Zirona

eee-control for Gentoo

Alex Günsche — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:18:57 +0000

Eee-control is a nice tool to control various features of an EeePC, such as certain hardware (Bluetooth, WLAN, etc.) as well as power management. Installing this package on a Gentoo system takes some work, but I’ve created an ebuild that takes care of the most. Please have a look at the dedicated page which contains a link to the ebuild as well as full documentation on how to get eee-control running on Gentoo.

On vacation

Alex Günsche — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:17:56 +0000

From August, 23rd till August, 30th, I’ll be on vacation, without any Internet connection at all, and completely unavailable! Let’s see if I will ever get acquainted to the Internet stuff when I’m back.

XXLview — a web-based viewer for large images

Alex Günsche — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:31:32 +0000

XXLview is a new software which allows to conveniently view very large images, such as those found in the Wikimedia Commons. You can zoom in/out, and you can navigate within an image. There are very many usage scenarios, but I especially developed XXLview having a large image viewer in the MediaWiki software in mind, i could also imagine it as an additional feature for WordPress gallery plugins. Check out XXLview as well as the WikiView usage example. XXLview is licensed under the MIT license.

WordPress MultiSiteManager released

Alex Günsche — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:49:28 +0000

MultiSiteManager (MSM) is a WordPress plugin which will perform two of the most important tasks of an administrator: backups and upgrades. MSM can manage any number of WordPress installations from one “master” WP installation. (To manage a WordPress website with MSM, you need FTP access to the site.)

Especially in times of mass hacks and surges of WP exploits, I think this plugin is very good news.

Read on and download »

Donations Clouds 0.1.1

Alex Günsche — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:57:37 +0000

The WordPress plugin Donations Clouds is available in version 0.1.1 which fixes some minor bugs and adds widgets capability to the plugin.

Donations Clouds

Alex Günsche — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:48:58 +0000

Your website has cool stuff and encourages people to donate for it, but nobody ever gives a penny? Give them something that they get only for a donation, e.g. a link on your website. However, maintaining a link list is tedious, and it’s not really appealing. Therefore, we are proud to present the donations cloud (similar to a tag cloud) concept along with an easy to use WordPress plugin. Read on to learn how you really get some donations, and how to go about it with your WordPress blog.

Polyglot editor integration in 5 minutes

Alex Günsche — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:24:51 +0000

Polyglot is a great WordPress plugin by Martin Chlupac, which allows WordPress users to offer multilanguage versions of virtually any content. (I’m using it on this website, too.)

Unfortunately, Polyglot lacks a quite important feature: A proper integration into the WordPress editors, i.e. TinyMCE and Quicktags (The buttons above the editor which you see when WYSIWYG is deactivated). I’m certainly not the first to notice this problem, but I might have been the first to create a proper solution.

Here you have it, code and documentation in a little package:

polyglot_editor_integration.zip
polyglot_editor_integration.tar.gz

(Follow the instructions in the file HOWTO. Note that the TinyMCE integration is based on TinyMCE 3, hence it requires WordPress 2.5 or higher. If there is enough request, I might also create a TinyMCE 2 solution.)

Integrate Polyglot with your WordPress editors. It’s just a matter of 5 minutes!

Have fun with WordPress SVN

Alex Günsche — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:21:43 +0000

Many people would like to try the very latest WordPress developments, which are usually available via the WordPress SVN server. But not everybody is able to use SVN, and of course nobody will bother to scrape the files together via the the web SVN interface.

So I’ve set up a little script on this server that will create a package of the latest SVN code once an hour and make it available for download. The files will be found under the following URLs:

http://www.zirona.com/download/wpsvn/wpsvn.zip
http://www.zirona.com/download/wpsvn/wpsvn.tar.gz
http://www.zirona.com/download/wpsvn/md5sums
http://www.zirona.com/download/wpsvn/current_revision

The packages are to be installed just as a regular WordPress package. You can also use it to upgrade an existing WP installation; note however that it’s not recommended to run development code on production sites.

You can download the script itself, too:
http://zirona.com/download/wpsvn/wpsvn.sh

Enjoy!

Btw, if you just want to see the latest WP without installing it, you can view the development version (especially the admin area) at Chris Johnston’s test site.

P.S. (06.03.2008, 15:40 CET): I just learnt that you can download a trunk snapshot from WP Trac directly. Therefore, this service appears a bit needless now. Anyway, I’m keeping it online; it doesn’t hurt me or my server, and maybe it serves a purpose for somebody.

InstantUpgrade video

Alex Günsche — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:50:58 +0000

How cool is that! Jim from The Kaizen Business has created a screencast of a WordPress upgrade with the InstantUpgrade plugin and posted it on YouTube. Enjoy!

InstantUpgrade: 1.0 beta

Alex Günsche — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:38:18 +0000

Changelog for this page:

14.02.08, 00:16 CET: beta2 uploaded, download links updated.
15.02.08, 22:07 CET: 1.0 beta2 has now been put on the official Instant Upgrade page, v0.2 has been moved. This page is now obsolete.
16.02.08, 10:44 CET: Moved the comments to the new page, too.

The popular InstantUpgrade plugin has become one of the most popular WordPress plugins — even though it is not too easy to use. The next version of InstantUpgrade will hopefully be as popular as the current one, but it is much easier to use!

How come? InstantUpgrade does now offer the possibilty to transfer files via FTP, with the blog owner’s FTP account data. So, you do no longer have to make all WordPress files writable, and you don’t need a chmod procedure once you want to get rid of the plugin. Simply insert the FTP account data, and you are ready to upgrade.

Attention: This version of the plugin is a beta release. If you want to play safe, please use the older, but extensively tested version. This beta release is for experienced users!

Installation

Please note: Upgrading a web application is a critical task. Of course we did our best to create a stable and careful software. Still, please be sure to have working backups. If you encounter problems with this beta version, leave a comment on this page.

Download

as .tar.gz archive (105.2 kB)
as .zip archive (112.0 kB)

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Download it.
Unpack it and upload it into your WordPress plugins folder.
Activate the plugin in your admin panel.
Go to Options » InstantUpgrade and pick an upgrade method. FTP is usually recommended.
For FTP: Enter your FTP account data.
For HTTP: You will very likely have to make lots of files writable. Follow the instructions.

As soon as the plugin is installed and the configuration is done, you can go to Manage » InstantUpgrade and perform the actual upgrades.

Please: If you use this beta release, come back and tell us if you were successful, and if not, what errors you encountered. Thank you.