The jQuery function allows for a second, lesser known about, parameter which tells the function to only search for the element within the context of the given element.

List item 1


List item 2

In this scenario the selector will navigate through the menu unordered list and select the list item with “List item 2″ in it, having never seen the other unordered list.

Instead of having to work its way through the entire DOM, containing perhaps several hundred of the same element, the function can search within the smaller search area and provide results faster and more accurate.


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The following code snippet will allow you to set the page breaking behavior to break before every h1 element, giving you a lot of control over how printed versions of your website will be displayed.

@media print {
       h1 {page-break-before:always}
}

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With CSS, on the standards compliant browsers such as Firefox, Chrome or Safari, you can decide what color shade the highlighted text appears for users using the following CSS:

::selection { /* Safari & Chrome */
 color:#000;
 background:#FFF;
}
::-moz-selection { /* Firefox */
 color:#000;
 background:#FFF;
}

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Double click pickaxe. Click ground. Wait. Fail. Double click pickaxe. Click ground. Gather.

For me, this was as addictive and engrosing as it got.

Ultima Online, an MMORPG released late 1997 by Origin Systems, was the game to open the doors for the likes of Everquest and eventually World of Warcraft to barge through. Played from an isometric perspective, the game put you in the customizable clothes of your avatar who could travel the lands of Britannia and fight evil, set up shop, mine, tame animals, build their own city or attack other players, salavaging their wares.

When I began playing, the controversial splitting of the player vs player areas (PvP) and safe areas into the two lands of Feluccia and Trammel had already happened and by the time I had amassed enough money to purchase the plans for my own house, all spaces had been grabbed by the elite. The only route to go down at this point was to keep saving the pennies and eventually buy a pre-built house of the homeowner – often selling at a remarkable premium depending on where the house was situated.

Managing a home was a game in itself.

The game was fascinating. Not only were the mechanics of the game complex and compelling, the players who filled up the vast lands – from Trinsic to Vesper – were dynamic, varied, annoying, hilarious and creative. Expanding on the feature that allowed a player to run their own shop, players combined their shops and created malls,treasure hunts and duelling pits, gave guided tours around the local area and provided services for pub quizes and weddings.

The majority of the unique ideas that players created would not be possible if not for Ultima Online’s often overlooked item management system. The ability to “drop” any item directly into the gameworld, yours and everyone elses, meant players could organise chairs and tables and form a wedding venue. This is something that could not be achieved in the static worlds of Azeroth and the like.

Of course, with the ability to customize the land for all players, came the people who griefed. Boxes placed infront of door ways, teleportation gates surrounded by immovable objects often caused the developers to get hands on with the world they had developed. Game Masters (GMs) were illustrious in their appearance – hooded robes that were unavailable to players gave them an ethereal quality about them, as if they were really from the higher circle. Ultimited powers gave the GMs the talent to magic any item into the game world or remove a player indefinately.

Player Killers were one of the controversial elements of this freeform world.

Websites began popping up, journaling the trials and tribulations of players wrongly put into GM voidspace – a holding cell seperate from the entire game world with no doors. These weren’t the only websites to form their own life outside the game – uo.stratics.com was a library of information, documenting the limitless items, monsters, skills and tactics that could be obtained in the game. UO-auctions.com became the eBay of Britannia, users swapping ingame gold for houses and magical swords. imanewbie.com provided a comedic twist on the game with a weekly on going story about the character ImaNewbie.

Characters weren’t limited by skill, only imagination. With a total of 700 points being able to be put into one of the 60+ skills (including fencing, fishing, cartography, peacemaking, musicianship, cooking, taming, alchemy, hiding and archery) a player could become a master in 7 skills, often refering to them as Grand Master (confusingly abbreviated to GM also). Again, websites sprung up giving information on how to get the best from your character and listing complimentary skills. Because of this, templates became the standard way to plan out your character, the idea of becoming a legendary animal tamer or treasure hunter was achieavable.

Ultima Online has changed now, servers are emptier than ever and the game has been streamlined in an attempt to gain the attention of the new MMO fans who have only ever known the tank’n’spank systems of Warcraft and Everquest. This really is a shame because Ultima Online of old was an unbelievable game filled with unbelievable people. It had so many great systems that these days would be deemed “too hardcore” or “unrealistic” – the ideas of losing all your items when killed, percentage based skills and homeownership.

Hopefully one day a team of developers will see the lasting appeal of giving players the ability to do anything they want to themselves and their world to the extent that the team at OSI once did.

Double click pick-axe. Click ground. Wait. Vas Corp Por, Kal Vas Flam, Corp Por. Dammit. Pk’d.

The Example

Lets say you are running a blog that will have podcasts as a content type every so often, but you don’t require a heavyweight plugin like PodPress – Custom Post Types are the perfect solution.

The Code

Take a look at the following code:

register_post_type('podcast', array(
        'label' => __('Podcasts'),
        'singular_label' => __('Podcast'),
        'public' => true,
        'show_ui' => true,
        'hierarchical' => false,
        'query_var' => false,
        'supports' => array('title', 'editor', 'author')
));

Whack that straight in your theme’s functions.php file and voila – you’ll see the new Podcast custom post type right there listed underneath the Comments button. So what did this code do exactly?

