (so the forum looks an integral part of the site not just a different site) credit to the Extreme Styles Mod, has brought me to start thinking about Hybrid’s own forum solution.

Voist (as it’s codenamed, I know it sounds like a VoIP app) will be available probably under the GPL as well as a non-Free licence and its main features will be:

• Easy and simple forum solution written in PHP and using MySQL as DB
• Nice and friendly URLs (so site.com/topic/4 rather than site.com/viewtopic.php?t=4) which will rely on Apache’s mod_rewrite
• Clean design with a fairly easy skinning ability
• [This bit will be in a non-GPL version] Connection with Hybrid Accounts

As I’ve mentioned, Voist will hopefully integrate with Hybrid Accounts in the proprietary version (that will likely be the only difference between it and the GPL version, however). That means I can’t start Voist yet, because Hybrid Accounts isn’t finished.

So that’s what I’ve been working on for a bit of today, Hybrid Accounts. There’s also something very special coming up, but they’ll be more about that later.

Yesterday I decided to install SUSE 10.1 (again), but this time on my server/development computer to use as a Linux software development installation. Now I’ve done bits and pieces of Visual Basic.NET on Windows, but I never really quite got into it like PHP.

So I installed SUSE alongside Kdevelop and I’ve started messing about with C++. C++ is probably not the best language to jump right into, but considering I basically know the syntax from PHP … well, we’ll see.

So I’m trying to build a few graphical KDE applications as examples, using cplusplus.com as my guide to the basics. Wish me luck, because the C++ jungle is big. If I do successfully get a grasp, however, I’m sure knowing C++ will come in handy for whatever platform. And cross-platform is king.

Anyone know any more good C++ resources?