Recorded the making-of my latest work — I’ve been wanting to make one of these videos for years.. Music from a podcast, I can’t find the first track, but the second one is Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff by Deadmau5. Screen recorded using Quicktime 10, & put together with iMovie ’11. Elapse span: just over 4 hours.

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This is a stop motion sort of video I made from a collection of 8000+ pictures I took of Natalie thoughout summer 2009 – showing the moments between the published pictures.. Music Dawn Chorus by Boards of Canada. Put together with QuickTime 9, and iMove ’10.

WordPress 3 introduced Custom Menu’s, which is a great feature, but when calling a menu with wp_nav_menu() it builds the menu with the ID’s relative to the menu itself, and not the actual object ID’s the menu items represent.

I needed to get the ID’s of a menu list, here’s how I did it:

function get_ids_of_nav_menu($nav_slug) {                              
 
    // lets get all wordpress menus
    $terms   = get_terms('nav_menu');
 
    // cycle through terms (custom menus) and find $nav_slug
    $term_id = '';
    foreach ($terms as $aterm) {
       if ($aterm->;slug == $nav_slug || $aterm->name == $nav_slug)
            $term_id = $aterm->term_id;    
    }
 
    // get all objects in found menu
    $items        = get_objects_in_term( $term_id , 'nav_menu' );
 
    // get the custom navigations ID's of pages
    $menuids      = array();
    foreach ($items as $uselss => $menu_id) {
       $realitem                       = get_post($menu_id);
       $object_id                      = get_post_meta( $realitem->ID, '_menu_item_object_id', true );
       // get the specified menu order, use as key for sorting after
       $menuids[$realitem->menu_order] = array('menu_id' => $menu_id, 'object_id' => $object_id );
    }
 
    // order by the the custom menu as seen in appearance > menus
    ksort($menuids);
 
    // rebuid & the array
    $return = array();
    foreach ($menuids as $order => $ids) {
       $return[$ids['menu_id']] = $ids['object_id'];
    }
    return $return;
}

The provided widgets that social networking sites like Twitter make offer for external web sites, are not my favourite – I understand the logic behind them; trying to make something consistent, universal, visually flexible, recognizable, ect.. but some sites integration of the social networking tools, are just horrible -

I believe every site should have a social networking feeds.. it shows you’re an active user and it keep your followers interested – but I also believe it has to look good.

I use Twitter for my networking (because it has relatively no ads), so I’ve written this script to pull tweets from a users RSS feed, then format the tweets any way I want. It’s on my site as well as hey-you.ca in the footers.

(If you can’t find your twitter ID in the source code of your twitter page, get it from this site)

The function can be called from your footer.php or whichever file like so:

<?
echo "<h1>Tweets</h1>" .
      yourplugin_twitter_feed('123456789');
?>

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