avatar

Andres Jaimes

Creating Shortcodes in WordPress

Shortcodes enable developers to create special kinds of content, following the idea of macros. One very famous short code is “gallery” needed to insert a gallery of images into a post. The good thing about shortcode’s is that final users are free to decide where to insert them. WordPress’s Shortcode API handles all the tricky parsing, making developers life much easier. The following is a snippet for a Shortcode – in order to make it work you have to add it to your functions.

Add a Thumbnail to Admin Post Columns in WordPress

Here is a snippet to add 64×64 images to the Admin Post Columns in WordPress. Having thumbnails may result extremely helpful, specially if you have hundreds of posts. You have to copy and paste the following code into the functions.php file of your theme. function posts_columns($defaults){ $defaults['the_post_thumbs'] = __('Thumbs'); return $defaults; } function posts_custom_columns($column_name, $id){ if($column_name === 'the_post_thumbs'){ echo the_post_thumbnail( array(64, 64) ); } } add_filter('manage_posts_columns', 'posts_columns'); add_action('manage_posts_custom_column', 'posts_custom_columns', 10, 2);  Instead of array(64, 64) you can also use default image sizes like ‘featured_thumbnail’, ‘thumbnail’, ‘medium’, ‘large’ and ‘full’.

How I made my HP LaserJet P1102w work with my iPad

I got an HP LaserJet P1102w about a year ago, so long before I thought I was going to get an Apple’s iOS device. I purchased it just because I thought it would be useful to have a printer that could work wirelessly. At that time I made it work using wireless, but for some reason it stopped working. I didn’t care because it was very simple to connect it via USB to my computer and get my stuff done.

Download YouTube videos using Java

From time to time we all have needed to show a YouTube video where no Internet connection is available. This program will allow you to download a video from YouTube for later playback. It is important to say that YouTube constantly changes its video URL, so someday it may need some rework. The following code was tested on Aug 12, 2012 and it works. Have a good day.  /** * YouTubeDownloader * * Modified by Andres Jaimes https://andres.

Free Image Resizer for Windows

This time I want to share with you a Windows application for image resizing. It’s a fact, size matters. That is why Image Resizer can be very useful for sharing pictures through email, uploading images to websites or posting them to social networks. If your images are smaller, then it will take you less time to share them. This application can load a list of jpeg, gif, png or bmp files, resize them and then put them on a selected folder.

How to avoid spam on Android's message bar

Recently, I started to get some really anoying spam messages from an unknown application on my phone’s message bar. Different icons were showing like stars, plus signs, check marks and so on. When you select any of this messages your browser opens and takes you to the leadbolt website. These ads started to become something annoying and I started to wonder if they were messing with my personal information.  How to proceed In order to identify the offender app, you have to install AirPush Detector (free app) written by Dan Bjorge from the Play Store.

10 WordPress plugins you should have

This time I would like to make a list of recommended WordPress plugins. They are alphabetically sorted and have many different purposes. The descriptions shown were taken right from the WordPress description. Here we go: 1. Comment Rating By Bob King Description: Allows visitors to rate comments in a Like vs. Dislike fashion with clickable images. Poorly-rated & highly-rated comments can be displayed differently. This plugin is simple and light-weight.

5 tips to get good pictures in low light conditions

I recently got an assignment to cover a music school’s annual concert. But it was not as easy I thought it was going to be. First of all, the concert took place in a very dark auditorium. There was just one working spot light pointing to the right side of the stage. The sun was bright outside and there some windows right behind the stage. For some reason, that I did not understand, they didn’t allow me to use a flash.

Useful vim commands

Even though we have many sophisticated GUI text editors, there is one that has passed all time tests: vi. vi is a text editor created originally for Unix in 1976. Are you kidding? 1976? Why should I even bother to know it exists? Because that is the only text editor you will find for sure in any Unix like command line environment, that includes any Unix flavor, Linux and Macs. Believe me, there are many times when you have no other way to edit files (like webpages, php’s, css’s) but from the command line.

A basic .vimrc configuration file for vim users

.vimrc is the configuration file for vim. Upon execution vim will read the contents of this file setting up a customized environment. You have to save this file in your home directory. It is important to notice that the commands should not include the initial colon (:). Here are some useful commands: syntax on " syntax highlighing set number " show line numbers set ruler " show the cursor position all the time set ignorecase " ignore case when searching set hlsearch " highlight searches set tabstop=4 " number of spaces of tab character set shiftwidth=4 " number of spaces to (auto)indent set autoindent " always set auto indenting on set smartindent " smart indent set cindent " cindent If you are using vi instead of vim, then save your configuration to ~/.