When developing new theme for this site, I used Easy Slider 1.7 – jQuery plugin written by Alen Grakalic of http://cssglobe.com to display handy image slider instead of recent posts list on the front page. This cute little slider runs very smoothly and quite unlike most of other slider plug-ins rotates images in round-robin fashion instead of rewinding at the end of the sequence. However, using 60K(!) of JavaScript code for a simple slider looked a bit of an overkill to me. Didn’t want to meddle with the perfectly good theme just when all the pieces finally fell into place,  so instead of replacing the slider, I decided to cross-breed my own Drop-in Slideshow plug-in with a newly developed full frame slider.

It took some brooding to figure out the most efficient way of endlessly rotating images either way, but at the end it turned out to be quite simple matter of placing 3 images next to each other (the current one being in the middle and visible in the slider window). When user (or timer, while on autopilot) initiates the rotation, the next image (in either direction) slides into view, being instantly covered by another layer of itself. While undercover, the underlying set of 3 adjacent images is being repositioned and updated waiting for the next move. Slick, isn’t it!?

Download

To wrap things up, we add some .php code to read a list of images from the current folder and display them as an automatic (as in self-advancing) full frame sliding kind of slide show. And all you have to do is extract dropinslider.php from dropinslider.zip and toss it in any folder with some images you wish to show. Click on the icon to download Drop-in Slider.

Demo

Click this link to see Drop-in Slider in action! When there are lots of big images in image folder, there might be a slight delay before Drop-in Slider kicks in.

How is this a WordPress plug-in?

Even though Drop-in Slider can be used on it’s own just as long as there are any images in the image folder for it to chew on, one neat little trick makes it fit nicely with your WordPress installation. When one clicks on an image being displayed in Drop-in Slider, a WordPress search is triggered and a posts to which this particular image belongs is displayed.

Instructions

FOLDER DROP-IN MODE

1. extract dropinslider.php from dropinslider.zip into a folder with images
2. point to http://your_web_page/…/your_pic_folder/dropinslider.php

INSTRUCTIONS: WORDPRESS UPLOADS FOLDER MODE

1. upload dropinslider.php from from dropinslider.zip with WordPress media uploader
2. point to http://your_web_page/…/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/dropinslider.php

CAUTION: with custom permalinks, this might not work, so you should:

1. upload dropinslider.php from from dropinslider.zip to http://your_web_page/
2. modify $_imageFolder in dropinslider.php ( now being ‘./’ for current folder) to point to folder with your images
3. point to http://your_web_page/dropinslider.php

Additional settings

There are a few user  settings you can change directly in dropinslider.php:

$_imageFolder folder with images, per default set to ./
$_slideinSpeed next image slide-in speed
$_slideDuration time each image is displayed, in miliseconds
_minWidth minimum width of images to include in the list
_minHeight minimum height of images to includein the list

... at dusk

And, regardless of Drop-in Slider,  a free computer desktop wallpaper of up to 1600 x 1200 pixels. Available on request as an affordable signed and numbered limited edition giclée print of up to 62 x 46 cm.

I use a touch phone mainly as a handy showcase of my graphics, so I can show them around stalking unsuspecting bystanders  without carrying a large portfolio map (or a desktop computer for that matter). Even though updating a touch phone with new images is a no-brainer, it would be even nicer to have my web page coerced into showing up nicely on a tiny phone display. Which is exactly what a WordPress plug-in called WPtouch does. Installation and setup of this plug-in are no brain surgery, but it took me a while to realize that  my browser should misrepresent itself as a touch phone to show me how a web-page displays on a small surface. Luckily it took no more than User Agent Switcher for Firefox to impersonate an iPhone on my desktop and to prove WPtouch actually works as advertised. It supports all major touch phones as it is, but in case yours is not on the list, you can add it via WPtouch settings panel. If not sure how your gadget’s browser calls itself, you can visit iOpus User Agent page. WPtouch is a quick and painless way to add a touch phone digestible mode to your blog. Highly recommended! And there’s a Pro version as well.

