I invented a boardgame.
One of the things taking a big chunk of my time has been a board game I designed that is tentatively called Blockade. I will talk about it more in future posts, but it is basically a two player strategy game where you roll a cube on a 4×4 board trying to pin your opponent. Stay tuned for more information in future posts.

Font Burner Plugin Updates
I released a major upgrade to my Font Burner WordPress plugin. Feedback has been great and downloads passed the 3000 mark recently.

Fever
I recently purchased Fever, a $30 personal rss feed aggregator. I don’t recommend it for anyone who isn’t savvy enough to install apps on your website, but for me it is really great. Once I loaded it up with the hundreds of feeds I try to follow (keyword: try) it filters through the “hot” feeds kind of like a personalized Digg.

I am quoted in Web Designer Magazine
A Twitter connection gave me the opportunity to be quoted in the upcoming issue of Web Designer magazine, a publication out of the UK. Now all I have to do is track down where I can buy a copy of the issue which I think will come out next month.

Music
My favorite album right now is an album called Fantasies
by Metric. The new Eels album
is great, too.

Movies
Netflix has been hit and miss lately. I enjoyed the Wrestler more than I was expecting. Finally saw The Village and Unbreakable and I thought they were great. I enjoyed The Omega Man as much as the remake, Legend.

Red Rocket
Life at work has been busy but good. I have a couple of posts up on the Red Rocket blog. One is about how good design adds credibility to a website and the other is about this YouTube video:

Easter Egg Plugin

I am proud to introduce my latest WordPress Plugin. This one is called “Konami Easter Egg” and it makes it easy for anyone to create custom easter eggs on any WordPress powered website. If you aren’t quite sure what an easter egg is, let me backup and give you a little history lesson. Easter eggs are hidden secrets that can be found in movies, websites, books, Tivo remote controls, and pretty much anything where the creator has hidden secrets. They are called “easter eggs” because they are hidden treasures that you have to find. The creators of these things often hide them as a wink to other people who know the secret code.

One of the most famous easter eggs was created by video game maker Konami in 1988 when they hid a code in their Contra game that allowed the player to gain 30 extra lives. The code was entered by pushing a sequence of buttons on their controller. The code was “up up down down left right left right b a start select.”

The Konami code has since been used in countless games and has transcended into popular culture. Most recently, the code has been added to Facebook with “start select” being replaced by “enter.” There is even a website dedicated to documenting all the websites that use the Konami code, http://konamicodesites.com/.

I have always been intrigued by easter eggs and have long wanted to be able to add hidden things to websites that I make. When I learned about a javascript file called konami-js available on Google Code I realized that I could make a WordPress plugin for creating secret codes that reveal hidden messages on a website.

My plugin will hopefully appear in the WordPress plugin directory soon, but if you would like to test it out ahead of time, please contact me and I will send you a demo.

The Konami Easter Egg plugin is available now through the WordPress Plugin Directory. Here are the installation instructions:

Click here to view a screenshot of the settings page of the Konami Easter Egg Plugin.

konami easter egg screenshot

Installation
Installing Konami Easter Egg is very easy and do not require any template modification. Just follow these steps :

1. Upload the folder ‘easter_egg’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.

2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

3. After activating the plugin you should see “Easter Egg” in the sidebar under “Settings.”

4. *IMPORTANT* Before the easter eggs will appear it is important that you enter the name of the outer most Div tag used in your theme templates. This can be found by viewing the source code of a page on your site. The first Div after the will look something like “<div id=”wrapper”>”. Take the name of this div (in this case it would be “wrapper” and enter it in the settings page for the plugin.

5. Enter the YouTube code of the video you would like to show.  Change the “key” if you want a unique key combination to unlock the easter egg. Change the message to say something unique. Customize the CSS to change the appearance of your Easter Egg as desired.

6. Congratulations, you did it!

By the way, I wonder what would happen if you entered the Konami code right now. Only one way to find out!

Here are some of the features of Dream Feedr:
• Quickly post a new dream in a “Twitter-style” interface.
• Each dreamer will have their own page showing their dreams.
• Each dreamer has their own RSS feed.
• Keyboard shortcuts for quick editing
• You can tag your dreams with keywords.

Click over to dreamfeedr.com to look around or to join for free. I have about ten dreams entered in there already, and I find it really interesting that all these thoughts would have been lost and forgotten if I hadn’t took a little time to write them down.

Dream Feedr is very much a “beta,” so it could change quite a bit depending on the response I get from people. Let me know what you think. If you have any interest in starting a dream journal I encourage you to sign up for a free account and test it out.

Font Burner
Smashing Magazine lists Font Burner among their list of 50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography.

Six Revisions lists Font Burner as one of their top 20 Useful Typography tools.

TripWire Magazine lists Font Burner among their picks for 60+ Typography & Font Mega Toolbox.

Speckyboy Design magazine praises Font Burner as one of 21 Typography and Font Web Apps You Can’t Live Without.

