Growing up I loved fish finger sandwiches. Hmmm. In fact, if I was given a plate of fish fingers, chips and beans most of it would end up between slices of bread.

After mentioning this last weekend my wife bought some fish fingers so that I could indulge once again. This was something I was looking forward to.

Some fresh white bread and some Birds Eye fish fingers were assembled. The fish fingers can be grilled or oven cooked… odd, I remember them always being fried. Anyway, I grilled them which didn’t go too well. They stuck to the grill pan and burnt a little. None-the-less I had some cooked fish fingers and some buttered bread.

It’s such a shame then that the result was disappointment.

What have Birds Eye done?The fish fingers were tasteless.

This is probably done to the drive these days to force food into being healthier. Gone is the salt and probably anything else that could be – if eaten in enough quantities – bad for you. Also gone is the taste.

Maybe the cooking method is another reason – even Wikipedia refers to them being fried.

Maybe it’s the fish. I’m sure it used to be Cod (hardly the most taste-packed of fish in the first place) but now it’s Alaska Pollock, described as “mild in flavour”.

Whatever reason, it makes you realise why they’re not as popular these days and kids prefer burgers instead. It’s such a shame (spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce went much the same way).

Having just created and submitted my first WordPress plugin, I thought I’d go through the process. And I have to say, WordPress don’t make it easy.

Assuming you have your plugin written and tested, you first need to submit it to Wordpress for them to create a subversion repository (basically an archive where you can store it).

1. Make sure you’re signed up (and signed in) to Wordpress.org and head over to the Developer section within the Plugin Directory.
2. From here, there’s an option named “Add Your Plugin“.
3. You need to enter the name and description of your plugin and, optionally, a link to it.

That’s it for that. Now you need to wait for WordPress to send you a link to your repository.

Meantime, you need to create a readme.txt file to go with your plugin. This will not only be bundled with your download but will be used for your plugin entry on the WordPress site. What I didn’t know is that these files, although plain text, have a special markup language within them.

1. WordPress provide an example, and I just took this and modified it appropriately.
2. There is also complete documentation on the markup language used.
3. Once you’ve written it, you can validate it.

So, now you have your plugin, a valid readme.txt and, hopefully, a repository URL from WordPress.Now it all got a lot fuzzier.

The WordPress instructions lept straight into a load of unexplained commands, not explaining, amonst other things, that you need SVN installed to use these. I came across another blog which recommended installing TortoiseSVN, which has a GUI interface. I did this but soon found the instructions on this alternative blog didn’t match what I was seeing (possibly a different version of TortoiseSVN?).

What I did was to use the Repo-browser context menu option. This provides you with a drag-and-drop interface to your repository (you use the URL that WordPress supplied plus your WordPress.org username and password). Head back to the WordPress site instructions on ensuring that you place your files in both the “trunk” and create another, versioned, copy under “tags”.

Once this was done my WordPress plugin page sprang to life, taking its details from my readme.txt file.

And that was it.

I’ve now published my second WordPress Plugin!

“Simple PayPal Donate”¹ makes it easy to place a PayPal donation button in your WordPress theme.

As well as making it easier to control your output, this plugin assists with multiple occurrences across a WordPress installation (maintaining a single point for the code, particularly useful if the code changes in future). It is also XHTML compliant, unlike the original PayPal code.

You can view more details and download it from the official WordPress site, or from it’s official page on this site.

1. can you see where I’m going with these naming conventions! [↩]

Since launching my Simple AdSense Insert plugin yesterday, I’ve had a query with regard to the parameters.

The user came to supply the parameters to the plugin and found that one of them – google_ad_slot – didn’t exist in the AdSense code.

After some digging, it turns out that is because Google changed the code format sometime before late 2007. If you’re using code from before then, it more than likely won’t have the ad_slot parameter. If this is the case, you simply need to go back into AdSense and recreate your advert (or, if you had it saved, simply bring it back up again) and get the new code.

After experiencing some problems around displaying code in WordPress (mainly around the code lines being too long and wrapping off the side of the page) I installed Dean’s Code Highlighter.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this is an excellent plugin. However, I found a flaw in it after someone reported a problem with the WordPress plugin that I launched yesterday. They’d copy and pasted the example code from my instructions page and it didn’t work. It turns out that the code highlighter had taken my single quotes and converted them to open and closed single quotes. Which broke the code.

I had a good look at the plugin code but couldn’t easily work out a solution. In the end I realised that I simply didn’t need code highlighting so turned the whole thing off. Instead, I used a similar style and applied to the bog standard CODE wrap. The only down-side is that I have to wary of the line wrapping again.