Author Archives: Alex (Viper007Bond)

Calling iPhone App “Gas Cubby” Users — I Need Your Help!

Do you use Gas Cubby on your iPhone? If so, would you mind helping me out by sending me an export of your data?

I’m writing a new WordPress plugin that will allow you display data similar to Gas Cubby’s data on your website. You’ll have the option to manually enter gas fillups and such, but you’ll also be able to import from the Gas Cubby app. I’ve been using my data as a test and it’s working great but I’d appreciate being able to use a larger sample size.

If you’d like to help me out, here’s how:

  1. Open up Gas Cubby and press the left arrow until you get to “All Vehicles” shown at the bottom.
  2. Tab the magnifying glass in the upper-left so that it says “Search” at the top.
  3. An “Export” button will now be shown in the upper-right. Press it.
  4. An e-mail prompt will show up. Send the e-mail to “gascubby” at this domain (viper007bond.com).

While there isn’t really any personal data in the export file other than perhaps your gas station location if you fill that in, I still promise not to share this information with anyone. I’ll only be using it for testing in my local machine’s WordPress installation.

Thanks!

wp_list_pluck() Is An Awesome WordPress Function

If you’re a WordPress developer and you don’t know about wp_list_pluck(), then listen up!

Say you have an array called $posts that contains this:

[0] => stdClass Object
	[ID] => 675
	[post_author] => 5
	[post_date] => 2010-07-25 19:40:01
	[post_date_gmt] => 2010-07-25 19:40:01
	[post_content] => This site is using the standard ...
	[post_title] => About The Tests

[1] => stdClass Object
	[ID] => 501
	[post_author] => 6
	[post_date] => 2010-08-01 09:42:26
	[post_date_gmt] => 2010-08-01 16:42:26
	[post_content] => The last item in this page's content ...
	[post_title] => Clearing Floats

[2] => stdClass Object
	[ID] => 174
	[post_author] => 5
	[post_date] => 2007-12-11 16:25:40
	[post_date_gmt] => 2007-12-11 06:25:40
	[post_content] => Level 1 of the reverse hierarchy test ...
	[post_title] => Level 1
	)

[3] => stdClass Object
	[ID] => 173
	[post_author] => 5
	[post_date] => 2007-12-11 16:23:33
	[post_date_gmt] => 2007-12-11 06:23:33
	[post_content] => Level 2 of the reverse hierarchy test.
	[post_title] => Level 2

How would you go about getting all of the post_title values? Well obviously you could do something like this:

$post_titles = array();
foreach ( $posts as $key => $post ) {
	$post_titles[$key] = $post->post_title;
}

Sure, it’s not that complicated but that can get repetitive in your code. So how about this instead?

$post_titles = wp_list_pluck( $posts, 'post_title' );

Much easier, right? :)

Thanks Michael Fields for reminding me about this great function!

Canon G11 vs. Canon S100: Big Brother Meets His New Little Brother

As much as I love my Canon PowerShot G11, it’s just too big. It technically fits in my pocket but it’s uncomfortable to walk around with it in my pocket. So after seeing my co-worker Daniel Bachhuber’s Canon PowerShot S100 a few weeks back, I just had to have one for myself. Besides shooting just about as good of quality images (if not better) than my G11, it also shoots full 1080p video (compared to 640×480!!) and has built-in GPS tagging of photos. Awesome!

Sublime 2: Open New Tabs On The Right

One of the few things that bugged me about my favorite text editor, Sublime 2, is that new tabs would open up next to the current tab instead on the far right. Since I usually have about a half-dozen tabs open at once, this made keeping them in a sane order frustrating.

Thankfully Stylishmedia has written a simple little Sublime 2 plugin that makes new tabs open on the right side. Perfect. :)

Using Traits In PHP 5.4

I just read a great article by Shameer C. about traits in PHP 5.4. I’m really looking forward to using this functionality. Basically you can create things called traits, modules if you will, that you can then include into classes that you are writing.

For example if you need to deal with the filesystem, you could load in a filesystem trait that provides you with pre-written functionality. Or if you needed to make remote requests, you could load in a HTTP trait. Classes can only extend a single other class but you can use as many traits as you want.

This will be so useful!

Thanks Mo for sending me the link!