Scrapwalls is a web application that lets you make a shape collage out of your pictures. It is written in PHP using the Smarty templating engine, and uses VIPS C++ library to manipulate the images. Scrapwalls has been around for a few years, but only in the latest release can you purchase high-resolution posters of your collages. The test orders have gone through correctly, and we’ve started promoting the site on Google and Facebook.

Please give us feedback if you end up using the site, by emailing me or commenting on this post.

Anyway, we are excited to present scrapwalls.com to the world!

Buddypress.org link: http://buddypress.org/community/groups/bp-group-control/

If you have comments and/or suggestions, I regularly check these channels as well as comments on this site.

Note to anyone who downloaded the plugin before a few days ago – I had named the plugin root folder wrong. You can re-download the plugin, or simply change the name of the plugin root directory from “BP-Group-Control” to “bp-group-control.”

“Strange days have found us / Strange days have tracked us down” – Jim Morrison

This line was merely the first thing that popped into my head when WordPress asked me to type in a blog title.  It just sounded eerie and cool.  In retrospect I think these words fit the instability of our present time  just as they fit the revolutionary past of the 1960s, and perhaps all presents and pasts which carry with them that inevitably strange sensation of entering the unknown.

Web technology is propelling business, politics, law, art, friendship and all other elements of life into a region of unknown.  It is defining a new medium and more importantly an entirely new scope and scale to the interactions that define our society.  How will the value of many-to-many communication balance with the value of one-to-one interactions and relationships?  What are the gains, and what are the potential losses of a system that facilitates and encourages individual connection with just about everyone else?

From the abstract to the mundane (well, not to me), Strange Days makes me think of the situation I now face working on a BuddyPress customization for a client.  Briefly, BuddyPress is an open source social networking platform that runs on WordPress Mu (multi-user).  I got into WordPress hacking and plugin writing a few months ago, and was amazed at the huge developer community and the amount of documentation and support for the API.  Naturally, I figured the same would be true of the MU and BuddyPress API.  And naturally, this assumption proved false, not to the discredit of the WordPress dev community, but because BuddyPress has only been an official Automattic project for about eight months.

For example, I was not a little worried when I discovered that the functions section of the API documentation was completely blank.

Ah, the unknown. Fortunately though, the BuddyPress guys have set up the functions in a way that makes sense (for the most part), so I think I should be able to do what I need to do.  One of the things I want to accomplish in this blog is to put together a rudimentary API for some of the functions that I encounter and use. I was kind of excited when I realized that this work is going to be done in uncharted, unstable territory.  And I have no doubt in the potential of BuddyPress (more on that later), judging by the extremely high quality that the regular WordPress platform has attained.

Really though, you never know, and that’s what makes it fun.

I don’t plan to limit the kinds of things I write about in here – you’ll probably find posts in here about music and literature right along side writing about buddypress, wordpress,  jQuery and other programming/web design topics.  If you’re interested in one thing in particular, pick a category.

I’m still working on the portfolio part, so check back soon and that should be done.  That’s all for now, signing off.