Viewfinder Design » Downloads

Book Review Custom Post Type

Administrator — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 17:10:42 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve updated the Book Review plugin, mainly because it was complicated to write and with each release of WordPress I largely had to rewrite it. And because most of the code it used emulated core WP functionality there wasn’t a lot of help anywhere to guide me how things had changed.

I fell back on using the More Fields plugin.

In WordPress 3 though, came the option for Custom Post Types. So, earlier in the week I rolled up my sleeves and, with the help of come excellent tutorials (mainly this one by Justin Tadlock), wrote a custom post type specifically for Book Reviews.

This basically adds fields for:

Author
Whether you recommend it
Book cover (optional)
Link to a site where people can buy the book (optional)
Link to a site where people can buy your copy (optional)

Screenshot:

You can find an example of the usage on my personal blog (click through on one of the titles).

Installation instructions and what-not are included in a readme.txt file inside the zip.

If you have existing reviews you would like to convert to the book_review post type I can recommend the Convert Post Types plugin, although note you may be missing custom field data.

Download the files here

Celtx Tools Application

Administrator — Tue, 04 May 2010 21:54:28 +0000

I’ve been a user of Celtx for a number of years. Apart from being a great free app for writing screenplays, comics, stageplays, etc, I’ve also found it the closest thing on Windows to Scrivener for writing stories of any length.

That’s not to say it’s perfect, especially where text files are concerned. Some of the features available in screenplay mode just aren’t there, and some simple tools are missing (global word count across all of your files – I use a separate file per chapter – for instance).

So, I rolled up my sleeves and put together a little app. Originally I was going to do it as an extension, but after leafing though the docs for a while and making no progress I went back to good ol’ WinForms.

I haven’t done much testing but it seems to work OK on Vista 64-bit, Windows 7 32-bit and XP 32-bit.

Features

The app comes with three features:

Global Word Count – this will extract all of the documents (text or screenplay at least) and perform a word count, then display the total.
Export Selected Docs – this will display a list of the text documents (and screenplays) in your project and allow you to select which ones to convert to plain text, merge and save as a single file.
Export to Final Draft – this is designed for screenplays and will export it to Final Draft 8’s .fdx XML format. It will only bring over the screenplay, not characters or notes or anything else, but it will preserve the formatting.

Installation

To use the application, just download the zip file below, extract all the files to the same folder and double-click the CeltxTools.exe file. No need to install.

The application uses the .Net framework and is best used with .Net Framework 3.5.

Usage

Once you have started the application:

Click the Select File button to browse for your Celtx file.
Once you have selected it, pick what task you would like to perform:
- Do a Global Word Count: this will display the total words of any text documents in the gap below the button.
- Export Selected Docs: this will display a pop-up window with a list of the text documents in your project, check those you want to export and it will merge them and export them to a text file and save it in the same directory as the original Celtx file, but with a .txt extension.
- Export to Final Draft: this will convert the screenplay part of your project to FD8’s format and save it in the same directory as the original Celtx file, but with a .fdx extension.

Release History

0.9 – 4/5/2010 – Initial release.
0.91 – 22/5/2010 – Added ability to do word count on selected files.

Download

Get Celtx Tools here

Zenphoto Flickr Importer

Administrator — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 15:02:32 +0000

I wrote recently about the fact that I did really use my Flickr account enough to warrant keeping it, plus I had space on my hosting accounts to store my photos, so I decided to take them back into my control. The issue with that was I had put a lot of work into loading, tagging and describing my photos, which I didn’t want to lose. Plus, since my account had expired, I couldn’t remember exactly what I had and had not loaded. So after I hunted around and found I liked Zenphoto I wrote a script to grab my photos, photosets, comments and descriptions and copy them into Zenphoto, setting up albums for the photosets, adding the images and the rest.

It worked for me so I thought I would make it available for everyone else should it prove useful.

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(Note: this only works with v1.2.5)

DOWNLOAD for Zenphoto v1.2.6

Book Reviews Plugin v1.4 for WP 2.5

Administrator — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:14:44 +0000

Slight update to make the plugin work better with version 2.5 of WordPress. Not sure how backwards compatible it is, due to changes in 2.5 I would not recommend using this on anything less than 2.5.

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SRG Clean Archives Plugin

Administrator — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:53:42 +0000

I use the SRG Clean Archives plugin on my blog but it wasn’t working under WordPress 2.3 so I hacked it and made it work, and I thought I would make it available to download for others should they want it.

Note that the official development of the SRG Clean Archives has been taken up over here, and their version works with 2.3 as well (apparently). I had a plugin that worked and couldn’t be bothered downloading another version and modifying it when a couple of hacks to the code was all it took to get the one I’m happy with up and working.

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Book Reviews Plugin v1.3 for WP 2.3

Administrator — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:19:44 +0000

The Book Reviews plugin has now been updated to work with version 2.3 of WordPress. Due to the changes in 2.3 this version will not work with older versions of WordPress, please stick with version 1.2 or upgrade your copy of WordPress.

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More Tag Modifier

Administrator — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:33:14 +0000

It’s easy enough to modifier a WordPress template to include standard code, such as advertising blocks, above or below the content of an article, but it’s not so easy to put a block in the middle of your text. There are some plugins for the likes of Google Ads to allow you to do this, which is great, if that’s all you want to do, but what if you want to use another advertiser, or just put in something custom? Well, now there’s the More Tag Modifier plugin.

This plugin will take whatever is in a file you designate and put it wherever you insert the more tag in your article. You can see an example of this, using Amazon’s advertising code, at A Screen Near You, just look at any of the (longer) articles and you see the block appearing in the middle of the text.

Installation instructions are included in the zip file.

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Book Reviews Plugin v1.2 for WP 2.1

Administrator — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 22:37:55 +0000

The Book Reviews plugin has now been updated to work with version 2.1 of WordPress. Aside from just making it work on 2.1, it also adds a new function, br_get_books_list, which provides an easier way to list all of the book reviews you’ve made in a variety of formats. I’ve also created and included a couple of drop-in templates for a page and single post entry as examples of how to use the plugin.

Please note that I have only tested this on version 2.1, so I’m not sure what backwards compatibility is like.

Update: Very slight modification made, version increased to 1.2

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If you are using WordPress 2.0 then you should use version 1.1 of this plugin, version 1.2 appears to be incompatible. You can download version 1.1 here.

List Books User Feed Plugin

Administrator — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 09:11:25 +0000

I’ve produced another simple plugin to take advantage of the new functionaility on List Books that grabs your 10 latest listings from the new user books RSS feed, converts it into one of four different layout formats and then includes it in the template wherever you call the function. List Books is another one of my sites, designed to allow anyone to sell their old books commission free.

This plugin allows you to display the book title and author with links to the entry on List Books. You can see an example of the plugin in action on the reading page of my blog.

Please note that it only updates the feed every 3 hours.

Full installation instructions are included in the zip file.

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List Books Feed Plugin

Administrator — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 13:08:48 +0000

I’ve produced a simple little plugin that grabs the contents of the List Books RSS feed, converts it into one of four different formats and then includes it in the template where you call the function. List Books is another of my sites, designed to allow anyone to sell their old books commission free.

This plugin allows you to display the 10 latest books with links to their entries and details of the author.

Full installation instructions are included in the zip file.

Update (22/01/2006)
Slight change to the date comparison, version 0.91 released.

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