It may not be much, but it means a lot to me, being my first ever qualification in the industry (despite having been in the industry now for over ten years!)

God, I’m getting old.

I feel I wasted a lot of that time in dead end jobs, never really progressing much and being a jack of all trades, master of none.

Since starting my job at Magma Digital a year ago (almost to the day!) I feel like I’ve progressed exponentially. I no longer that nagging feeling of imposter syndrome. Having no formal education has never held me back in the sense of programming capability, but I’ve always felt out of my depth when it came to talking about programming. It’s been great to actually have peers and mentors, people I can ask questions instead of having to feel my way around in the dark and finding a solution that works, but isn’t ideal (and half the time, not even knowing why it’s not ideal).

I think we built it up to be a big thing. All of us at Magma are looking to get Zend certified over the next couple of months, and we’ve all been putting it off for ages. I’ve spent 4 hours a night revising for the exam for the last week and it really wasn’t anything to worry about. It covered some topics that I don’t often touch, which is where I tried to prepare most… And there weren’t even any bloody bit shifting questions.

I recently figured I should probably get my website set back up after it being down for around about a year. In doing so, I wanted to find a way to keep new posts flowing without me actually needing to do anything, so I wound up making a plugin.

It was kind of interesting getting back to my roots and putting together a WordPress plugin using all the things I’ve learned in the past year, putting it together in a more object oriented way and even using React to build the admin page.It’s a fairly simple plugin, and it only took a few hours to write, but you’ll see it active here on my site too. The idea is that it allows automated posts via a WP cron job, sourced from RSS feeds.

I used a free tool called QueryFeed which provides my Instagram posts as an RSS feed to import my Instagram posts directly into my blog feed, but it could just as easily be used to repost articles from other blogs and create an aggregated feed.

Features include sourcing the title, content, categories and media (which can be sideloaded as a featured image on the post) in a customisable way, complete with preview of what’s being pulled from the feed.It’s currently limited to 5 items per hour, but if I find the plugin starts to gain traction I’ll look to make more things a little more configurable, and might even add plugins for sources other than RSS (yeah, plugins for a plugin… Yo dawg and all that jazz).

More to follow soon once it hits the plugin store!

In the meantime… you can check out the repository here.

I recently switched my domain from danny.gb.net to danny.gg – all was well and good, until I realised my comments were missing.

After some extensive Google-fu, I couldn’t find any proper solutions on migrating a domain and keeping all comments intact.  So I had to hack the Facebook plugin a little.

I’ve always used this plugin to enable Facebook comments.  Seemed like a great idea at the time.  If you’ve switched domain and encountered a similar issue, you’ll find that the problem is caused by having a data-href attribute on the comments box.  This basically means that Facebook uses your URL as a “unique ID” of sorts, so it knows which comments belong to which page.

Logically, you’d think it’d just be the request URI (the bit after the domain), maybe with a setting in the app itself on the developer console.  Nope.

The easiest fix, which is quick and dirty, is to edit the Facebook plugin directly and add the following bit of code:

Of course, you’d need to tweak this a bit specifically for your website.  I used the Unix Timestamp Converter to calculate a timestamp somewhere between the last post on my old domain and the first one on my new domain (in my case, the first of July 2015)

What this basically does is replace the new domain with the old one for any posts published prior to the domain switchover.  Of course, if you’ve had comments since switching your domain, you’ll have to decide whether to use the old comments or the new – there’s unfortunately no way of merging them.

I think I’ll be finding a way to export comments and going back to standard WordPress.

Not only have I recently come back to the whole blogging thing, I also want to start streaming myself playing Starcraft on Twitch.

Well, I’m a master of procrastination so instead of actually streaming, I decided to make a small WordPress plugin which adds a banner to the bottom of your website to let your readers know when you’re online.

And since I’m probably too busy procrastinating instead of streaming, here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Edit: It previously didn’t look this good.  I’m good at making things work, I’m bad at making them pretty.  That’s where Chris came in – I work with Chris, and he does the pretty side of things.  Thanks to his input, I’ve added options for opacity, padding, and also a “glow” colour – making it possible to “pulse” different colours.

WP-Members is a fantastic plugin for securing various areas of your WordPress site for access by registered users.  While extremely versatile, not everything can be controlled through the settings alone.

An often-requested feature is for the plugin to automatically login a user after they have registered.  Unfortunately, this functionality is unavailable in the current version of the plugin.  However, by adding an action to WP-Members’ wpmem_post_register_data tag, it becomes possible to add this extra functionality.  The following can be added to your plugin file, or even to your theme’s functions.php file:

Note: At the time of writing, the current production version of WP-Members is 2.8.2