I don’t usually talk much about my day-to-day life here, but that doesn’t mean I never do. This is one of those times. If you just want more tech talk check out the end of this post. The rest is all me whinging anyway. ;)
I need a break. A real break. I mean, I am technically on a break right now from school but it doesn’t really feel that way. I finished out my first year of school a couple weeks ago (26 years after graduating from high school, no less) and I thought “wow, I have an entire month that I can use to rest, catch up on some personal stuff, maybe clean out the garage ….” Unfortunately it is not turning out that way.
Instead I am writing this at 5:54 in the morning as this has been the first chance I have had to pay any attention at all to the blog. So what has been keeping me busy? Well, first, there is work. I did use a little of what would have been study time to modify the script I use to generate weekly work reports from Trac so that it now shows the amount of change for hours on each ticket (which is set in a “custom” field). And holy cow, I put in 58.5 hours last week. At least 8 of that doesn’t really count, though. I messed my back up and spent some time trying to work while under the influence of cyclobenzaprine which means that I wrote, scrapped and rewrote one class method at least 6 times before finally giving up. (Programming and drugs that make you stupid don’t mix!)
Aside from work I have been putting some time into a project for a non-profit that is kicking off on May 12th. I’m not allowed to say too much about it ahead of launch, but I can say that it is about raising awareness about ME/CFS and how badly it has been mismanaged and patients marginalized for the past 25 years.
Finally, I upgraded the WordPress plugin Shorten2Ping which I will continue to pimp as long as it keeps working so well. Of course I like my post tweets to have some hashtag love, so I do a little editing of the shorten2ping.php.
Here is a diff:
--- shorten2ping/shorten2ping.php 2010-04-12 10:22:34.000000000 -0700
+++ shorten2ping.mine/shorten2ping.php 2010-04-19 06:47:58.000000000 -0700
@@ -119,6 +119,15 @@
$post_url = get_permalink($post_id);
$post_title = strip_tags($post->post_title);
+ // add some tag bits here
+ $tags = wp_get_post_tags($post_id);
+ $my_tag_list = '';
+ if (is_array($tags)) {
+ foreach ($tags as $j=>$tag) {
+ $my_tag_list .= '#'.$tag->slug.' ';
+ }
+ }
+
$short_url_exists = get_post_meta($post_id, 'short_url', true);
if (empty($short_url_exists)) {
@@ -205,9 +214,19 @@
//get message from settings and process title and link
$message = $s2p_options['message'];
+ $message_bare_char_count = strlen(str_replace(array('[title]','[link]','[tags]'), '', $message));
+ $title_count = strlen($post_title);
+ $link_count = strlen($short_url);
+ $tag_count = strlen($my_tag_list);
+ $over = $message_bare_count + $title_count + $link_count + $tag_count - 140;
+ if ($over > 0 && $over <= $post_title/2) {
+ // if the overage is more than half the post title then skip it and let tags get truncated
+ $post_title = substr($post_title, 0, $title_count - $over);
+ }
$message = str_replace('[title]', $post_title, $message);
$message = str_replace('[link]', $short_url, $message);
-
+ $message = str_replace('[tags]', $my_tag_list, $message);
+
if ($s2p_options['ping_service'] == 'pingfm'){
send_pingfm($pingfm_user_key,$post_id,$message);
(You can download the diff as well.)
Ooops! Draft Saved at 6:23:27 am. And it is now 8:10, and this would still be a draft if I wasn’t closing browser tabs.