However, making a genuine touchable web page version requires quite a bit more than just a plug-in. The whole gimmick could be summarised as minimalize and buttonize, but that’s another story for another day …

Completely unrelated, here’s s thought of the day for you:

No mistake is fatal. Unless it is!

last sun rays in the late afternoon

Available on request as an affordable signed and numbered limited edition print of up to 93 x 70 cm. A  free wide-screen computer desktop wallpaper of up to 1920 x 1200 pixels.

wrought iron fence around the house with many windows

• Espresso Book Machine allows you to browse a catalogue of books and print out a bound, trimmed paperback in five to ten minutes.
• The pattern created in a Swedish forest by logging tracks and trees downed by Hurricane Gudrun in January 2005.
• Celebration of Colors by Poras Chaudhary, winner of Digital Camera Magazine’s “Photographer of the Year” competition.
• Photos of Franc Grom’s work. He drills thousands of holes into egg shells to create unique Easter eggs of fragile beauty.
• Atypik site of funy objects.
• A website analysis tool, providing technical analysis and SEO optimization information to further your website’s marketing, sales and navigation effectiveness.
• WordPress Firewall Plugin which investigates web requests with simple WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious spam attacks. A must have for any WP blog
• WatchMyBack24, another SPAM-fightin Plugin für WordPress. Hard to find at times though.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where a web application or a WordPress plug-in created a folder or a file you couldn’t touch afterwards, not even to rename or delete? It happens more often then you might think, most of the times because a developer neglected to chmod newly created item to 666 after it was created. Which causes the same to remain property of the web server account and inaccessible to the ftp account one uses to work with files on a web server.

So what is one to do? As a quick hack, you could use your WordPress Media Library to upload a new file to inaccessible folder. To preform this stunt you first change the uploads folder (go to Settings/Miscellaneous ) to the one you wish to access and then use Media Library to upload a new file. Don’t forget to change uploads folder back to wp-content/uploads afterwards!

As with any hack, this one is limited, clumsy, awkward and way uncool, so one has to ask: is there a better way. As ussually, it is and this time it is called PHP Shell Terminal and can be obtained from Sourceforge. After configuring the user in phpterm.php just upload the files to your WordPress folder on a web server and point to phpterm.php. Now you can use basic Linux commands to move around folders on your webserver and change ownership (chown) and/or permisions (chmod) of any file.

Two of my clients websites got framed by HTML/Framer mallware, subsequently causing their pages to be blocked by Google. This trojan adds a hidden iframe and some JavaScript code to the bottom of index.html or index.php, causing a visitor redirect to a site with more malicious code to be downloaded by unsuspecting website visitors. Since Google detects this mallware right away, Google users are promptly warned of imminent danger, which is how I was made aware off the hijacking. Cleaning up was a no-brainer except for the fact that site unblocking can only be performed through Google web master Tools central, but what worries me though is that the infection itself could only take place on a poorly protected web hosting server. Most likely thanks to a popular misconception that Linux servers are safe from mallware. Guess what: they are NOT!

Since this trojan is an extremely dumb one, adding an explicit die(); directive to any index.php just before the final ?> would render any further infections of this kind harmless, but one could safely bet on the next trojan to be more clever than this.

Many of my patients require a multilingual website which is not all that unexpected considering quite a few of them are tourist agencies, farms, hotels, apartment villages and such. Rest asured  I checked and rechecked and tested and retested many multilingual Worpress plugins before finding qTranslate. Which is just about everything a multulingual blog developer might wish for, extremely simple to use with a reach feature set on top of it for spoils. Unfortunately it didn’t work quite as expected with WordPress 2.7 until just recently (at least as far as I was aware of), so I kept many of websites using qTranslate utilizing previous versions of WordPress. When a new client requested a German version of his website, I decided to check whether qTranslate now supports Wp 2.7 and much to my excitement, it does now! Way to go, Qian Qin!

Check it out at qTranslate website.