Font Burner WordPress Plugin
The Font Burner WordPress plugin has about 1500 downloads from the WordPress Plugin directory.

iPhone Control Panel Plugin
Over 250 downloads so far.

Found Photography
Listed as one of 87 Great Photography Blogs and Feeds by Epic Edits

Phone Feedr
Phone Feedr has been added to the web app section ofApple’s website. I can’t say that has lead to a flood of traffic, but 18 sites have signed up so far, so that’s something.

(If you are scratching your head in confusion right now it’s because this is a very inside joke. Somehow we started this tradition at our office a couple years ago and for some reason it has stuck. Seriously though if you haven’t had the cini-sopapilla bites you should give yourself a little treat. Yummy.)

iphone_control_panel_plugin_screenshot

Bookmark icon

The bookmark icon dropdown menu above lets you choose the icon that appears on a users home screen when they bookmark your site. When you click “save changes” you will be able to preview your new icon on the phone in the Plugin screen. If you want to us a custom icon of your own design, simply replace one of the six images in the “icon” folder of this plugin.

CSS

You can enter custom css that will only be seen by iPhone and iPod Touches. Keep in mind that the phone will also see your other stylesheets, so you need to redefine your styles here in order to “overwrite” them.

Viewport

Think of the viewport as the size of the window that is seen on the iPhone’s screen. The width of the screen of the touch devices is 320 pixels when held vertically and 480 pixels when held horizontally. The optimum viewport for your site will vary so experiment with it until you get it right.

Redirect

If you would like to redirect iPhone and iPod Touch devices to another url, enter it in the “redirect” box. Other browsers are not affected by this redirect, just touch devices. This will add a redirect code to every page of your site, so use it carefully. Leaving this box blank and no redirect will occur.

Installation Instructions
Installing iPhone Control Panel is very easy and does not require any template modification. Just follow these steps:

1. Upload the folder ‘/iPhone_Control_Panelr/’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.

2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

3. Click on “settings” and you should see a iPhone Control Panel link. Click this and follow the directions to customize your iPhone settings.

The plugin is a free download and is available through WordPress plugin directory.

Version 0.6 was a major rebuild, and some people may be interested in accessing the previous version. Click here to download iPhone Control Panel version 0.5.

Visit the plugins homepage at <a href=”http://www.fontburner.com/the-font-burner-wordpress-plugin/”>FontBurner.com</a> or download it from the plugin directory at WordPress.org. If you use the plugin please give me any feedback that you have. Being my first plugin I know it can be improved and could use all the help I can get.

Since this was my first plugin, I wanted to take a few lines to describe the process. The rest of this post is pretty technical, so feel free to skip it unless you are interested in plugin development…

I have been tinkering with WordPress for a few years now and building a plugin was the obvious next step in my development. PHP isn’t my native language, but the more I hack around in WordPress the easier it is too understand how it works. The best teacher for me is always trial-and-error. If you are interested in creating a plugin of your own, my advice would be to find a plugin that already exists that does something remotely similar to what you are looking to create. Dissect the plugin and try to figure out what it does and how. Change the variables and try to change that plugin to do something else. If you are lucky, you might just end up with the plugin you were trying to create. The thing that I found the most helpful was a “themes option framework” from Jeremy Clark. Once I got theme options page doing what I needed it to do it wasn’t too hard to convert it into a plugin.

Once I had my plugin created, the next thing I needed to tackle was getting the plugin posted in the WordPress directory. WordPress plugins need to loaded into their system using subversion. I haven’t had good experiences with subversion, so I wasn’t sure how easy this would be. The first step is to request to have your plugin added. I made my request on a Friday evening and had approval on Sunday evening. Not too bad, but while I was waiting for approval I read some horror stories of this taking a week or more.

Once I was approved it was time to tackle subversion. I wanted to avoid the command line, so I started looking for a Mac application that would make subversion easier. I found two programs that did the trick. One was Versions and the other was svnx. While neither program made the process completely painless, I think Versions was slightly better. Luckily, I found a pretty good tutorial that explains step-by-step how to add a plugin to the WordPress repository using subversion. If you are braver than me, WordPress has a pretty good overview of how to do it all through the command line.

With my first plugin behind me I am already about finished with number two. The next one is iPhone related and might go live later this week. Stay tuned!

The site is live, so head on over to phonefeedr.com and test it out. You are some of the first eyes to see it, so if you find bugs or mistakes please let me know!

As a side note, any visitors to this blog will automatically get redirected to my feedr. If you are curious about how to redirect iPhone users to friendlier versions of your site, you can find the script I use here.

For the technically curious, Phone Feedr was built using WordPress MU. The RSS parsing is handled by Simple Pie and the iPhone interface uses iUI. I call the Simple Pie and iUI concoction Pie.ui and have made it available to anyone interested in reusing it.

Here are some clouds taken in our back yard:

Another sunset from our office in Loveland:

Geese on a frozen lake:

My commute to work:

Stars moving in the night sky:

Driving to Nebraska over Thanksgiving: