Author: Brian

Hi all!

Remember me?

I’m the guy that pretty much disappeared off the face of the earth back in May! I have been THOROUGHLY enjoying my new job at b5media. And there’s been soooooo much to do at b5 that I’ve not been taking the time I should have been taking to visit with you guys. When I started at b5 the posted blog count was 185 or something like that. The count is currently 260 blogs. Yes, we’ve added 75 new blogs in the last four months. And there are a good many more blogs on their way.

As a result of five months of fun and mayhem (Heck, I’ve even been out to WordCamp and had supper with Matt Mullenweg and the whole automattic gang). I’ve got loads of tips to share with you, things I’ve learned to do better. What enables me to do that is that we’ve just hired a great new employee, Corey Shaffer. He was my student for the 2007 Google Summer of Code project. He’s been a tremendous help at b5 and has helped tip the balance between the day to day tasks of mananging a existing network of 22 dozen blogs and the need for forward progress.

So, now I feel that I can responsibly take some time to get back into the WordPress world on my own again too. Oh I’ve still been out helping other with their blogs. I helped my sister with a site for the family of my Brother in Law’s army unit: The 298 Sandbandits. I also helped a friend get his own blog running: Iggy the Biker. But I haven’t done much for just me.

Well in October, that’s gonna change. I’m starting the month by falling back to my old tried and true and I’m posting a Delphi program I wrote tonight. It’s a really simple program that I’m going to find incredibly useful.

All it does is reverse the slashes of what is in the clip board. How is that useful? Well, in my setup I work in a Telnet (SSH) window half the time and half the time I use SFTPDrive to map the b5media resources to my local drives. Well when I am in telnet my paths might look like this: /var/www/blogname/.htaccess. But if I want open up that .htaccess file in Notepad++, I have to change the path to look like y:\var\www\blogname\.htaccess. Now I have a simple way to do that. In fact I just used it to convert the slashes. I’ve got a shortcut to that program on an auto-hide taskbar on the left side of my screen. So I just click it and boom the slashes are reversed (again) like this: /var/www/blogname/.htaccess. That is sooo awesome.

And it was sooo simple. I’ve been wanting to write this for ages. I actually did write it in Delphi 5 but it didn’t work under Vista (which came on my laptop). I’ve now rewritten it using CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 (which is simply awesome). And it works great!

Here’s the code & exe in a zip: http://www.thecodecave.com/downloads/delphi/SlashFix.zip
program SlashFix;

[delphi]

uses
Forms, Clipbrd, SysUtils;

{$R *.res}

var
S: String;
begin
Application.Initialize;
Application.Title := ‘Slash Fix from TheCodeCave.com’;
Application.Run;
S := Clipboard.AsText;
if (pos(‘/’, S) > 0)
then S := stringreplace(S, ‘/’, ‘\’, [rfReplaceAll])
else S := stringreplace(S, ‘\’, ‘/’, [rfReplaceAll]);
Clipboard.AsText := S;
end.

[/delphi]

Here’s the exe only: http://www.thecodecave.com/downloads/delphi/SlashFix.exe

Of course the version I use is tweaked a bit to work specifically with my common tasks at b5 and will be growing even more. I’m sure you can thing of ways to automate the tasks you do everyday in the same way.

Any way, more tomorrow. There’s another b5 blog that is launching tomorrow, and I’ve got to tweak somethinb befor it launches. Here you can check it out: http://www.LadiesCourt.com/ which is all about Women’s basketball. I just wish that the Cleveland Rockers were still around to be featured on it. My kids went to a number of cleveland Rockers games and we have still have some logo material around.