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Web nourishment by John Ford and crew

Archive for the 'Tools' Category

WordPress 2.5 is officially out

John Ford Mar 29, 2008

WordPress 2.5

It’s official. WordPress 2.5 is now out with a crisp new admin interface and great new features. They’ve even redone the website. Here are some of my favorite changes:

  • A beautiful new admin interface.
  • A much more intuitive flow when making a post.
  • Multiple instant file uploads.
  • Thumbnail, medium and full-sized image options (and you can change the image dimensions in Settings).
  • A quick way to display your photos as a gallery
  • Easily add/edit tags so no more plugins are needed.
  • A visual editor that doesn’t break your code (this one is great for my clients).
  • Search now looks at posts and pages.

I’ve always thought that WordPress is one of the best blogging and content management systems. It’s incredibly intuitive for the user (even more so now) and extremely flexible for developers.

Thanks so much to everyone who has helped with WordPress!

Plugin Update: PDF Bookmark for Adobe Reader 8

John Ford Dec 21, 2007

Some of you may already be using the PDF bookmark plugin I put together for Adobe Reader. It provides a quick and easy way to bookmark the page your on and return back to that spot later. It’s especially handy when reading large PDF books.

Thanks to the input of Michael Hartl, I updated the plugin to work properly with Adobe Reader 8. Adobe turned on some security settings by default in the new Adobe Reader which broke the previous version of the plugin.

See the full details and download the plugin.

Plugin: Bookmark A Page In Your PDF

John Ford Sep 15, 2006

With the long, yet wonderful, books in PDF format these days (Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson with Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, Thomas Fuchs, and Andreas Schwarz [570 pages]; Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas, with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt [864 pages]) there needs to be a better way to digitally bookmark where you left off. For some reason Adobe Reader (Acrobat Reader) doesn’t have this capability built in. I found a plugin for Acrobat Reader to do multiple bookmarks per document from PDF Hacks. However, I really just want it to be simple like a physical book - you bookmark the page you’re on when you stop and go to that page when you pick back up. So here is my plugin to bookmark your page in Adobe Reader.

Download:

PDF Bookmark 1.1

Change Log:

  • 1.1 - Dec 20, 2007 - Update to work with Adobe Reader 8 due to security changes (app.trustedFunction)
  • 1.0 - Sep 15, 2006 - Initial release

Installation:

Adobe Reader 8 - copy pdf_bookmark.js to:

  • Mac: ~/Library/Acrobat User Data/8.0_x86/JavaScripts (or similar)
  • Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Adobe\Acrobat\8.0\JavaScripts (or similar)

Adobe Reader 7 - copy pdf_bookmark.js to:

  • Mac: ~/Library/Acrobat User Data/7.0/JavaScripts (or similar)
  • Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Adobe\Acrobat\7.0\JavaScripts (or similar)

Note: you may have to create the JavaScripts folder

Usage:

Open your document in Adobe Reader. Then choose Tools -> Bookmark from the menu. “Bookmark This Page” adds the bookmark. “Go To Bookmark” sends you to the bookmark you created. It remembers which PDF document you bookmarked so it works on all of your PDFs simultaneously. (Tested with Acrobat Reader 7 and Adobe Reader 8 (thanks Michael) on Mac OS X and Windows)

PDF Bookmark Plugin Screenshot (8.0)