As pointed out in a comment on the WordPress Hebrew Date Plugin page, there was a PHP function isJewishLeapYear missing from the plugin that caused issues when the month was Adar. I added this to the file and released it as version 0.9. I do not have any posts in Adar, so I can’t really test this fix, so please let me know if you run into any problems.
Category: Software Dev
Zmanim Calendar Generator TODO List
I slightly updated the Zmanim Calendar Generator to add some user input validation.
Looking at the logs, I noticed that someone generated a calendar with the longitude and latitude of Lakewood, NJ (the default), with just the location label changed to Minneapolis, MN. I don’t know if the user was just testing, or just assumed that I picked up the geocoding information by parsing the location name. This led to the addition of a JavaScript confirm when the location name is changed.
Items on the TODO list are:
- Use JavaScript to convert the longitude and latitude when the format is changed from decimal to degrees, minutes and seconds
- Provide links to locate longitude and latitude information
- Add support for the generation of a standard (not full as is the default now) calendar with a much smaller set of zmanim
- Implement the generation of PDF calendars
- Possibly use the Google Maps API to allow the selection of longitude and latitude information
The code for the PDF generation is already in the API but has not been updated in a while and does not work properly. This will also have to be updated for the standard calendar mentioned above.
The way I envision interacting with Google Maps would be to allow the user to center their location in the map, and have those coordinates used for the zmanim calendar. This would have been relatively trivial if they provided geocoding information, by just allowing the user to enter their location as it can be done at Google Maps, but they currently do not provide geocoding information. I haven’t touched their API yet, and although it does not look too complex, it will probably take a while.
Hebrew Year Conversion
There was a request on the Correspondence page of Remy Landau’s Hebrew Calendar Science and Myths site for a utility that generated “Hebrew Year Number Transliteration”. Since I had already developed the code as part of PhpGedView (now forked and maintained by webtrees) and the Hebrew date plugin, I just ported it to JavaScript as a demo.
Search engine optimization?
Do a Google search for "javadoc api" and amazingly the API Docs page shows up at number 9 (number 10 if you omit the quotes). I somehow doubt that the tweaks last week had this effect. I guess not too many pages have these words in the URL, title and page content. It’s still nice to be in the same list as Sun. Interestingly Sun did not end up in the first place. I found this via the log files when I noticed a referer (not a typo) of the Google search for javadoc api.