While I may not be as good at finding the words… I thought I’d try to find the images.

I started a pic-a-day blog at http://blisspic.wordpress.com

The blog will just display one photo from my day. A small glimpse into each day’s story.

It is meant to help me do a few things:

• Get better at creating/finding content.
• Look UP more… try to be more observant of the things around me.
• Get some WordPress.com experience (boring… I know). I do a LOT of self-hosted WordPress work (wordpress.org), but have a few friends who could use some help on the hosted WordPress platform (wordpress.com). This blog will get me there a little more.

All the photos will be taken on my iPhone, and all the pictures will be posted using the WordPress iOS app.

I hope you enjoy it!

Go retro with this Walkman-like case for the iPhone!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57345153-1/dress-your-iphone-up-like-a-walkman/

After… of course… you support the kickstarter project that would make it a reality.

In my case, it’s usually along the lines of “Sorry!” or “My Bad!”. But I would venture to guess that some road rage could be prevented, if we were just able to communicate slightly more than a gesture allows.

So I got a kick out of this weekend project (This is cool!!!)

An LED panel display for the rear window.

This link provides more information INCLUDING complete instructions on how to build your own.

What do you think… would more communication lead to less… or more road rage?

I was fascinated to read about a 9/11 tribute that has reached Mars. An aluminum sleeve on a robotic arm of a NASA rover, was made using aluminum recovered from the World Trade Center site.

More info can be found here >>

(Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University )

My head hurts now…

(via techi)

The Russian government has given the go-ahead to begin development of an underground rail line that would connect Alaska and Siberia.

The tunnel (not being built for personal or commuter traffic) is expected to be an efficient means of transporting freight. (Can you imagine the easy access to China?)

Photo Source - Wikicommons

The engineering marvel would be twice the length of the Chunnel in Europe.

More info >>

The goal of the site is simple. Allow parents to collaborate to effectively disciple their kids.

• Share ideas of what has worked in your family.
• Share stories of God at work, to help inspire other parents.
• Share struggles, and allow other parents and friends to come along side you and offer support.

If you are a parent (of little ones or big ones), or just have a heart for this newest generation, we’d love your help.

Create an account and join in the conversation at http://www.pro226.com

The Cool Running Pace Calculator allows me to calculate goal paces and race potential.

It include 3 variables:

• Time
• Distance
• Pace

You just need to enter 2 of the variables, and it will calculate the third.

For instance, a question I often ask myself is: “If I could maintain that pace for a marathon, what would my time be?”

So I enter the pace in question (pace), and the marathon (distance), then calculate the goal time.

Runner’s World – What to Wear for Runners

http://www.runnersworld.com/cda/whattowear/0,7152,s6-240-325-330-0,00.html

I use this tool all the time. Particularly this time of year when the weather conditions are changing so frequently that I can’t remember what’s comfortable.

The Purpose

This post is intended to be an introduction to the basic structure of a WordPress plugin. The plugin is, arguably, not extremely useful. But it does do something. So that has to count for something, right?

The purpose of a user group is to bring product users together to learn from each other. I’m not an expert in WordPress plugin development. So I would love to learn from you. If I missed something, or could say something better, feel free to leave a comment below!

The Problem

On our family blog, I posted a picture of our children, with their names.

The only problem was that my wife and I would rather not post their names online. Our preference is that we will refer to them as “Thing 1″, “Thing 2″ and “Thing 3″.

The Solution
Now, I could try and remember to change their names every time I write a post. I suppose that wouldn’t be too difficult. However, as a true geek, I decided to find a way to automate it. I created a WordPress plugin that will change their names in each post.

WordPress plugins are an easy way to enhance, suppress or filter some of the basic WordPress functionality. It makes it fairly simple to customize the functionality, without editing the application itself.

Plugins are stored in the wp-content/plugins folder in your WordPress installation.

The Start

The first thing we do is create the plugin file. For this project, I created the PHP file:

wp-content/plugins/thing1.php


/*
Plugin Name: Thing 1
*/

That is the minimum amount of information needed to create a plugin. With that file created, I should be able to go the “Plugin” section of my WordPress dashboard, and see the plugin listed.

Sweet!

Now, let’s make something happen

Now that the plugin file has been created, we will add a simple PHP function to replace the girls’ names with the generic replacements:


function thing_1($text) {
$text = str_replace('Helga', 'Thing 1', $text);
$text = str_replace('Olga', 'Thing 2', $text);
$text = str_replace('Inga', 'Thing 3', $text);
return $text;
}

What we’ve done here is created a function called “thing_1″ that will process the content it is sent ($text) and replace the names with the replacement words.

The next step is to attach this function to WordPress. We are going to do this with a hook the WordPress API has provided for plugin creation.

Hooks

There are two types of hooks in WordPress. Action hooks and Filter hooks.

Action hooks are used to add a function when WordPress “does something” (like sending an email or writing to the database)

Filter hooks are used to modify data before it is written to the database, or published to the browser.

There are a lot of hooks. I’m not going to get into them here, but here are some great links to learn more about the various hooks in WordPress:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API (a general guide to understanding how hooks work with the API)
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference (a list of Filter hooks in WordPress)

For this project, we are going to use a “Filter Hook” to modify the post content before it is published to the browser. This will keep the names intact in the database, but will change them before it is displayed on the browser screen:

add_filter('the_content', 'thing_1');

This uses the WordPress function “add_filter” to add my function “thing_1″ to the filter hook “the_content”. Essentially, it will take the contents of “the_content” and pass it through the function “thing_1″.

There are other arguments that can be passed to the “add_filter” function. For more information, visit this reference on the function.

Let’s take a look.

Now that we have created the plugin file, created a function, and assigned that function to a Filter Hook, I am going to activate the plugin and see how it impacts my site:

You can see now, that the plugin has replaced the names in the post. The only remaining issue is that the name “Helga” still shows up in the post title:

Let’s add one more filter to the plugin, to apply the same function (thing_1) to the post title.

add_filter('the_title', 'thing_1');

Here we are grabbing onto the Filter Hook “the_title” to apply the same function. Let’s take a look:

Perfect.

Now that the function works, I am going to add a few more lines to the comments at the top of the plugin file, to take a little credit for my work:

/*
Plugin Name: Thing 1
Plugin URI: http://www.carlbliss.com/?p=528
Description: Protects the identity of my daughters by changing their names to generic Dr. Seuss References
Author: Carl Bliss
Author URI: http://www.carlbliss.com
Version: 1.0b
*/

Those comments will add extra information to the plugin page in the dashboard.

And the process has now been automated!

Here is the completed plugin code (wp-content/plugins/thing_1.php)


/*
Plugin Name: Thing 1
Plugin URI: http://www.carlbliss.com/thing_1
Description: Protects the identity of my daughters by changing their names to generic Dr. Seuss References
Author: Carl Bliss
Author URI: http://www.carlbliss.com
Version: 1.0b
*/

function thing_1($text) {
$text = str_replace('Helga', 'Thing 1', $text);
$text = str_replace('Olga', 'Thing 2', $text);
$text = str_replace('Inga', 'Thing 3', $text);
return $text;
}

add_filter('the_content', 'thing_1');
add_filter('the_title', 'thing_1');

You can download the entire plugin file here: thing_1.php (ZIP)