So what I’ve been doing is setting up a new action using add_action for the following two action types:

• wp_ajax_<myaction>
• wp_ajax_nopriv_<myaction>

According to the documentation that should generate a hook to support both registered users (wp_ajax_<myaction>) and unregistered users (wp_ajax_nopriv_<myaction>). Which sounds great, since my theme should work for both type of users .

On the front-end I’ve created a Javascript method that should call the ajax command using the ‘wp-admin/admin-ajax.php’. With as action parameter the name of my ajax method. So in theory I should be setup correctly to handle ajax, but this is where the theory and actual situation start to differ.

To test my new theme I’ve been using the preview mode of WordPress, after all I don’t want to kill any existing feature or activate the theme before it is done. But for some reason my nicely setup Ajax hooks aren’t working as advertised.

Now I’m not going to be boring you with all kinds of tutorials on how to develop on Android, or give you any other clues on this subject. I just don’t know anything about Android development, well not yet anyhow. But some good reading material to get you on the right path might be:

• The Android development guide, all you ever will need to know about Android development (bit technical though)
• Writing your first Android app, good tutorial to get started in Android

The only thing I have learned so far is that I don’t really like the way of designing a UI for the Android. It’s just way to basic with XML files describing how the UI should look like. Feels like going back to 1990 when designing a UI was done in code rather then with a UI design tool.

It’s been a rather busy couple of weeks since my last update, but work is slowly progressing. So far I designed most of the UI elements, but I ended up in some trouble with the browser compatibility. As any web developer will know it’s a hell to make a website compatible with older browsers, especially the older Internet Explorer versions. And as this is supposed to be a lightweight theme it means I’ll have to rely on as much of CSS3 as possible. Which also means making separate sylesheets for the older browsers to display the content the same way.

So far I’ve built the following features in the new WordPress Theme:

• Support of the social networks
• Browser detection to better enable CSS2 / CSS3 features or mobile version
• Various hooks into the WordPress system to change behaviour of WordPress
• Design of the various elements of WordPress, being posts / pages and categories

Now I still have a long way to go before the new theme is ready for deployment, but I’m slowly continuing the work on the new theme. Just to give you some insight on how the final version of the theme will look I’ve included some screen-shots of the latest development release.

Screenshot of new layout

Even when all the design stuff is done I’ll still have to do some integration of analytics software and the capabilities to show ads. As well as hooking back in all the various plug-ins I’ve been using for WordPress for the past couple of years.

To be honest the tracking of changes works fine, for the most part. But what happens when you made a change sometime in the past, you know roughly what you did but not which files were affected or which branch was used. Yes I sometimes don’t know what version (branch) of the software a fix was made in. In any normal version control system you would open up the history log and start searching for a comment you entered. That would result in some result popping up, and with any luck the change-set you were looking for.

Alas Microsoft in all its wisdom decided that searching is overrated and not needed for a version control system. After all you can read through the entire history log to find the change-set can’t you. Ah you can’t, silly you!

Here is a quick work around for this ‘missing’ feature:

• Open up the History view on the ROOT of the TFS server
• Scroll all the way down, in most systems that will be just a few thousand change-sets
• Select all and copy
• Open Excel and paste

Voila now you can search. At least Excel offers a way to search your Team Foundation Server history.

So I started looking into a way to let my web application determine what browser was visiting and what capabilities it had. Since this was for the new WordPress theme I’m developing it had to be in PHP and be sorta light-weight.

First thing was to figure out the basic browser that was visiting. This can be done by doing a simple strpos call in PHP on the user agent property. Having a list of the various user agents helped, I found just such a list at UserAgentString. A brief summary for some common browsers is below.

  $user_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
  $IE        = strpos($this->_user_agent, 'MSIE') > -1;
  $IPad      = strpos($this->_user_agent, 'iPad') > -1;
  $Firefox   = strpos($this->_user_agent, 'Firefox/') > -1;
  $Chrome    = strpos($this->_user_agent, 'Chrome/') > -1;
  $Opera     = strpos($this->_user_agent, 'Opera/') > -1;
  $Android = strpos($this->_user_agent, 'Android') > -1;

As you can see determining the basic browser type is pretty simple. But to be able to determine if CSS3 is supported you will also need to locate the version of the browser. Keeping in mind that IE9+, Firefox 4+, Opera 10+ and Chrome are the only versions that support CSS3. The check for this is slightly different for each version. But you can do it easily with a regular expresion.

