As part of the team of men who went to Zimbabwe in June - I was amazed by the work being done to make a difference in the country of Zimbabwe by the Village of Hope and their work with children. One of the things that I discovered in working with them is that they don’t have a website to promote what they are doing and provide an information/communication portal for their current and potential supporters. I decided to donate my services to design and host the website because I believe so strongly in the work the Village of Hope is doing.

So without further ado, I’m announcing the launch of the brand new website for the Village of Hope in Zimbabwe (vohzimbabwe.com).

Coincidently, that is why there’s been some inactivity on this blog lately (and also why development of the Organize Series Plugin has been stalled)…

In my pursuit to become more literate in the web-development world I recently made a few purchases of technology books that I hope will accelerate my understanding of things like Ajax, DOM, Json, JavaScript, Java…etc. I know that there is a wealth of material available for free on the internets but there’s just something about a good book that makes learning so much easier. Key word there is good!

A good book I’ve just finished reading (and written a review on) is “Head Rush Ajax“by Brett McLaughlin. Thanks to the freaky layout and writing style (it’s definitely not your typical technical resource!) this was a book that I quickly worked through and at least now I have a firmer grasp of concepts that were just acquaintances before.

For instance, I now know:

• AJAX - isn’t a new language. It is simply a “method” of coding (using existing languages - JavaScript primarily) to enable visitors of a web-page interact with a page without having to reload it. Of course, I already knew of AJAXian goodness from using all the various web-apps that apply it - but it’s neat to know that it’s really not that hard to work with - it certainly isn’t as intimidating as I thought it would be.

Right on the heels of 1.6.1, one day later, I’m releasing another version of the Organize Series WordPress Plugin.? Again, it’s a minor bug fix - ordinarily some of this stuff I’d leave until I can add more features etc.? - but since my life is pretty busy lately I’ve decided to release any fixes as I do them so that it can benefit those using this plugin.? I never know how long it will be before I can work on it again.

Anyway, enough with that dribble…you can download the files on the page here.

I just finished version 1.6.1 of the plugin.? There’s nothing big in this version - just a minor bug fix and some added files to make it compatible with the new WordPress plugins page.? I want to thank Jim for his communication with me that alerted me to a potential problem with my plugin resulting in this bug fix.

You can find out more and download the Organize Series WordPress Plugin on this page.

I’ve just pushed live the new version of my Organize Series Plugin for WordPress.? I was going to hold off doing a new release until I got some more features added I had in mind but the bug fix that is in this publish couldn’t wait.? So without further ado here’s the scoop on what this version includes:

• BUG FIX: Blank screen/errors in the options panel when plugin installed in WordPress versions below 2.1.
• NEW FEATURE: You can now set how posts will be displayed on the series ?table of contents? page (i.e. ascending or descending, ordered by date, author, title etc.) This can be selected via the new options panel on the plugin options page. (NOTE: This appears to only work with WP 2.1+ for now - I?m still investigating if it works with other versions)
• NEW TEMPLATE TAG: ?is_series()? This tag will check for if the displayed category archive page is a series category. Returns true if it is, false if it isn?t.

As always, for the download and installation/upgrade and usage instructions, check out the plugin page.