I’m really pleased to announce that the WordPress plugin I have been working on with Van Patten Media, Total Slider, has now been released!

Total Slider is a plugin for WordPress from Van Patten Media that will transform your experience with sliders forever. Build your own templates in PHP and CSS, then preview the output in a beautiful WYSIWYG interface designed to blend seamlessly with the WordPress core.

Total Slider is released under the GNU GPL version 2 or later. We’d love your feedback, ideas, bug reports, translations and more.

Here is a quick 2-minute video introduction:

You can find out more and download Total Slider from the WordPress plugin directory.

Just a quick note to say that I’m proud to announce the release of some more open source code, as part of my collaboration with Van Patten Media.

The Van Patten Media Labs site has all the details of the Very Simple PayPal Bridge — a simple way to connect to the PayPal API.

Interacting with the PayPal NVP API is something that a lot of e-commerce websites need to do. If you’re writing your own code for a bespoke e-commerce solution, rather than shoehorning in generic ‘Shopping Cart’ software, there is quite a lot to think about in order to communicate successfully with the API and provide a great payment experience for the site’s customers.

The Very Simple PayPal Bridge is a PHP class that, as the name suggests, provides a very simple interface for the PayPal NVP API.

In any situation where you need to interface more directly with the PayPal API, the VSPB provides a clean interface for the other layers of your code, dealing with all of the implementation details of sending requests via cURL, encoding and decoding the arguments, as well as offering full support for graceful error handling with PHP exceptions. It is great as a lower-level component of a wider PHP e-commerce solution.

For more information, see the post on Van Patten Media Labs and check out the code at GitHub!

A change of scenery here at my personal site has been long overdue, I think, so I’m pleased to usher in 2012 with a refresh of the site’s design!

Keeping Things Compact

The first thing you’ll likely notice is the new compact, fixed header, with the navigation to the major parts of the site. It stays fixed in place, so you can always get back to any of those pages at any time. (It also swaps out the legacy image gradients for exciting new CSS3 gradients where available!)

Who Shot the Serif?

I have also moved away from Bitstream Charter/Georgia as the main font around the site, in favour of Helvetica Neue/Helvetica/Arial, combined with the existing accents of Gill Sans (where available!) for the headings. I think the site now has a more contemporary feel — and reads particularly well on devices where Helvetica Neue is available, like the iPad.

There is also a new webfont in use for the ‘Peter Upfold’ text in the header — Charis SIL (generously licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence).

Practising What I Preach

As a strong proponent of users having control over their privacy online, I am pleased that the Do Not Track initiative, for indicating the user’s preferences about tracking technology on the web, has gained traction in many web browsers. Because I support the rights of users to make choices about the code running in their browsers and what information it is collecting about them, I took this opportunity to begin the implementation of Do Not Track support on my site.

» Read the rest of this post…

I am very pleased to announce that Amalia, the content management system I helped to develop for Van Patten Media, has now been released as an open source project!

Amalia is designed to be a content management system ‘for the rest of us’ and to make it easy to manage a small website. Amalia is a database-less CMS, so it doesn’t need the complexity, maintenance, and expense of a MySQL server, making it possible to run on even many of the most limited of web hosting packages.

There are, admittedly, some missing pieces in Amalia — and it certainly isn’t perfect. I am excited, however, about the possibilities of Amalia and its future potential as an open source project. We would certainly love your feedback, ideas, Core code, plugins, and any other contributions you might want to make.

Please head on over to project’s GitHub page for the code and to get involved. You can also check out the install guide (PDF) and an install video on YouTube.

“What? I thought you updated this yesterday?”

Well, I did. 😛

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s auto-update-capable release, is DfontSplitter for Windows 0.3.1. This version includes a single fix, introducing a new method of avoiding the dreaded ‘corrupt font file’ error. For some unknown reason, sometimes Windows simply will refuse to work with the original fondu output file, but if simply DfontSplitter makes a duplicate of the file, it will happily see it as a TrueType font! It is very odd behaviour, and this fix only works in some cases, but it should reduce the incidence of ‘corrupt font files’ being output from DfontSplitter for Windows. This means users will less frequently have to go through a secondary hoop to get Windows to play nicely with DfontSplitter’s outputs.

