I’ve just released version 0.3 of the Google Calendar Feed Parser.  This update was a quick one but definitely deserved a new version number.  Since I wrote the plugin I’ve received feedback from many users indicating that PHP’s file_get_contents() would not work on their hosting provider.  A few of these users posted alternative code that used cURL instead and that fixed the problem for everyone.  Today, the author of onigoetz.ch left this comment on my blog about some work he did to the plugin.  Specifically, he mentioned a function called wp_remote_get().  I wasn’t able to find that function in the documentation for WordPress, but searching for it led me to what I think he may have meant: a function called wp_remote_fopen().  This is essentially a wrapper function for retrieving the contents of a file from a URL and will first try using fopen() and, if that fails, fall back on using cURL.

I’ve updated the code to use that function which should come as a relief to many who were forced to hack at the plugin’s code to get it to work on their hosting provider.  A big thanks to onigoetz.ch for making me aware of that function!

I just released version 0.2 of my Google Calendar Feed Parser plugin for WordPress. The new version confirms compatibility up to version 2.7.1 of WordPress and also adds one new pseudo-feature.

When I originally wrote the plugin, I had some trouble with the start and end times for events displaying in the correct timezone.  To solve the issue (just for EST), I added a hard-coded number of seconds to each time.  This presented a problem when daylight savings time changed since now all the times were displaying one hour off.

To temporarily fix this problem, I’ve added an option to the administrative interface for the plugin that allows the user to directly set the offset (in seconds) that gets added to the start and end times for each event.  This way, a user can test different values to see which one produces the desired result for their timezone.  I call this a pseudo-feature because I hope to replace it with a more comprehensive timezone configuration section at some point in the future.

Version 0.2 can be downloaded from the WordPress Plugin Directory.  Users with version 0.1 installed should be prompted to upgrade from the plugin section of the WordPress admin interface (I’m excited to see if that just works without any effort on my part).

Ryan and I recently did a project detailing the process of setting up a Subversion server. The procedure is really simple and only takes about 15 minutes or so.  If you try it out for yourself and find any problems, please let me know.

I was just looking through some old posts and came across this one that was a follow up to my release of the Google Calendar Feed Parser plugin for WordPress.  At that point (about 2 weeks after the release), I’d had my plugin downloaded 50 times.  I thought that was amazing and it felt pretty neat to know that people were actually using something I made.

Inspired by reading that just now, I decided to check and see the status of my plugin as of today… about 10 months since the release.  I’m really excited to report that it has been downloaded 1,315 times.  Maybe this summer I’ll have some free time to do some more work on the plugin (add a few missing features and fix some bugs).

Here are some pictures I took of the April Fools’ prank Ryan, Pat and I did in COSI.

We also taped small squares of paper to the bottom of all the computer mouses in the COSI lab (rendering them useless) and Ryan modified some of the text on Planet ITL.