The main reason I chose Erlang over say Haskell, Clojure, or some other functional language is my interest in concurrency and scalability. From what I’ve read people have had a lot of success with Erlang in situations that require concurrency and scalability so it seemed like a good way to satisfy my concurrency itch and my curiosity for functional programming. For the curious, Wikipedia has a short list of some projects using Erlang including some big names like Facebook and Amazon.

I’ve been reading Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong. It’s a pretty solid book so far. It’s well written and easy to follow. There’s a lot of code snippets for you to try which fits my learning style. I wish there were some exercises at the end each section or chapter to get the reader thinking and writing some code instead of passively reading. My strategy for getting around this so far is to redo my 15-212 homework in Erlang, which has worked out pretty well.

I find my 15-212 homework easier to do in Erlang. It’s dynamically typed so I can add an integer and float together (what a concept!). I know you can do that in SML if you call the real function but it’s a pain and makes the code hard to read. Also, guards are awesome. One of the things that really annoyed me about pattern matching in SML is that while it was a very elegant, you still had to resort to if/else to check for things like inequalities and greater than or less than relationships. Guards in Erlang let you do this in natural way that feels like an extension to pattern matching.

Erlang is great so far. I’m starting to get into the concurrency features of Erlang so hopefully I’ll have more interesting things to post later.

Features:

• Support for displaying thumbnail images via WP 2.9′s new post thumbnail feature.
• Set how many posts to show.
• Option to show the post excerpt and how long the excerpt should be.
• Option to show the post date.
• Option to show the comment count.
• Option to make the widget title link to the category page.
• Multiple widgets.

You can download the plugin from the WordPress repository.

• Support for WordPress 2.9′s post thumbnails.
• Option to show the post date.
• Option to show the comment count.
• Option to set the word length of the excerpt.

Note that support for Simple Post Thumbnails has been removed in favor of the built in functionality.

You can download the plugin at the WordPress plugin repository: Download here.

Please donate if you find this plugin useful.

Update: Several people have been reporting an error “Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach()…” I just pushed out version 3.1 which should fix this. This bug could have been fixed if I had done some more rigorous testing. I’ll do better next time.

I just released a long overdue update to Category Posts Widget. At the time of this writing, it has been downloaded over 23,500 times and has an average of 4.5 stars from 22 people!

CPW 2.0 has been included with Press75 themes for sometime now. I haven’t heard any problems with it yet so it should be pretty stable. I updated it to use the new widget API so it is only compatible with WordPress 2.8 and above. It also supports a little plugin I wrote called Simple Post Thumbnails.

Download

Simple Video Embedder adds a widget to the posting screen with fields for inputting URLs to videos on popular video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. The plugin can automagically generate embed codes for many video sites, but also provides a manual embed code field for unsupported ones.

Simple Post Thumbnails adds a widget to the posting screen as well. It provides an upload form to upload an image to use as a thumbnail. The plugin will crop and resize the image to the correct size for you so you don’t have to open up Photoshop every time you want to post a thumbnail for your posts. The plugin also has another field to input a URL to a remote image which gets downloaded and cropped, making it even easier.

Hope you like the plugins and definitely check out some of Jason’s awesome themes.

You can download the update at the official WordPress plugin repository or use the automatic update feature in newer versions of WordPress.

Thanks to everyone who is using the plugin! Over 10,000 downloads since I first released it in October 2007!

As promised, I’ve updated Category Posts Widget. Version 1.3 brings one new feature to the table: an option to show a post excerpt. I also converted the widget to the new WordPress 2.5 system of adding multiple widgets so 1.3 will only work on WordPress 2.5 or later. Please donate if you like this plugin! Full list of changes below.

Changes:

• New option to display post excerpt below permalink.
• Display as many posts from a category as you want.
• Add as many widgets as you want.
• WordPress 2.5 or later compatible only.

Note: You may have to reconfigure your CPW widgets if you are upgrading from a previous version.

Download

You can download Category Posts Widget 1.3 at the official WordPress plugin repository.

Donate

This plugin was created by me and is made available free of charge. However, if you would like to show your appreciation, you can donate via PayPal by clicking the donate button in the sidebar. All funds go towards paying for my college expenses.

I competed in the Oregon SkillsUSA web design competition again yesterday. The rules were the same as least year. We had four hours to build a website based on a fictitious website proposal. However, I went solo this time around and competed against six other teams of two. It was interesting to say the least.

After the competition I went to Red Robin with Sadie, her dad, and Emerald for lunch. I had the most amazing burger I’ve ever had in my life there. It was heavenly, epic even. I think it was called the Whiskey River BBQ Burger. The onion straws at the bottom are magical.

After lunch we went back to the competition for the awards ceremony. It was really long like last year’s. They awarded the winners in alphabetical order by competition name so web design was near the very end. Sadie and Emerald took third and I took first again. That makes me the two-time state web design champion monster.

Here’s a link to the website I made. That’s what four hours, a computer, a Kit Kat bar, a bottle of water, and an iPod full of good music can get you.

I’ll add an option for post excerpts in the near future when I get my main laptop up and running again. I coded this feature on my secondary laptop which doesn’t have my usual coding software.

You can download the new plugin here at the WordPress plugin repository.

Also note that I’m closing comments on the other posts about Category Posts Widget because it’s becoming hard to keep track of them all across several different posts.