My directory image resize script has been updated to support a few new features. You can new resize images with the “a” or “f” character instead of a pixel value to use the image size and users screen resolution respectively. More details are in the readme as well as the included example.
Backdrop updated, now with WP Customizer support.
Pretty much what the title says, I’ve updated my backdrop plugin to version 2.0 (well, 2.0.1 because of a small issue). This version supports the WP customizer so you can see the changes as you make them.
Also in this version of some removals. Since this was re-written some thing are inevitably missing and the way it operates is different. With the old Backdrop it would apply the background to the body element, like themes do. I received a few emails from people wanting to use it to have multiple backgrounds, something that it could theoretically do, but not in practice with most themes. When I was rebuilding the plugin for 2.0 I went ahead and used a pseudo-background element. This means that the background you theme applies is still there, and your backdrop goes over it. That, along with the new options for transparency on the background color, allow you to overlay a new background over your old one.
There is a downside to this however, because the background is always on a new element that has a fixed position, it cannot scroll normally. This is overcome by faking the scroll instead. While this is fine it does have a larger performance impact that it otherwise would. I have overcome this as bast os possible by using the requestAnimationFrame() ability in javascript, the backdrop will refresh as often as the browser re-draws. Some browsers still have a big of studdering to the animation, especially IE when handling lots of alpha level transparency, but it’s mostly mitigated. Another downside is that it requires IE 10 and up.
The plugin has been updated, you should be able to get the newest version here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/backdrop/
New Plugin: GitHub Repo List
While I was cleaning things up around the site yesterday I noticed my “Other” section was out of date. Not only has it not been updated since 2012, it was out-of-date in 2012. I have since put a bunch of stuff up in my GitHub account and was really not looking forward to linking all of it in manually. Since most of the more interesting things get posts detailing them I figured I would just need the links and, since there are a bunch I decided to create a little WordPress plugin to do it for me.
The GitHub Repo List plugin creates a shortcode to add all your github repositories to a page. It support not only getting your list but some mild customization, custom sort order, the ability to filter some repositories out, and even filters based on almost anything you can think of. You can already get the github-repo-list plugin from WordPress extend, and it will be up on my GitHub account shortly.