Troidus

Over the last couple of days, I’ve coded a very simple, 1 file gallery of sorts.
Put it in a folder on your web server, and it’ll display all the images within the folder as a gallery.

Check out Itsy Bitsy Gallery (version 0.4.2). Any feature requests are welcome.

A few months ago, I joined a pledge to write a blog post about a woman I think has been a real role model in the field of technology. Today being the day, here’s my contribution to Ada Lovelace Day, a post celebrating the enchanted wonder that is Shreya Sarkar.

I’ve known Shreya for the last 2 years, and she is one of the few people in my life who never fail to amaze me. I first came across her as this restless, dreamy poet on a blog, and she has never failed to awe me ever since. With a thirst for learning everything new, and a passion for creating something unique, she has proven that determination & passion can conquer anything.

Shreya has never been very technologically savvy the way you and I take technology. She still has trouble navigating to her Control Panel, and we recently spent 5 hours on the phone, me helping her install Windows XP, step by step, by every single step. Open a copy of photoshop, however, or give her a camera to work with, and she transforms into this whole other person. In seven months, I’ve seen her go from asking me how to create layers in Photoshop to creating awesome photomanipulations by herself. She lives and breathes photography, and has a passion for it I’ve seldom seen in others.

In my mind, she’s a brilliant photographer who knows how to bring out the best in an ordinary scene, and then knows how to edit it to something truly outstanding. And all this, from someone who didn’t know anything about photography or PhotoShop a year ago is a truly outstanding achievement. And she can only get better at this!

Here’s to Shreya! Go check her photostream out. And did I mention she is a content writer too?

Every other blog I surf has an “X essential rules to follow for twittering”, so I thought I’d chime in with mine. I’ll keep mine simple & to the point.

• Write what you want to.
• Don’t write to please your followers.
• Speak your mind.
• Keep in mind, it’s your account, not your followers’.
• Don’t give a damn about the follower number.

And basically, have fun. And seriously, don’t do it just for the “followers”. For the love of God, be yourself!!!!

Now that the development of Keyed In is underway, and I’m making great progress with it, let’s get into some details.

People buy software licenses. I know that my email is scattered with emails containing serial keys & license files. Now, when you need to easily find the key for a particular software, you have to scour through your email or emails, searching for the key. Keyed In serves as your online repository of license keys.

Bought a software license key? Enter the details into Keyed In, and you know where they are. Got a license file along with the key? Upload it to Keyed In and it’s just one click away.

We plan to launch an early alpha to about 10-15 users by 1st February. A private beta hopefully will come up within February, and the application will be publicly available by March 2009. Any question or comment is welcome.

The last MacWorld keynote by Apple was sort of a mixed bag.

New versions of iLife & iWork, which was expected. iWork.com which probably won’t compete with Google Docs, because as Phil said, it’s going to be a fee based service. And only for people with copies of iWork 09. So we shall see how popular they are.

New MacBook Pro 17″. Again nothing out of the ordinary. But nice to see what goes into making those batteries.

The big news at MacWorld, obviously, was the iTunes Music Store going completely DRM free. Now, India doesn’t have a music store, but I can just see all my online contacts happily upgrading all their songs to iTunes +.

The thing is, with this move, Apple again put the hammer down on the online music business. And it’s a great move for everyone! For Apple, they now have everything people cribbed about. For people who buy the music, they actually “have” the music now, and for music companies, who’ll obviously charge $1.29 for most popular songs.

Now, we wait and see when Steve Jobs comes on stage again!

Firstly, I hope you’ve had a great beginning to a year which brings so much hope with it.

Now, to kick off 2009, we’re planning to release our first application over at Dawn Studios. While I can’t go into more details as to what it does before we have a solid working copy, you are welcome to subscribe to the list at the website, and subscribe to the product blog where we hope to keep you updated on the progress.

The application is called Keyed In, and we hope it will help you be sane!

WordPress 2.7 brings with it the new plugin hook register_uninstall_hook and the graceful uninstallation of a plugin.

To clean up any options when your plugin is uninstalled, either use the hook, or simply place an uninstall.php file within your plugin directory with the code you want to be run when a plugin is deleted from the WP-admin interface. For an example, check out my plugin Menu Maker, where I’ve recently included the uninstall.php file for cleaning up the database.

Have you ever wanted to create a navigation list with external links & a few pages, maybe even a post or 2? Well, menu maker is for you!

Does exactly what it should. Makes a menu/navigation list, whatever you want. Download it and give it a whirl. Here’s the link.

For posts & pages, give the ID, not the entire URL.

Usually, when you create a navigation list for your site, it takes the following code :

<ul class="navigation">
	<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
	<li><a href="about.html">About</a></li>
	<li><a href="extras.html">Extras</a></li>
	<li><a href="contact.html">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

Now, if you’re horizontally styling them up, you’d use a CSS styling similiar to this :

ul.navigation {
	list-style: none;
	font: 14px/30px Georgia, Times, serif;
}

ul.navigation li {
	display: block;
	float: left;
	margin-right: 15px;
}

ul.navigation li a {
	display: block;
	float: left;
	padding: 0 1em;
	height: 30px;
	line-height: 30px;
	text-decoration: none;
	border: 1px dotted #999999;
}

However, doing this will completely put your list to the left of the screen. If you know the exact width, you can use a margin: 0 auto; to center the list to the page, but as it often happens with dynamic lists, you won’t know the width. For those times, use this short & sweet workaround to stick the list to the center.

ul.navigation {
	display: table;
	margin: 0 auto;
}

And your dynamically generated list will be centered on the page, no matter what the width of it!