I made this blog to have a place to post the applications and programs I have made, and for that I needed a Content Management System (CMS). I looked at some CMS plugins for WordPress, but most of them are overkill for what I need. Instead I decided to use the built inn Categories of WordPress. I created a category called Project, and for each project (a program, website or anything else I made) I would add a sub-category with that projects name. With this simple method I could create several posts describing the progress of a project. Now all I needed was a page with all the projects listed, and maybe the latest posts for each one.
I solved this by making a page Template (not to be confused with Theme, which is something completely different). The template lists all the subcategories of a category, specified in the page metadata, along with the category description and the last 5 posts for each category. This way you can list all the projects on one page and link to the most recent information for each one. Because the category name is specified in the page metadata, you can have multiple CMS pages, for example, ideas, projects or experiments.
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Wake Me Up Spotify
This simple app lets you wake up to your favorite song or playlist by using Spotify as an alarm clock. Just set the time you want to wake up and the Spotify URI you want it to play, and your done. It will automatically open Spotify and start playing, and you can minimize it to the tray so it stays out of the way.
This is the first program I’ve ever made in C# and WinForms, so it’s pretty simple. Most of the development time was spent making WinForms look nice, something it’s definitively not designed for. For example, to add the nice shadow around the app, I had to sacrifice the blinking caret in the textboxes. Styling textboxes is also pretty difficult, so the simplest thing is to position so they line up with a background picture of the form. The rest of the time was spent making it work with Spotify, using the Spotify Remote API. Spotify gives you very little control; I’m only able to play, pause, stop, play next and previous song and change the volume. To play a song specified by a Spotify URI I have to start Spotify with that URI as argument.
The program still has a few bugs, so don’t use it as the only way to wake up. For example, while it is possible to play a song at any time by starting Spotify with a song URI, it is not possible to make it play playlist when it is already open. If you want to wake up to a playlist, make sure you close the Spotify before you go to bed!
Download WakeMeUpSpotify (65kB)
