Embedded Components and Tools Blog Center

Ron Fredericks writes: This is just a short post to point my readers to a new mathematics publishing plugin available from ECI’s Blog Center. This plugin offers a simple alternative to the more standard approaches: XML’s MathML and Math into LaTeX.

WordPress Math Publisher plugin home page
www.embeddedcomponents.com/wordpress/wpmathpub/

Usage

An example of how it can be used is your blog posts:

Results in:

where:
is defined as a
is defined as b

References:
  Pascal Brachet’s phpmathpublisher
    Home: www.xm1math.net/phpmathpublisher/
    Usage: www.xm1math.net/phpmathpublisher/doc/help.html
  Matteo Bertini’s WordPress plugin called PHP Math Publisher
    www.slug.it/naufraghi/programmazione-web/wpmathpublisher
  Randy Morrow’s WordPress plugin called Axiom
    wordpress.org/extend/plugins/axiom/#post-2794

Technorati Tags: Ron Fredericks, Embedded Components, WP Math Pub, wpmathpub, math, mathematics, publish, plugin, phpmathpublisher, axiom, MathML, LaTeX

Ron Fredericks writes: In my last two posts:

• I discovered Dean Lee’s Code Highlighter plugin for WordPress as the blogging solution for my source code display needs.
• I fixed a word wrap problem in Dean’s plugin.

During my research to solve the word wrap problem, I discovered a few more issues leading me to update Dean’s plugin with the latest version of GeSHI (an open-source project: Generic Syntax Highlighter for php. Highlight many languages, including PHP, CSS, HTML, SQL, Java, Assembler, and C for XHTML compliant output) and removal of unused files. I thought other WordPress bloggers might like to take advantage of the latest code too, so I document the steps needed to build a clean plugin with the latest components.

Flow Chart / Swim Lanes Widget
Below is a Flash widget I built to document the steps needed so you can roll your own up-to-date plugin. Follow these steps and you won’t have to be a programmer to get the benefits from the latest versions of these program components. The widget actively links to the latest PHP files and CSS classes:

[flash http://www.embeddedcomponents.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/how2installplugin.swf w=450 h=583]

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Technorati Tags: Ron Fredericks, Dean Lee, Code Highlighter, WordPress, plugin, component, Flow Chart, Swim Lanes, Flash, widget, PHP, CSS

Ron Fredericks writes: In my previous post, I discuss Dean Lee’s source code syntax highlighting plugin for WordPress. It delivers all the great features of the GeSHi open-source highlight project for Wordress bloggers.

Yet some source code displayed badly – turning a developer’s nice clean style into a chaotic and messy format. I demonstrated the display problem using a perl sendmail script I plan to discuss in a future blog post. The problem had to do with some kind of whitespace word wrap issue.

I tested various features of CSS and DIV tag attributes created by Dean’s plugin and the GeSHi php code. I am happy to say, I found a simple one-line solution. My solution is in updating Dean’s CSS container class to force white space not to wrap.

Here is my solution:
Add this property to Dean’s “ch_code_container” CSS class:

white-space: nowrap;

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Technorati Tags: Ron Fredericks, Dean Lee, source code, syntax highlighting, plugin, WordPress, GeSHi, open-source

Ron Fredericks writes: I have a problem in common with many software engineers and technical managers – “How can I display source code within my blog?”

See, the problem starts when the source code to be displayed interacts with the blogging software itself and then corrupts the blog’s own loop-and-display engine. Thus, the blog page becomes corrupt or at the very least, becomes mis-formatted and hard to read. Of course it would also be nice to color code a software snippet similar to a source code editor to make the posted source code easier to read.

I tried several techniques during my Internet search for “WordPress source code formatting”. I discovered a common theme – there are source code display and highlighting methods available – in fact too many are available. So the search became a “needle in the haystack” time sink. And the sad fact, most choices have some severe limitations.

But at last, I found Dean Lee’s blog post: Source Code syntax highlighting plugin for WordPress (V1.1)

Dan’s pluglin for WordPress has all the features I was looking for:

• installs as a simple plugin for WordPress
• usage within a blog post is easy through the use of the pre tag
• source code displays in its own container with line numbers for reference
• a reader should be able to easily select a range of displayed source code and copy it for their own use (without also selecting the displayed line numbers)
• source code display should not break my WordPress blogging software

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Ron Fredericks writes: This is just a note to point out to my readers that drupal is an easy content management system to use. Over time, ECI will be adding more of the drupal features to improve its community experience. Drupal includes multi-user blogging as well as forums and many other core and extended modules. You can see my new drupal personal site in action from here.
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Ron Fredericks writes: This is my first WordPress Widget development effort, or my first WordPress *anything* pretty much. However, I provide my best effort to offer a complete and useful widget following the guidlines published by WordPress and the spirit of quality. It is a widget following Atomattic’s Widget offering for managing our blog’s sidebar. It was inspired by a conversation with a friend of mine, Mukesh Lulla, co-founder of embedded security software provider TeamF1. Mukesh suggested that I might want to have a list of news and blog links that are relevant to my user base. This is the resulting widget I dreamed up. I hope you like it, but your comments and guidance are welcome either which way.

You can see Embedded Components’ blinesAgg widget in action on this blog’s sidebar with the title: Embedded Device Updates

Download Widget

You can download and extract the zipped blinesAgg.php version 1.0.2 widget from here: blinesAgg.zip

Features

The blinesAgg WordPress widget displays a list of selected news and blog RSS syndicated feeds as a list of links:

• Links can be collected from a neat RSS service called Bloglines
• Links are collected using the Bloglines search engine
• You select the desired search words to search for links you think might be cool for those that read your blog
• No user account on Bloglines is used, just their search engine
• Any number of additional RSS feeds can be aggregated from extra sites to complete your list
• Page access to RSS feeds can be cached using an embedded copy of lastRSS, by Vojtech Semecky, for efficient use of your web server

Once blinesAgg widget is installed, you can configure the widget using a simple web form:

• Title
• Number of links to display
• Bloglines search parameters: search words to use, and search words to exclude
• *List of other RSS feeds you would like to include in your list of aggregated links

*Because sometimes there may not be enough links found within your requested Bloglines search. Given some combinations of search and avoidance words, you may want to list extra RSS feeds to be used to fill out the remaining total number of links you would like to display. That’s why I added the extra feeds form entry. But, you may want to skip the Bloglines search feature and just use the extra feeds as your RSS aggregator.

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Technorati Tags: Ron Fredericks, WordPress, Widget, Mukesh Lulla, TeamF1, Embedded Components, blinesAgg, Bloglines, RSS