 // For all non IE browsers
 $locator;
 if ($Firefox) $locator = "Firefox\/";
 if ($Android) $locator = "Android\s";
 if ($Chrome) $locator = "Chrome\/";
 if ($Opera) $locator = "Version\/";
 preg_match('/'.$locator.'([0-9]{1,4}(.[0-9]{1,3})+)/', $user_agent, $version);

 // For IE
 preg_match('/MSIE\s([0-9]{1,2}.[0-9]{1,2})/', $user_agent, $version);
 if (count($version) > 1) $version = $version[1];
 else $version = 0;

Having the version and the type of browser allows us to do all kinds of fancy browser specific stuff. Mostly introduce hacks for IE7 (yes many are needed), or add CSS3 support.

We are using various IDE’s for editing our Java projects, meanly because different developers like different IDE’s. Personally I’m using Netbeans, which has perfect Subversion, Git, CVS and Perforce support. Some other developers use IntelliJ from Netbrains. Which is sorta expensive and the version we are using has no support for TFS at all.

So when I want to edit a simple file I first locate it in my IDE, which takes me about 5 seconds. Then I need to look up its location on disk, followed by opening the completely useless Team Exporer. Then I again need to look up the file in TE, followed by a check-out. The whole process to the point that the file is checked out and ready to go takes probably about 1 minute, each and every time.

On an average day I probably waste up to an hour checking out files, and commiting them back into the version control system.

To ease the burden a bit I’ve tried the SvnBridge tool to link my IDE’s Subversion system with TFS, but this tool has many flaws. Just a few of which are:

• No longer appears to be developed
• A merge in TE causes all updates to fail, you need to do a clean checkout again
• Random update failures due to commits of other developers

So for now I’m stuck. Really, really, really stuck.

I mean who has the money to buy every possible phone out there, or every tablet.  Well there are some ways to do this without having all of the devices. Here is a short list:

• Run it through the validator at http://validator.w3.org/mobile/
• Use a simulator for testing like:
  • iPhoney, for iPhone testing
  • iBBDemo2, for iPad testing
• Doing a simple resolution check, for IE this can be done by hitting F12 and selecting Tools -> Resize
• Checking the load times on different connection speeds, using Fiddler 2 by changing Rules -> Performance -> Simulate modem speeds

So what are resolutions to check for with mobile devices, well here is a short list.

• 480 x 800 (default Android 1.5 – 2.2)
• 540 x 960 (newer Android phones 2.3.3)
• 640 x 960 (iPhone4)
• 1280 x 800 (various Android 3 tablets)

Developing a website with JQuery / Ajax and advanced JavaScript prototypes isn’t anything new to me. But having all of these features and still make the site indexable is! So far I’m stuck at the simple point that crawlers don’t support JavaScript, so no go for that part. It looks like I will have to create a module for the WordPress plugin to detect what type of user is visiting the website. Serving the search engines a version that will not use any of the advanced features that normal browsers will support.

Besides the issue with the indexing there is still the task of getting all the pages on the website to be tracked with Google Analytics. Currently that is easy, though the website is dynamic each page is a new request to the server. But using advanced features like Ajax stops that in its tracks. Currently I don’t even know if it is possible to track pages when the actual URL doesn’t change, just the content of the page. If it is possible to do this I would have to build a module to do so.

So after just ranting and brain storming for a few seconds I already found to nice features that would have to be build. Another person might call them serious issues, but I prefer good challenges. At least for the moment I do. Not even mentioning the fact that I have to build a complete new template for WordPress too.

• Redesigning this blog, to bring it up to speed with the latest possibilities from WordPress
• Building of the UML Design tool that I started on some months ago
• Defining the specs of a neural algorithm to build a user centric database (more on this to come in the future here)
• Continued development on the Synchronizer tool, hoping to release version 3.0 soon

And that’s just the work that I do in my rare spare time next to a full-time job.

I started out by creating a custom component, which inherits from the Panel. This would give me pretty much a blank object that could be added to the GUI. The painting part on its own is not that difficult either. Done that hundreds of times. The problem is in adding the various objects to paint on top of the panel to the panel before drawing commences.

Ok, I’ll try to explain a little better. I keep track of what to draw in an array inside the custom panel. This because these objects contain more information then just how to draw. But they are not part of the component list of the panel. I need to add them dynamically just before drawing and remove them again after drawing. But I’ve yet to find the correct way of doing this.

Tried adding them in the onPaint method, but this doesn’t trigger them to be painted. So I’ll probably have to intercept the WM_PAINT message sent to the panel and attach the