1995 – Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript.

One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.

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New in v2.0:

• Rewrote Settings page to WP 2.5 standard
• New Setting to strip internal links (href=”#id”) from pull-quotes
• Added “Settings” link to Actions on Plugins screen
• Strips “a” tags that lack an “href” attribute from pull-quotes
• Strips “id” and “name” attributes from tags in pull-quotes
• Improved error correction if Style files go missing (not finished though)
• BUGFIX: Files starting with “.” should not appear in styles list in Admin
• Misc. code cleanup

New in v 1.7:

• BUGFIX: “preview” script is now only added to Pull-Quotes page — used to add to ever admin page (was causing problems when editing posts)
• Improved security via nonces
• Changed name of preview script in Admin to avoid potential conflicts
• Removed “edit CSS” link from Admin. Doesn’t work in WP 2.5
• Simplified HTML comments on page headers. Blog pages no longer have plugin URL and Admin page no longer has version.
• Extensive code cleanup and abstraction

I’m very happy with some of the things I figured out along the way to 1.7 and 2.0. I anticipate they will result in one or more tutorials for plugin authors, not to mention one or two submissions to WordPress core software.

In the meantime, for Geeks and Norms alike, the plugin is good to go.

Go get it!

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I have, however, been doing a lot of code cleanup recently in anticipation of a new version release. I’m releasing the plugin as it stands now in the hopes that some of the cleanup and normalization I’ve done will fix some of these issues.

There are no new features in this release, which is why I’m calling it a “beta”. Don’t let that tag scare you off though — the code is a lot more tight than in the previous release, I just wanted to add in a couple things before the “final” version 1.7. That will probably come out this weekend or soon after.

So, if things are working great, no worries (though the upgrade certainly won’t hurt anything). If you’ve had issues with this plugin, download the latest and greatest and give it a try.

Go get it!

Enjoy.

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A user requested that i allow for an option to turn off the CSS links, so he could reduce HTTP requests by manually putting the CSS in his own stylesheets. So here it is. I live the serve.

Some minor under-the-hood changes, also.

Go get it!

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If you’re anywhere near my age, you probably spent a good part of the 80′s playing computer games such as the early Ultimas. One of the common elements of these games is the first-person perspective dungeon.

Someone has figured out a 3-D perspective dungeon using nothing but JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets.

Check it out!

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(Oh, and by the way, there’s a new version of the Pull-quote plugin available)

Ultimately I decided the best way to do this would be to duplicate it as a custom function, that I could them modify to my heart’s content. As this proved to be more difficult than I first thought it would be, largely due to the difficulty of debugging recursive functions (that is, functions that can call themselves).

Take a look if you’re interested.

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DOM Scripting is an extremely flexible and powerful set of techniques within Javascript that allows the scripter to manipulate HTML (that is, web pages) in various ways, including adding markup and text, changing CSS settings, and a lot of other things. For this idea, I had it in my head that I could wrap the text to be quoted in a <span> tag with a class of “pullquote”, then use the DOM to take all such spans and turn their contents into pull-quotes.

Well darn it all if some guy named Roger Johansson didn’t go and save me the trouble by beating me to the punch. I actually laughed when I saw his post, because he uses precisely the methodology I was planning, and he pulls it off well — though, even more coincidentally, his first iteration had a limitation that mine would have had, and for the same reason! (I should note here that I’m not trying to take anything away from Roger — obviously I think it was a good idea, and he did clearly beat me to it.)

Almost immediately, a reader of his blog (going by the nom de web “Viper007Bond”) took the script and very neatly turned it into a plugin for WordPress. Better and better. It wouldn’t have been too terribly hard to incorporate it into a blog, but now it’s a total no-brainer.

Since I had been thinking directly along the same lines before seeing the script, I of course immediately had ideas of what might be done differently. I have a number of concepts that I will work on soon, but one of them is already done. I added code to Roger’s that excludes <a> tags from within “pullquote” <span>s — Not the content of the links, just the link itself. It occurred to me that having a link inside pullquote would not look so good, and in some cases could actually damage navigation within a page (in the cases of “name” links or navigational links pointing to “name” links). You can see it in action in this post from my other blog.

The modified script can be downloaded right here. This can easily be used with the WordPress plugin — just replace the “jspullquotes.js” file in the plugin folder with the modified copy. (Actually, this is an excellent quality of the way Viper007Bond made the plugin, as it is so easily updated when improvements are made to the original script!)

Some of the ideas I have for down the road include:

• If a quote span doesn’t start with a capital letter, [C]apitalize it within brackets, as would be proper grammar for a quote
• Allowing pullquotes that actually differ from the text in the span, such as excluding clauses within a long sentence. I actually think this will be easier than it sounds.
• Make successive pullquotes in a single post alternate sides
• Figure out how to make a preference screen within WordPress so that these various improvements¹ can be easily turned on or off by the blog owner

That’s all I’ve got for now. Those links again are:

• Roger Johansson’s script
• Viper007Bond’s WordPress Plugin
• My “No Links” modified script
• Update: My full-feature WordPress Plugin

That’s it for now. See you next time!

1: This is important because, as experience tells us, “improvement” is often in the eye of the beholder.

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