I’ve just launched The Markdown Tutorial. It’s an interactive tutorial covering the Markdown syntax by John Gruber.

Recently, I found myself using a lot of Markdown in various projects. While searching for instructional material for Markdown, I realized that there weren’t many full-fledged tutorials about Markdown on the web. It seems like most people learn it by using syntax references for the elements they need, and, eventually, they’ve used it enough where they can say that they ‘know’ Markdown. I thought that some people may find a guided approach more effective.

My goal was to get the reader to use enough Markdown in the tutorial that they no longer needed to refer to reference materials for common tasks like emphasizing text, adding code blocks, headers, links, etc. Hopefully, users will find themselves comfortable enough with Markdown to use it in their comment and forum posts, without even realizing that they’ve learned a whole new language.

Please let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, or comments regarding The Markdown Tutorial.

I just launched my first WordPress Plugin. The Donate Everywhere Plugin helps increase donations by adding a link to your PayPal donation page at the end of every post. My goal was to produce a clean, minimal donation plugin that was easy to configure and extend. I took care to include many of the commonly used PayPal HTML variables, including ‘return’, ‘notify_url’, ‘cbt’. You can set these advanced options directly from the plugin admin page. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for further improvements.

Problem: “I want to build my own WordPress plugin, but after sifting through the WordPress documentation, I don’t really know where to start.”

WordPress plugins are a fantastic way to add new functionality to your website, but approaching plugins for the first time can be daunting, even for experienced programmers. This quickstart tutorial provides a step-by-step guide to creating a WordPress plugin from scratch. It is designed for WordPress users who have never built a plugin before, but have had some experience with PHP. The goal of this tutorial is to get a simple plugin operational in a minimal amount of time. For all of the details on building a plugin, see the WordPress plugin How To.

By the end of this tutorial, you will have a basic understanding of how to extend WordPress functionality with plugins, how to set options via the WordPress database, as well as how to define an admin menu for your plugin. Read more »

Changing your default favicon is one of those subtle, but important details in customizing your website. In case you were wondering, your favicon is that little icon that is displayed next to the url when people visit your site. You should be able to see my favicon next to the url right now:

Problem: Change your WordPress favicon.

Solution: Upload your favicon to wordpress/wp-content/themes/your_theme/images/favicon.png. Then, change this line in your theme’s header.php:

to

Details: In the above code, the line

returns the path to your template directory (e.g., wordpress/wp-content/themes/classic). This should be used instead of actually typing out the full path, which will not work.

Favicons should be square images, typically not larger than 22×22 pixels.

Problem: Set the order of my WordPress pages in the sidebar while using a template that disregards the Page Order property completely.

Solution: Add spaces to the beginning of page titles. More spaces results in a higher page order. Don’t worry, the extra spaces won’t actually appear on your blog.

Details: WordPress is great at getting a website online fast, but its quirks can be frustrating for new users (I’m a new user). Today I tried to reorder my my pages so that “Home” showed up before “About”. I tried setting the Page Order property in the page editor window, but that had no effect. So, I thought maybe a plugin would solve the problem. I installed My Page Order, only to find that that, too, had no effect. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure that My Page Order only sets the Page Order property of each page…

Oops: Well, I feel rather stupid. I was playing with my WordPress blog and discovered that the sidebar widget is what sets the page order. This was overriding the changes I made to the theme’s php…I guess I made that problem harder than it should have been…

My first code snippet:

Now that I finally have a simple, efficient way to post code snippets, I can start writing some Flash tutorials. I plan to document my own real-world experiences with ActionScript 3.0 on this blog. Hopefully this will save you (and a future me) a lot of time and frustration.

Problem: Add syntax highlighted code snippets to my WordPress blog.

Solution: SyHi. Read more »