I was actually very close to reinstalling Ubuntu 10.10 this evening. There’s always an issue when installing/upgrading and this time, as it always seems to be, there was a problem with the sound. At first I didn’t even think it was the sound though! Upon loading Firefox 4 (so that I could download Google Chrome), I saw a youtube video on my homepage. I figured I should check it out quickly since flash is also a sore spot with Ubuntu every once in a while. It played, which was a good sign, but it seemed to play is super fast forward no matter what I did.

So I sharpened up my google-fu, and started trying to figure out why this was happening to no avail, including several re-installs of the flash plugin. With that hitting a sore spot, I decided I should try some music. It happened to do the same thing! Finally, after what seemed like forever, I was able to find a vague post on launchpad discussing hardware selections. A-HA, I said to myself. I remember this from the days when I had a Creative Soundblaster Live! card, and the motherboard also had onboard sound.

I fiddled with settings for a few minutes and managed to get things going, but this dilemma really drives me crazy. I don’t understand why these types of issues are so darn hard to figure out. Ubuntu seemed to think I wanted sound going out from my video card over DVI… but when that didn’t work, it didn’t ever consider another option for sound at all. Nope, it just decided to not work. I have the patience, albeit just enough of it, to try and figure these issues out, but I would never, not in a million years, expect an every day user to try to figure an issue like this out.

So… Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu Developer alike. I ask you, why can’t things like this be EASY?! I installed Windows 7 last night on the same PC, there wasn’t a single issue (other than wiping out the MBR… but that’s a gripe for another day). I won’t say that Linux hasn’t come a long way in the last 5 or 6 years, but I still think there’s a long, long way to go.

Also… why the heck do you have to change the default applications every damn release. It’s driving me insane!

And… I broke the pi script (well, technically all my “projects” pages) with a little rewrite rule I was testing the other day. I forgot to remove it and it made a nasty redirect loop for things that actually existed. Oh well, it’s fixed for pi day!

If you want your content to work with “ajax” and “web 2.0″ do the mass of your HTML rendering first. Don’t break your site with ridiculous things just because “it’s cool!”, that doesn’t fly.

Cheers

Michael

Anyway, we’ll see how this goes. As of right now theme integration has failed horribly. Maybe I need to do some more research to see if there’s a better option for forums which integrate nicely with a Zend Framework site without me coding it from scratch.

The basic premise for the site is to be able to find Indie Rock events near where you are. I use a geoip solution to find your approximate location and then do a radius search to find events near there. When the events are found I plot them on a google map. There’s more to the site, obviously but I feel that this (which is what you see on the main page) is the most important part.

Other options for the site include looking at albums, artists, venues, and even other indie rock events. I have a large database of all these things so I allow you to take a look at what we have on file.

Right now everything is read only, but user contributed information is slated. I would actually like to start a rating system as well to allow users to say what they like and don’t like, as well allow them to filter their views based on this. But, that’s something for the future!

This has been a good exercising using the Zend Framework. I hadn’t used it for anything large scale yet, but I’m definitely getting the hang of it. There were some steep learning curves, but after I was ramped up to speed I’m churning pages out like made. There’s so much functionality there which I had to do by hand before. Definitely a tool I’m going to be keeping around for future projects.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Go on and check it out.

WordPress has been my CMS of choice over the last while because it is easy and quick to set up. This leads to the corollary: my customers pay less for settings a site up. Most of my time is usually spent digging up existing plugins and themes for the site which customize things to the customer’s liking. This time there was no existing plugin to do what was necessary and I had to dig right in.

I started off with extending the already extended plugin I worked on: SmartRSS. I added the ability to post to multiple categories, as well as select the user you want to post as (instead of the default admin). I also cleaned up the code a little by switching some hand coded SQL queries to use built in wordpress functions, but that doesn’t really affect what I’m talking about now! Anyway, I needed a little more functionality than SmartRSS had at the moment… The client wanted me to scan each incoming post for certain keywords and tag posts appropriately. How was I going to do that without hard coding it in to the plugin itself, something I did not want to do?

The solution I ended up with was extending SmartRSS even further to support the option of hooking one or more ‘post processors’ (as opposed to ‘pre processors’) to a post. After inserting the post in to the database I go through the list of post processors and pass the ID of the newly created post. The post processor then does anything we want it to do. Now, someone might come along and say: “Why didn’t you hook ‘wp_insert_post‘ or ‘save_post‘ in order to do that?” This is especially true since as I mentioned above I modified SmartRSS to use built in functions, so we actually do call ‘wp_insert_post‘ now instead of inserting directly to the database. The answer is simple… I only wanted this post processing to happen when we were automatically posting via SmartRSS. If a regular user creates a post we want to trust they’re setting up the post like they want already.

Another option the customer wanted was the ability to take the custom data we were processing and display it on the sidebar. Well, this implies a widget and I had never created a widget before. It just so happens to be they’re pretty easy to create. After taking the skeleton class from the wordpress codex on creating widgets, I just wrote the queries to get the data I wanted from the db and proceeded to output them in the way I wanted. To tell the truth, the hardest part was actually formatting the data since it involved some slick aggregation. The widget itself was simple as can be!

With all that said, expect a new release of SmartRSS in the near future. The post processor I wrote about here will not be included, but I will include a sample processor when the new release is done. I hope you enjoy it!