I have a lot to blog in the next little while. Now the dust has settled for a bit, I might have time to spruce up this site too. Certainly going to try…

I still haven’t finished the Artistdata-WordPress import I mentioned recently, but I have built a display plugin which has proven mighty useful. Includes a handy sidebar widget. You can see it in action on BenAllison.com. I intend to package that up properly and get it submitted to the WP Plugin repository – hopefully this week if I have time.

Another useful script I figured out recently was a custom AddThis button for WP blogs. Much simpler and more effective than the AddThis official plugin I found. That’s also in action on Ben’s site and Pittsburgh JazzLive International.

Question is: which of these do you want to hear about first? Answers in the comments please…

What exciting geeky stuff did you do today?

Has anybody reading this done this before? It’d be ideal if there was an existing plugin to take care of this. If not, I guess I’ll have to commit it to a plugin, once I figure it out….

Will it stick? Will I ever post again? Will I release the half dozen or so WordPress plugins I’ve built lately? Will I ever get around to reposting my portfolio? Will I finally redesign the theme? I’d like to answer all these questions, and soon, but all things will probably be superseded by work….

A great article that came in most useful today!

A great article today on Roger Johansson’s 456 Berea St about controlling the syndication feeds generated by WordPress. I have a feeling it’ll come in useful sometime soon!

I was reminded, recently, of this great performance from The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Doc Severinsen sounds incredible, as always, and Tommy Newsom’s arrangement blows me away! This is one of my favourite examples of how a great big band should sound.

I’ve been testing out some possibilities for Page Tabs over the weekend and kept running into a particular problem; namely setting the size of the iframe I was importing to so it didn’t have scrollbars within the page. It seems that the default iframe size is 495×800 pixels – narrower than the FBML method which had a container width of 520px. The width I can live with, but I couldn’t figure out how to set height: auto for the container – hence the scrollbars. The Facebook Developers documentation is a hopeless mess and doesn’t seem to have been updated for the new tabs. It turns out that the method is basically the same as for previous iterations of the Facebook Javascript SDK – it’s just that the documentation didn’t give me a clue about the correct syntax required to make things happen! It took much googling to finally figure it out – hopefully this post will make that easier for others!

This is what worked for me. Just add it after the opening body tag on your imported page.

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
window.fbAsyncInit = function() {

FB.init({appId: '{your App ID here}',
status: true,
cookie: true,
xfbml: true});
FB.Canvas.setAutoResize();
};
(function() {
var e = document.createElement('script'); e.async = true;
e.src = document.location.protocol +
'//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js';
document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e);
}());
</script>

This snippet will call the include Javascript library from Facebook and then Initialise and AutoResize your container on your Facebook Page Tab. You need to add your own App ID – it’s listed among the settings when you create your application in Facebook.

Enjoy…