Here are the official release notes:

New Features and Bugfixes

• Uses a new method to decrease the incidence of ‘invalid font file’ errors on Windows. More fonts should now convert correctly without requiring further intervention.

Known Issues

• Some fonts still require further conversion after DfontSplitter has created the TrueType font file. FontForge is one option for this.

As always, you can always get the latest and greatest version of DfontSplitter by downloading it from the the DfontSplitter project page.

I have just released a new version of DfontSplitter for Windows, version 0.3. The main change here is a brand new automatic update notification system. Like the Mac version, which uses the excellent Sparkle Framework, users of DfontSplitter for Windows can now keep the application up-to-date without having to manually check the website. This makes my development of the software easier, as I can release smaller feature releases more frequently, rather than large releases that must have a longer lifespan.

Unfortunately, because the automatic update feature is new, previous users of DfontSplitter 0.2 are not going to be notified automatically about this new release. 🙁

If you know any other users of DfontSplitter for Windows, please let them know this update is available so they might have the opportunity to keep up-to-date with this new feature too.

Here are the official release notes for this version:

New Features and Bugfixes

• New automatic update facility, similar to that of DfontSplitter for Mac. Users can now be notified of new releases in the future, which may include new features.

Known Issues

• Some versions of Windows report the TTF files that DfontSplitter creates as ‘corrupt’. Please see this workaround — https://peter.upfold.org.uk/blog/2009/08/23/dfontsplitter-solution-to-windows-corrupt-font-error/

As always, you can always get the latest and greatest version of DfontSplitter by downloading it from the the DfontSplitter project page.

I have just released a new version of DfontSplitter for Mac. It is a bugfix-only release, containing a single fix for an issue that affected some non-English versions of Mac OS X.

New Features and Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug where DfontSplitter would report valid files as not being in the correct format on some non-English versions of Mac OS X. File type detection is now done through uniform type identifiers, avoiding this issue.

Known Issues

• Converting TTC files on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) does sometimes run into problems, where the TTC splitting script can’t open the TTC file. The reason for this is currently unclear.
• Moving TTF files that have been extracted from a .dfont over to Windows — please see this workaround.
• Some Font Suitcase files may not contain TTF data that can be extracted.

Users of DfontSplitter for Mac should update their copy of the application by launching it, and choosing DfontSplitter > Check for Updates from the menu bar. Alternatively, you can always download a fresh copy from the DfontSplitter project page.

It has been quite a while since this bit of software was updated, but please welcome WPGet 1.0.

As well as the milestone of reaching version 1.0, this version now sports a host of new changes, including:

• Switched over to Perl regular expressions for better forwards compatibility
• Ability to show only posts in a specified date range in WPGet&#8217s output
• Ability to show only posts that match a specific search term in WPGet’s output.
• Support for stripping links out of WPGet’s output.
• Drops support for PHP 4

The best way to install WPGet if you’re setting up a new installation is to use the hosted WPGet Installer. Existing users can upgrade their installations by running only Step 1 (‘set up for the first time’) of the installer and uploading the updated wpget.php file that will be generated.

Alternatively, you may download the installer to run yourself from the WPGet project page (or even perform a manual install if you are proficient in PHP).

The new release is also available at the PHP Classes page for WPGet and at HotScripts.

Just a quick post to say that I’ve put up a brand new portfolio page here on my site.

The old one was way out of date and had no images, so I am pleased I have taken the time to put together the new page, which features some Software Development projects I have been working on, some Blogging and Podcasting that I do and some information about my web server and the Systems that I am familiar with.

Feel free to take a look and let me know what you think.

I have released a new update to DfontSplitter for Mac. Here are the release notes for this version:

New Features and Bugfixes

• The Font Suitcase format is now supported. TrueType font data inside a FFIL Font Suitcase can now be extracted with DfontSplitter.

Known Issues

• Converting TTC files on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) does sometimes run into problems, where the TTC splitting script can’t open the TTC file. The reason for this is currently unclear.
• Moving TTF files that have been extracted from a .dfont over to Windows — please see this workaround.
• Some Font Suitcase files may not contain TTF data that can be extracted.

As always, go across to the DfontSplitter project page to download the new release.

If you’re already using DfontSplitter for Mac, simply go to DfontSplitter > Check for Updates within the application to upgrade to the new release.