1) Keep the Simplicity – My greatest fear with WordPress is that people won’t stop adding more things to it. I like its smallness. The merging of WordPress MU in the upcoming 3.0 version is just one example of the unnecessary growing complexity of the WordPress code base.

2) Be more Open – Automattic keeps control of the only official plugin repository and WordPress only works with it. Reminds me of the Apple App Store and I for sure don’t want anything like that for WordPress.

For the 2011 Portuguese Presidential elections I will be supporting Fernando Nobre. Not that anyone cares but I thought I should mention it. For that reason I’ve added to my blog a small support banner linking to the campaign site.

I’ve also been thinking how I can contribute and help with the campaign, and how to enable people that are interested in helping out to do so effectively, besides the obvious sign-up for voluntary help at the campaign site.

If you have a WordPress blog, I’ve made public a widget you can use on the sidebar of your blog to display a small image banner just like the one I’m using. It’s an easy way of showing our support and it’s very easy to install:

1. Inside the WordPress admin, go to Plugins -> Add New and search for ‘Fernando Nobre’.
2. Click ‘Install’.
3. Inside the WordPress admin, go to Appearance > Widgets, and add the ‘Apoio Fernando Nobre’ widget where you want, then save the changes.
4. That’s it!

And here’s the link to the plugin page:

• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/support-fernando-nobre/

Para freelancers e pequenos negócios que precisem de um software para facturação, podem dar uma vista de olhos ao Invoic€xpress. Já suporta o formato SAFT-PT que desde 1 de Janeiro de 2010 é obrigatório e também facturas electrónicas, entre outras funcionalidades.

É um serviço totalmente web-based e tem um trial de 30 dias grátis para se experimentar. Após o periódo de trial, consoante o plano escolhido, paga-se uma pequena mensalidade por mês, mas é também possivel adquirir pacotes de facturas a vulso por um preço fixo (para quem não gostar de pagar mensalidades).

Fica a dica. Aproveitem e se experimentarem e gostarem digam qualquer coisa.

p.s. O Invoic€xpress é um produto da RUPEAL.

I’ve reduced the number of people I had on Twitter from 185 down to 50. I was getting hammered by so many tweets that I didn’t care that some of them had to go. Over the next weeks I will be selecting 50 persons that I will follow and interact with. That means those 50 better be good or they will be replaced.

Information overload. That’s a big problem. Our heads are overloaded with information and simplifying all that information into a digestible form is a big challenge. What’s the solution? Selection.

Result = Good quality content

define ('WPLANG', 'pt_PT');

I then used poEdit, a localization tool that works with Mac OS X and that can be downloaded from the poEdit download page. In poEdit, from the File menu select ‘New Catalog’. Fill in the information there and in the ‘Paths’ tab put the plugin directory. In the ‘Keywords’ tab add the missing entries so it looks like this:

At this point it should recognize all the text strings in your code and present a screen where you can add the translations. After that be sure to save the file as pluginname-pt_PT.po, preferably in a directory called ‘translations’ or ‘locales’ (but anything will do). After that you’re all set. In your code you should load the translation like this:

load_plugin_textdomain ( 'your-plugin-name' , FALSE , '/your-plugin-name/translations' );

And strings should have the form:

_e('Choose a Category','your-plugin-name');

That’s it. Let me know if you run into troubles :)

Resources & Further Reading for the Geeks:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin
• http://codex.wordpress.org/I18n_for_WordPress_Developers
• http://urbangiraffe.com/articles/translating-wordpress-themes-and-plugins/
• http://urbangiraffe.com/articles/localizing-wordpress-themes-and-plugins/

The Idea – “Apple Time Machine”-like interface to your Lifestream

You’ve probably heard about Apple’s Time Machine, the backup software that lets you navigate back in time and restore files and folders from your hard drive. Well, we thought: “Why not backup your life as well?”. At least your online life. All your tweets, facebook updates, flickr photos, youtube videos, blog posts, etc. What today is called a lifestream. Imagine you can check what happened this same day, one year before. What were you doing? What did you blog about? Any tweets? Maybe you’ve posted photos or videos. That’s what we wanted to do, within a 3D interface inspired by Apple’s Time Machine. Here is a screenshot of how it looked*:

How it Works

We get the lifestream from one of the many aggregators on-line these days. We used the recently launched Sapo’s Pond web service, that aggregates Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, Sapo Videos, Sapo Blogs, Sapo Fotos, etc. We get the data via Pond’s API.

The interface was build using Adobe’s Flash and Flex Builder. For the 3D we used the new 3D object manipulation functionality in Flash CS4 and not Papervision3D.

