Technically, this plugin has been available from the WordPress plugin directory since last Monday, but today is it’s official launch. This is for two reasons: first, it gave the plugin a week to “shake out the bugs,” so that the official launch could be as stable as is reasonably possible.

Second, it’s my birthday, so I’ll be able to remember when the plugin launched. Isn’t that sweet?

The plug-in is pretty straightforward: it posts a status update about your new WP post to Twitter, passing by Pierre Far’s Cli.gs URL shortening service on the way. If you have a Cli.gs API key, you’ll get the added bonus that your Cli.gs will automatically show up in your Cli.gs account, so you can track the statistics of that Clig right from the beginning.

By default, the plugin will take a chunk of text you’ve defined and your post title and truncate them to an acceptable length (including your Cli.gs post URL) to send over to Twitter. However, you don’t have to just accept this stock text: you can custom author your Tweet for every post, using the WP to Twitter custom field in your post authoring interface.

Read more about WP->Twitter

Download it at WordPress!

I know it’s only been a month, so it’s obviously far too soon for me to be publishing any kind of a script update. However, these were things which just needed to be done.

First, I’ve greatly improved the internationalism of the script: it now operates searches on UTF-8 encoded data, so it should be great for working with any language which requires characters in that character set. Testing this kind of behavior is difficult, so if you should encounter any problems please do let me know!

Second, I improved the pagination of results. Previously, if there were 150 pages of results, you’d have to see links to every single page of the results. Granted, this can be advantageous, but it’s not really practical. In this updated version, when there are more than 10 pages of results you’ll only have links to the first page, the last page, and two pages before and after the current page. This boundary is configurable — you can offer 50 pages before and after the current, if you wish, but the default is 2.

Last, I changed the way the search query was checked before being sent to MySQL. The original version of this script used my own custom-authored regular expression to secure the request. This was probably very secure, since it functioned by only allowing certain characters rather than checking restricted characters — but it did make things such as multibyte queries pretty much impossible. So it was time to change over to a more standard method. So be it! I got what I needed out of the regular expression; it didn’t need to stay in the script.

There are, of course, a lot of color contrast evaluation tools available on the web. Roger Johansson published a list of 10 color contrast checking tools last September, and there are undoubtedly more out there yet.

In fact, for a long time, I’ve primarily used the three tools by Gez Lemon which are on that list:

• Color Contrast Analyzer
• Luminosity Contrast Ratio
• Color Contrast Analyzer Firefox Extension

I certainly have no intention to stop using the Firefox Extension, but I’ve been irritated by the other two tools for a long time for two reasons. First, the simple fact that there are two tools. Obviously, the first was written long before the second, but given that they are testing the same pieces of information, it would be nice to be able to conduct the test with a single test. The second is that the tools have rather poor usability: the original color contrast analyzer, at any rate, gives a lot of information and it can be rather difficult to pick out the key bits: the actual contrast between the items and whether or not you’ve passed or failed.

This tool I’ve just placed on the web (“released” is far too glorified for this) is purely intended to combine these two functions into one tool and to provide more readable output.

I haven’t checked the output as thoroughly as I might have; there may well be bugs. Let me know if you notice one!

Following the publication of a brief article on Search results design by Adaptive Path, I decided that revising my database search script was a valuable goal. Specifically, meeting the checklist in that result was probably not a bad idea!

It’s not that the previous version was terrible, but I knew perfectly well that it could be much better.

The additions to the script are pretty straightforward:

Additions:

• Added: Made row highlighting available in both tabular and list-based search results.
• Added: Search terms are now highlighted in search results.
• Added: The default sort is now to order results by query relevance.
• Added: Paginated navigation of search results is now available.
• Added: Translation base file [English], so translating the script is easier.
• Added: Basic Spellchecking [English]
• Added: Default stylesheet

Changes:

• Changed: Text excerpts are now truncated at word boundaries, rather than in the middle of words.
• Changed: separated results template information into external include files for easier upgrading or modification.
• Changed: Included the search form as part of the script so that search terms could be automatically returned to the search input.

The spell checking is the most exciting addition in my view. It’s hardly complete, but it’s based on a list of 4,068 common misspellings available from Wikipedia. This addition has significantly bulked up the total download size, since I’m including the spell-checking database as part of the download, but I think it adds a lot of value to the script.

I’ve also added a translation base file to the package, to make it a bit easier for users of the script to port it to their own languages. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet had time to seriously work on the internationalization of the search script itself, so (to be entirely frank) this is an area which the script isn’t really well suited at this time.

Internationalization is next on the list, however. It’s a high priority at this point, since internationalization ranks as one of the most reported problems with the script.

With spell-checking in mind, I think it’s appropriate to provide a healthy reminder of the limitations of spellcheck:

Candidate for a Pullet Surprise

by Mark Eckman and Jerrold H. Zar

I’m looking for people to provide alternate language translations for my Color Contrast Tester. I’ve already got people offering to provide Italian and German language files, but once you’ve gone that far…why not keep going?

If anybody reading this can provide additional translations, let me know in the comments — I’ll respond privately to make arrangements. It’s an easy job; the language file is independent of the rest of the script, so there aren’t any serious challenges in sorting what needs to be done.

Thanks in advance!