Today my wife’s operating system crashed – the registry hive was corrupted. We went through a restore process and after running hard drive diagnostic (chkdsk) we found some corrupt sectors.

Since the laptop was still under warranty, I called Dell and reached a live person in record time. I only had to listen to one voice prompt, and a technician (Ashish) picked up after a couple rings.

After explaining the issue and giving him the error code from the DELL diagnostic utility, he immediately said they would be shipping me a new hard drive. This literally took 2 minutes. No second guessing on his part – it was painless.

To top it off, he sent a personal email with all his contact information and backup contact information in case he wasn’t available.

This is excellent customer service, I’m glad to see Dell is getting this right.

I have two fixes for users who are having trouble getting wordpress search to work correctly with the Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin:

I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to modify my wordpress category template to display thumbnail images of each cake in a gallery format. Combining this with my highslide plugin provides a simple and easy to maintain gallery.

I recently upgraded one of our testing sites to WP 2.1 Here are some of the issues and fixes that I went through:

I’ve added more flexibility to the WordPress WP-HIGHSLIDE script. The new updates allow you to toggle the caption box, close window link, and next and previous links through global settings in WP-HIGHSLIDE options page.

If you want to override the global settings for a single image you can use one of the override settings in your <highslide>. More info in the FAQ section.

Note: I’m temporarily including the highslide.js script with the plugin. The script writer made an enhancement to highslide that makes it much easier to integrate with wordpress. I’ve included that fix in highslide.js, but it’s not yet available in his latest release 2.2.8. Once that fix makes his latest release, I will no longer include the script.

Looking for an easy way to use Highslide JS thumbnail viewer in your wordpress blog? My new plugin, WP-Highslide allows easy integration of Highslide JS using wordpress quicktags.

For documentation and download go here and for a demo check our wedding cake blog. Let me know if you find this useful.

After a lot of integration work, I was able to create a pretty nifty Ajax enabled wordpress poll for a Valentine’s Day contest we are running at Pink CakeBox. The poll allows the user to vote for their favorite wedding cake and submit their contact information.

This weekend I worked on a enhancing an existing related post plugin from WASABI. The plugin finds related posts using mySQL full-text search functionality.

Along with each related post, I wanted to display the cake or cookie that the post highlighted.

I recently had the need to enhance our wedding cake blog to include excerpts of the previous and next posts when viewing a single post. In our case, our excerpt is just an image of the next cake.

Nick from www.NicksJourney.com asked the following question regarding my wordpress/phplist plugin:

How can I add more attributes other than Name and Email? (like Zip code, for example) – see my phpList Capture page at www.nickdaugherty.com/lists/