iRui.ac - Home of vSlider

I’m back!

Hello everybody!

No, iRui.ac is not dead. After a long (long, long, long, looooonggg…) period of inactivity, finally there is a new post. Yupee!

“What have you been doing?” you might ask. Well, tons of stuff. A lot has happened in my life since July, but I won’t bother you with details. Suffice to say that we’ve moved to a great new place, and I’m finally settled in. Well… not entirely true, there’s still some work needed, but enough has been done to call it “home” . In case you are wondering, we are now living in Almere, a city quite close to Amsterdam.

So, what’s next?

First let me just say that I’m still amazed on how many people are using the “cool stuff“… there are now hundreds of blogs out there (maybe thousands???) using vSlider, and even KBurnalizer, which started just as a fun experiment with Javascript and CSS, has become quite popular – even though it still has a few problems (long loading times anyone?). Also, I would like to thank everyone for the nice comments, emails and particularly the donations . And special note of thanks to the anonymous cool guy that sent me “India: A Celebration of Independence” book from my Amazon wish list – I’ve tried really hard to figure out who you were, so that I could thank you personally, but no luck. So, whoever you are, thanks!

As for plans, I have a couple of new ideas, but I don’t want to go into them right now… For starters, I’m considering some improvements to existing stuff, and later on we’ll see.

Last, but not least, there are three new language files for vSlider: one German and two Italian. Thanks to buebo, Giovanni and LELE …. Check them out on the languages page!

L8r

I’m moving…

Hi everybody! Sorry for not replying to emails and comments, but I’m currently moving to a new house - it’s a lot more work than I thought! I rarely have the time to even touch my computer…
So, have some patience, and I will get back to you as soon as I have everything organized and sorted out (and actually have a place to type!).
In the meantime, if you see requests for help from other users and you feel you can help them out, please do so. The power is in the community.

More languages available

Two more translations for vSlider have been added: Danish and Brazilian Portuguese. Thanks guys!

Version 2.1 is out

As promised, here’s a new version of vSlider. Amazingly, it actually contains all the features I planned for!
In a nutshell, here’s what’s new:

Internationalization support
Widgets support
Safari support for KBurnalizer (and don’t get me started on Safari… weird stuff…)
A few extra things

I’ve also updated the standard KBurnalizer library and the Gallery2 module to include the Safari fix.

So, go on to my Cool Stuff page and check them out.

And a big thanks to three people that helped making this latest version possible: dr3w, Mike and Simon. Thanks guys!

Plans…

Today I got a big scare… iRui.ac was down and for a moment there it looked like I had lost all my files! I contacted the hosting company, but they were already on top of it. Apparently the server disk was failing, and they were already arranging a replacement one – it seems that everything is back to normal.
Anyway, updates have been non-existing (as usual), due to my lack of time (also as usual ). But I do have plans to update a few things:

Fix the problem with the Gallery2 link on vSlider (a few people complained about this, and I already posted a solution, but I want to make it part of the theme anyway…)
Maybe add support for Widgets. I personally don’t feel like I need them, but they are becoming really popular, and it doesn’t seem to be very difficult to add Widget support on the vSlider sidebar.
Try (and I emphasize “try!“) to have KBurnalizer working properly on Safari. No offense to Mac users, but somehow Safari always seems to misbehave – why can’t everybody just use Firefox?
I want to take a look into internationalization support for vSlider. I’ve seen really a lot of non-English site out there using vSlider, so it might be a good idea to make it easier for them. If I do this, then I will kindly ask for translations from you guys!

That’s about it… stay tuned.

Big Announcement x3

Finally! After a long, long wait, I managed to finish the new version of vSlider.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… vSlider 2.0! (5 stars for originality on the name )

This new version is ready for the very latest versions of WordPress and Gallery2, so it should solve the problems of everybody who is having problems since they decided to upgrade. It also has a lot of new features, including an administration page for the theme.

In fact, this is a triple announcement, since there are in fact three new entries for my cool stuff page:

KBurnalizer is a fun project that I started a few months back when I was tinkering with the idea of making a slideshow in a web page using the Ken Burns effect, with nothing but JavaScript and CSS. Well, I proved it’s possible. I was rather pleased with the results, so I ended up making a Gallery2 module for it and using it on vSlider itself (see the new fading header on top? That’s not Flash )

Anyway, check out all the new toys (there’s quite a lot of them at one time), and let me know what you think. As usual, feedback is welcome on any problems you might find.

By the way, did you know I have a donation page (hint )?

New version in the works

First of all, a big “sorry” to everybody who’s been writing to me with questions and asking for help with vSlider. I started working in a new project for a client which involves a lot of traveling (really a LOT) and consequently my free time completely evaporated. I simply can’t answer all the emails I get, although I do read them and I am aware of some problems caused by new versions of WP and G2.
The good news is that I started working on new versions of the themes. I don’t intend to make any drastic changes to the design, but mostly concentrate in making them easier to manage, add a few new features and overall upgrade them to support the latest changes of WP/G2.
So, have a little patience and good things may come

New year, new life, old bugs

Most people like to think of a new year like a new start. Although the 1st of January is mostly an arbitrary date set up according to our arbitrary calendar, the feeling is real, and that’s what matters. In my case, it is VERY real, since the New Year really brought me lots of changes, most of important them being the start of a new job.
Unfortunately, because of these changes, the holidays, etc, etc, I haven’t had much time for this site, and I got quite some email mostly about vSlider, that is already pilling up.
Over the coming period I will try to get things “back to normal” (although I think that “normal”never really happens to me).

But here’s a start: a lot of people have been asking me about the problem that they only get the time on their posts, and not the date, when using vSlider. That’s very true, and there are reasons and solutions for that.
First the reason: when I was designing vSlider for my site, I had the intention from the start to use a plugin called Time Since. I was having some problems with it, and it worked much better if I only used one field instead of the usual date + time duo. So, the theme went public with only one field on the PHP code (it was working fine for me! )
Now, possible solutions:

Change the Default Time Format on the WordPress options page. For instance, I’m currently using “D j, F Y”. WP is pretty flexible with this, so you can use date and time fields combined.
Edit the PHP code and add the missing information (c’mon, it’s not that difficult! )
Wait for the next version of vSlider I’m not making any promises on when is this coming out, but I will definitely make this feature better next time around.

Hope this helps.

And Happy New Year!
Cheers.

Yahoo buys them all

Del.icio.us has tags and Yahoo bought it.
Flickr has tags and Yahoo bought it.
Hmmm… so… logic tells us that if anything has tags and alive on the Internet, Yahoo will eventually buy it.
Interesting.

Something lurks…

There’s been almost no activity on the blog in this last week. I’ve been so ridiculously busy… *sigh*
But am I working on some new fun experiments which might turn out to be good candidates for the “cool stuff” page. But I need some FREE time to figure out some details - why are the days so damn small!?
Stay tuned….