devmorgan.com

Something interesting happened tonight, between the hours of 3:00am and 4:00am (can you tell I haven’t been getting sleep?). The interesting thing that happened is that I trying to find plug-ins for WordPress that would allow easy sharing of articles that I write with facebook, digg, slashdot, etc…

I found one that seemed promising called obsocialbookmarker. He had a new release out, so I figured I would give it a whirl and see if I liked it… because I really didn’t feel like writing something custom that I knew someone out there had already done.

It didn’t work!

I was frustrated to say the least, but I was able to at least get some of the error messages to display to me. The errors were not WordPress errors, but actually PHP errors from the plug-in code. I thought “Damnit this guy must suck”. Then I realized what the error actually meant… The plug-in tries to figure out if it is out of date. Fair enough. The problem is that my server does not take to kindly to PHP trying to call fopen() on a remote server via URL (a security setting I cannot change, since allow_url_fopen is disabled… although this does give me more motivation to try to get around that).

So what was I to do? I suppose anyone that wasn’t a programmer wouldn’t have even got this far and would have moved on to another plug-in, but I saw some of the other ones and I thought they sucked. So, I did was most programmers like to do, and hack. Sure, the hack was only removal of the version checker, but it was still something kind of neat.

1. Something didn’t work.
2. I wanted it to.
3. I made it work.
4. I posted a comment on his blog to let him know.

Sure. This isn’t anything huge, and I have been a programmer long enough to know that this happens all the time! I think tonight something was just different about it. When I was learning how to code, I used to talk about how being a programmer was akin to being god-like. It kind of motivated me to learn. You can create things, destroy things, do good, do evil. This kinda just touched me again to think about that concept… what kind of power a programmer has.. Sure, for me just now, it is as simple as making something work that will put little icons on every post I make. The bigger thought perhaps, is what makes the idea interesting.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 3:50 am and is filed under coding, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.