Any service can be easily added as long as there is a RSS feed available. Also it can be used on the web or as a desktop app using Adobe’s Air. Because it is Flash it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux (provided the Flash plugin is installed).

The Prize

1x 13” Apple Macbook Pro notebook, 1x Apple Wireless Keyboard, 1x Apple Magic Mouse, 2x iPod Nano, 1x O’Reilly Book, 3x issues of Make Magazine.

The Story

My project got the first place at Codebits 2009, I was so happy, couldn’t believe it. Especially because of all that happened before, up to that point of our project being announced as the winner. After all I didn’t know the rest of my team until after the programming contest had already started! And they were already doing a project which eventually they put aside to work on “Supond”.

It was the second day of Codebits when the programming contest kicked off and I wasn’t planning on doing any project. I was hanging around with some old friends on the way to some talk when I noticed a couple of guys working with Flex Builder. I had used Flex before so that caught me eye. I approached and started talking about it. They were working on a project already and after a while I commented about an idea I had. Immediately the guys said “hey, that’s a good idea”, and we started prototyping some code. In less than nothing @semmais had some 3D planes lined up for us to use. I started working on the backend to fetch the data via the Pond’s API. @semmais went home at around 20h and I left a bit later, at 22h. We had a nice long night of sleep.

In the next morning we got together again and I had the lifestream data all nicely put in an array for him to populate the interface. He had the nice interface ready to populate and some nice particles in the background with the galaxy picture @jvarandas had done the day before for us. We started integrating. We hacked, hacked, hacked. Integrated support to watch videos and full-sized flickr photos. And we were ready by the time the organization call in the teams for testing the laptops on stage. Great run, great fun. While it was my initial idea I think what worked nicely was that both me, @semmais and @jvarandas fitted nicely as a team and the result came from that. Here’s a photo we took to upload and test the flickr service on Supond:

Thanks

To Paulo Andrade for helping out with the Pond API. It was so good to, when having a problem with the API, just stand up and walk over to the guys that made the thing in the first place.

This year’s competition was largely decided by votes from the audience. We couldn’t have made it if it wasn’t for all the people there that voted on our project. Thanks to all of you.

To Sapo, because I have to, for organizing this cool hacker conference in Portugal.

The Other Projects

Some other teams had really nice projects as well. I particulary liked the “Time-based OTPs” by Paulo Andrade, the  “Simple MBNet” by Pedro Sousa and BlinkBrick, a “lego” like led arduino device by Sergio Veiga. I hope they can finish their projects because they are really cool.

What Now

We are thinking in further developing this idea. If you have suggestions drop us a direct message on Twitter or email. One of the ideas people suggested was to allow saving the data to the hard disk.

* – we’re thinking in posting a live demo for people to play with.

Update: There is now a video demo published.

• What Every Aspiring Photographer Should Know – can easily be applied to entrepreneurs.
• how society should spend 100 million hours – part of the inspiring talk Matt Webb gave at reboot11 this year.
• Introduction to Creative Thinking – how a different way of structuring your thoughts can unblock you.
• The Truth about Freelance Web Development – covers several aspects anyone working self-employed on the web should pay attention.
• Apache Optimization and NGINX – self-explanatory.
• How to build a Web App business from A to Z – notes from the talk at the FOWD conference.
• Online Business Plan Software - I haven’t used this yet but maybe there is some value to it.
• Dropbox YCombinator Funding 2007 Application – an example of how to apply for seed capital at YCombinator.

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His starting point was: how hard would it be to use Eclipse+Eclipse plugins to develop web apps?

So he started developing the thing and now it’s using:

• A custom http server based on Apache’s httpcomponents lib
• The Dojo Toolkit as a Javascript library
• Freemarker as a Template Engine
• Eclipse EMF to describe the data schemas
• Apache log4j as a logger

Also we talked about working on it together so we ended up publishing it on sourceforge for now. We called it “the Gizmo”. It’s not big and powerful like Apache’s Tomcat but can be useful for someone looking into using a small and lightweight Java container for web apps.

Also it is important to understand that the initial goal was more to understand how things work and how he could play with these things, plugging them together, etc., rather than working on a full-blown framework. I’ve been using it myself for a small web app me and @aaires are doing in our free time and so far we’ve been happy with it. I wouldn’t say it is ready for production but it is something I would like to contribute in developing further. Especially because there are so many interesting Java libraries out there that we could use in conjunction with the Gizmo and also because using Eclipse for development is just plain fun.

You can take a look at:

http://lipog.sf.net