The Parameters

As you can see, all we’re really doing is calling the new register_post_type() method and sending through some parameters:

• Label is pretty straight forward, what do you want the custom post type to be displayed.
• Singular label is also intuitive, what do you call ONE of your post types.
• Public is a meta argument to determine whether your post type will be accessible via search, menu’s etc… (more about this on wordpress docs)
• Show UI - set to true to show the custom post type on the back end. False can be set to allow extra content to determine how the custom post type is displayed in the back end.
• Hierarchical is a parameter to determine whether each custom post can have or be a parent of another.
• Supports allows you to determine what content creation fields are used when creating or editing a custom post:
  • ‘title’
  • ‘editor’ (content)
  • ‘author’
  • ‘thumbnail’ (featured image) (current theme must also support post-thumbnails)
  • ‘excerpt’
  • ‘trackbacks’
  • ‘custom-fields’
  • ‘comments’ (also will see comment count balloon on edit screen)
  • ‘revisions’ (will store revisions)
  • ‘page-attributes’ (template and menu order) (hierarchical must be true)

The Results

Shown below: the new “Podcasts” custom post type. Now start filling that bad boy with some content!

Set up is now quicker than ever, so give it a go on your local or dev servers. I would give it a few weeks before upgrading or deploying any live sites however, Wordpress updates are notorious for their security leaks.

Check out the official Wordpress TV introduction to the new features below!

Thank god for Web 2.0 tools, doing 99% of the work for me!

So if you’ve ever dreamed about doing the classic American road trip check out the video below and don’t forget to check back here this time next year!



Video Source: Boreme.com

This gave me the good fortune to see how 30 or so websites handle opting out of their newsletter.

The best that I came across were when there was a clearly defined opt-out button in the footer of the email which, on clicking, opened a new window with a “confirm your choice to unsubscribe” to push. On clicking, the page was automatically closed. Wham-bam thank you mam.

The bad types were the systems which required me to enter in my email address that I wished to unsubscribe from. Seriously, I just came from my email window, surely you could have sent that information over as a parameter. This system, however, is dreamy when compared with several or so websites which required me to login to their site, using a long since forgotten username and password system, then eventually navigating to the correct “my profile” settings. Pretty shoddy. At least it wasn’t as bad as the newsletters which require you email the newsletter with only “unsubscribe” in the subject line.

The worst offender however was a certain train booking service which required me to login with a username (not an email address), navigate 3 menus deep, un-tick 3 individual boxes (don’t sign me up to: 3rd party, offers…etc…) and then click submit. After clicking submit, excited in the knowledge that I no longer would receive timely rail maintainence updates, I was surprised when I recieved yet another email from said website telling me that I had unsubscribed and no longer would receive any emails. Gah.

I have a feeling that in a few days I may recieve another email from them reminding me that I’m continually unsubscribed, oh and btw check out these new offers!

So please, I know newsletter creation is a ball-ache but please, just one “confirm” button to save sanity and inbox capacity for all.

What’s new?

Here are the promised features:

• New default theme including extended customization options (background color).
• Choose your admin name and password during installation.
• Wordpress MU (multi site wordpress) interegration.
• Custom post types.
• Menu management built into the “appearance” tab.
• General back-end theme design.
• Bug fixes.

New Default Theme

Although 99% of people will probably switch this theme off, it’s a decent looking theme (although far from the best I’ve seen) with plenty of customization options.

Easier installation

The addition of allowing developers to define their admin username and password instead of being given a forgettable, randomly generated one is a blessing for anyone whos job involves setting up multiple sites a month. I can remember more than one occasion where I’ve had to go direct to the database to reset the password. This will be an understated but useful feature.

Wordpress MU collaboration

With vanilla wordpress 3.0, bloggers will be able to roll out multiple blogs running off the same backend. Although this includes no groundbreaking features that haven’t been seen in Wordpress MU, it is definately nice to have from the outset should a Wordpress project scope change half way through development.

Custom post types

Although there are many plugins out there that have fixed this issue (my favourite being Pods CMS, highly recommended even after WP3.0 comes out), Wordpress is going to get a lot easier from the outset to create a custom post type. Although you can do a lot with posts and pages, there are plenty of occasions where you may need a type of content on your site that can’t be categorized as either.

Menu Management

For any developer who has struggled to figure out the right combination of exludes and includes when using wp_list_pages(); this is going to be a stand out feature. Using a WYSIWYG approach to designing the menu, this will be endlessly useful and very nice when handing over to clients. Definatly a lot easier to teach a non technical person a drag and drop system than telling them to manage parameters in the wp_list_pages function.

General polish and a tidy up

Overall there seems to be a general tidy up to the codebase and graphics. Hoverovers seem crisp, pages are more responsive and we’re promised several pages worth of bug fixes ensuring there are no hangovers from the 2’s.

So, how can you prepare your site for the major update?

If you are a developer running a vanilla rollout of any of the later 2.x’s then there should be no issues for you as the core codebase behind Wordpress remains the same. If you are a plugin developer the best way to approach the update is to get the latest beta/release candidate version and throwing it on there. Considering WP3.0 is only weeks away from launching, the base code will more than likely remain the same – which should give you a good idea of how well (or not as the case may be) your plugin will be supported. If you have any concerns over how well your site or plugin will work with 3, I’d recommend keeping an eye on the forums or the bug tracking site.