I finally got around to releasing my script I use for toting my private WordPress notebook around on my iPod. It’s essentially a PHP page that creates a static HTML page with a load of JavaScript to selectively hide and show posts as they’re searched for.

This is my method for getting the resulting file onto my iPod. I’ve included it here in case it’s useful to someone.

Things you will need

• A jailbroken iPod/iPhone
• MobileTerminal (from Cydia)
• wget (from Cydia)
• file:// Schema in Safari (from Cydia)

Setting up the alias

Open MobileTerminal and type the following:

iPod:~ mobile$ nano .bashrc

This will either open your existing .bashrc file or create one for you in Nano.

The following command will create an alias that makes a backup of your previously downloaded export page and then downloads the latest version.

alias wp='cd; mv export.html export~.html; wget http://www.domain.com/pathtopage --output-document=export.html'

Note that if your blog is behind a password you will need to add --http-user=name and --http-password=pass to the wget part of the alias.

Now close the file by typing CTRL-O.

To make sure your .bashrc file loads when you start up your iPod you now need to create a .profile. Type the following:

iPod:~ mobile$ nano .profile

Then add the following to that file:

source $HOME/.bashrc

Close the file by typing CTRL-O.

Now any time you want to download your WP data just load up MobileTerminal and type wp. To load your offline page in Safari you need go to the URL file:///var/mobile/export.html.

At Oxeye Daisy we often build small websites (10ish pages). For a website of this size we may use WordPress and bend it into a CMS. While not ideal it does work quite well for our customers who want the convenience of being able to update their site without shelling out a lot of money for something bespoke.

Recently we’ve had to make some updates to a couple of CMS websites that were built by other agencies. Both times this involved learning each CMS and their idiosyncrasies. This is when using something ’standard’ would have been helpful. The only problem is I’ve tried Plone, Drupal and various others and found them to be way over complicated. I mean, if I can’t figure our how to add a page to a section of a website how can I expect customers to use it? A good CMS should be something that someone just ‘gets’, clear, intuitive, simple.

I think we’re getting near the point of having to build our own small scale CMS, which of course leads back to my previous problem with non-standard CMSes. I’ll be creating the same problem for someone else in the future. Unless I can find a straight forward off the shelf CMS this is what I can see my next in-house project being.

One thing I have always thought was missing from WordPress was the ability to resize images added to blog posts. Particularly for people who may not be Photoshop savvy (apparently they do exist).

The iMax plugin adds this functionality. It allows the blog admin to set various options including maximum width, height and file size. We’ve used it on the Your Tomorrow blog.

I’ve completed the redesign for this site. It comes not long after the previous revision but I wasn’t entirely happy with the style of that version. I went with a wider design for the first time, everything has more room to breathe and as its my personal site I’m not so concerned with designing for smaller monitors. I’ve also moved the blog to WordPress rather than continue adding bits of programming to the CMS - there’s no point reinventing the wheel.