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Tag: Programming

Hiding the “Welcome to your new WordPress site” message

Sitting here working on setting up a WordPress network and hit a snag. New sites have a giant “Welcome to your new WordPress site” message when someone logs in for the first time.

Now, I’m not against the message; and WordPress should definitely market where ever they can. But I’d like to be able to customize the layout a bit. Still plan on keeping links to WP and all of that, just want to add in some of my own welcome message.

Googling didn’t turn up anything except editing the core WordPress code which is a terrible idea. I don’t want to have to redo it every time WP upgrades. And it looks like there isn’t a hook or filter that can make it easy. So I had to make it ugly.

Teaching recursion with Scratch BYOB – take 2

This is a follow up from a post I did about a year and a half ago on using Scratch BYOB to teach recursion. The original way of defining parameters in BYOB were a bit clunky, but it’s gotten much better in recent versions so it seems a good time for an update.

A bit about BYOB
If you haven’t tried Scratch in your intro computer science classes run, don’t walk, and give it a try. It’s early October and our intro students just finished their first pass through a unit on list processing. There’s no way we would be where we are if we had to worry much about syntax, and Scratch takes care of that by letting students drag and drop pieces together rather than worry about classes, methods, braces, and semicolons.

Curved corners script for Photoshop

I’ve been looking for an excuse to play around with scripting in Photoshop. Today I found one. I came across a series of actions that rounded off the corners of an image to get it ready for uploading to a web site. The problem is that it was a series of actions. As in one action for each radii. One for 5px, one for 10px, one for 25px, etc. That’s just screaming to be scripted with a quick prompt asking for a radius.

So that’s what I did. About half an hour and I had a script that would prompt for a radius and then round off whatever image was opened.

Event tracking with JavaScript

A while back Google added event tracking to Analytics so you could keep track of Javascript and Flash events.  Pretty cool feature.

Being the stat junkie that I wanted to use this to keep track of outgoing clicks on a photography forum of mine.  But I didn’t want to have to go through every link prior to displaying the page.  Seemed like a perfect time for a little bit of Javascript.