The method covered in the patent includes “generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items.” — PC World

Apple sues HTC for violations on 20 patents

Here’s the actual filing that includes the titles of each of the patents including:

• Object oriented graphic system – granted 1995
• List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display – granted 2008
• Object oriented event notification system with listener registration of both interests and methods – granted 2002

What kinds of Inventions can be Protected?

An invention must, in general, fulfill the following conditions to be protected by a patent. It must be of practical use; it must show an element of novelty, that is, some new characteristic which is not known in the body of existing knowledge in its technical field. This body of existing knowledge is called ” prior art“. The invention must show an inventive step which could not be deduced by a person with average knowledge of the technical field. Finally, its subject matter must be accepted as “patentable” under law. In many countries, scientific theories, mathematical methods, plant or animal varieties, discoveries of natural substances, commercial methods, or methods for medical treatment (as opposed to medical products) are generally not patentable. — World Intellectual Property Organization

At an Apple press event, CEO Steve Jobs shows off the company’s new iBooks app. Users can now browse, read reviews, read a sample excerpt, or just buy books–and the book downloads to a virtual “book shelf.” The software has the support of five of the largest publishers, including Simon & Schuster. (from ZDNet…)

This could be a lot of fun…

My wife writes for the nycmoms blog. She wanted to show a list of her recent blogs on her personal blog.

Nycmoms exposes a single feed aggregating recent posts across all authors.

Create a feed

My first iteration was to filter this feed through Yahoo Pipes. Pipes provides a graphical interface for chaining rules for manipulating web content and exposing it in a feed.

I used the “fetch feed” module pointed to the recent posts feed, connected it to the filter module set to only permit items where the author.name contained my wife’s handle.

This produced a correct result. However, only one or two of my wife’s posts are in the “recent posts” feed at any given time.

For the next iteration I found an alternative source outside the blog itself. Being a Yahoo tool, pipes provides a Yahoo search module. So, I searched for the phrase “Posted by KathieH” restricted to the site, nycmomsblog.com.

This produced more but less precise results. It includes additional pages such as my wife’s bio and sorted by relevance not post date.

I used the sort module on the item.updatedon field in the rss feed.

Next I used the filter module to exclude anything that was not an actual post identified by the term: “NYC Moms: KathieH” and piped out to rss.

Then I used the RSS widget in wordpress to expose this feed on my wife’s blog. Done!

Consume the feed

Except, my wife’s blog began suffering from the dreaded “Fatal Error: Allowed Memory Size” error in the simplepie library used by the RSS widget.

Well documented on the web, this is caused by my service provider’s decision to restrict accounts to 32MB of memory for PHP script execution. This and the 50MB-200MB storage limits were reasonable when I first signed up with my ISP ten years ago but is about as appropriate as using a 80286 processor now.

I decided to switch from server side processing to client side.

Luckily, Yahoo Pipes exposes feeds in the JSONP format. JSON is easily parsed by Javascript in the browser. JSONP is an established workaround (i.e. hack) that allows the client to make requests to third party URL’s without triggering the cross site security restrictions built into current browsers. It simply wraps the data response in a prefix that the browser parses as a function (allowed) as opposed to pure data (not allowed).

Wordpress already uses the jQuery library which is well documented by examples on how to request, parse and render a feed.

I used the getJSON function to retrieve and parse the feed. It is exposed as a nested array containing at the top level, key/value pairs associated with the entire feed and an array of items containing the actual posts.

I loop through the value.items format them into HTML and append them into a div with the id nycmoms_posts. Probably overkill given how fast this all works but I display a loading indicator which I fade out when the loop is complete (from Kyle Meyer).

FLL is a global program created to get children excited about science and technology. A hands-on program for ages 9 to 16 (9 to 14 in the U.S. and Canada), FLL uses Challenges based on real world scientific problems to engage children in research, problem solving, and engineering. The cornerstone of the program is its Core Values, which emphasize friendly sportsmanship, learning, and community involvement. (more…)

• Beneficial change results from cycles of learning, doing and self-reflection.
• Success derives from delivering small things of value regularly and often.
• A discreet piece of work is either done or it is not done.
• Better to risk a bad decision than make no decision at all.
• The wisest decision is made just before it can be most efficiently acted upon and no earlier.
• Most features will receive little or no use. 60% of what you want is better than 100%.
• Plans document one scenario that will not happen and describe some other application than the one that was built.
• On time and on budget are not synonyms for success.
• In human endeavor, every enlightening truth contains a lie. The road to hell is paved with…

Do you really need to link out to all your buddies in your blogroll site wide? Or is it perhaps wiser to just do that on your front page?

I want to link out on my homepage but I don’t need my sidebar to extend two screens below the content on my individual post pages.

So, it appears desirable to have elements of the sidebar (e.g. the blogroll and external social networking arcana) only appear on the homepage of my blog.

Thanks to some sample code from wpcandy.com, this was trivially easy to implement.

I modified the functions.php in my theme to register three sidebars. I called them Top Right Sidebar, Front Page Sidebar, and Bottom Right Sidebar.


if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'Top Right Sidebar',
'before_widget' => '', // Removes <li>
'after_widget' => '', // Removes </li>
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'Bottom Right Sidebar',
'before_widget' => '', // Removes <li>
'after_widget' => '', // Removes </li>
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));


Then I modified my sidebar.php to render those three sidebars if the dynamic_sidebar function exists also making the Front Page Sidebar conditional on is_front_page().

<?php
if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar('Top Right Sidebar') ) : else :
?>
//default markup for the top sidebar goes here
<?php endif; ?>
//renders only if the current page is the front page, i.e. is_front_page()
<?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') &&
is_front_page() && dynamic_sidebar('Front Page Sidebar') ) {} ?>
<?php
if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar('Bottom Right Sidebar') ) : else :
?>
//default markup for the bottom sidebar goes here
<?php endif; ?>

In my widgets admin I now have three sidebars listed:

• They are defined in my theme’s functions.php.
• They render stacked one on top of the other based on the markup in sidebar.php.
• I can populate them in the widget admin.
• The middle bar only appears on the homepage.

I want one theme that I can quickly re-configure to create multiple blogs along different topics with different color/graphic schemes. I want easy maintenance so I’d love to share one instance of the theme across these different instances.

We’re using enough different plugins that WordPress Mu isn’t yet worth fighting. So database options and the Settings API seemed the best way.

The documentation on how to extend a theme this way is not so easy to find but there are plenty of examples. They tend to break the process into steps but don’t give as much sense of what you actually get and how to use it.

I based my code on this example: http://blog.starscapetheme.com/2008/05/31/create-settings-page-for-theme/

After the fact, I found this description which seems well written: http://www.pixelace.com/2009/theme-options-for-wordpress-27/

I created a menu item and a corresponding properties form:

My form adds three properties which are stored in the WordPress wp_options table and easily exposed on template pages

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php $options = get_option('vertical'); echo $options['vertical_custom_css_url']; ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />

Here’s the actual code I added to the functions.php page of the theme. If you don’t have a functions.php you can just create one in your theme folder. You need to make sure the code below is wrapped in “<?php” “?>” tags.