Installed Alex King’s Popularity Contest plugin. It keeps excellent stats for the admin on how popular each blog post is. It also shows users a list of the most popular posts by category, month, etc… in the sidebar.

I found this plugin via the Weblog Tools Collection plugin competition.

The front-end is nice and the back-end (what the admin sees) is beautiful.

I just threw $15 to Alex for this and other things he’s written that I use.

[I installed this a couple weeks ago but forgot to blog it.]
Here’s a little something to make writing pretty comments a little easier.
I took it from Scriptygoddess, who took it from Alex King.

The tags I use in my lineup are:
bold, italics, blockquote, link close tags

You should see these buttons just above the Comments field when you write your comments to me. They make it a little easier for you to add HTML tags to your comments.

From Jennifer’s site (this was written for WP 1.2. The instructions are a bit different for newer versions. I’ve installed it for WP 1.5 just fine)

To use the “mini” version I made:

1) Download the js file and upload it to the root of your domain.

2) Open up your wp-comments.php page [in WP 1.5, comments.php in your theme] … Look for the beginning of the comments form – (search for “<form” in the file) and put this just above it:

<script src="/js_quicktags-mini.js" type="text/javascript"></script></form>

Look for the text area field for comments which looks like this

<textarea name="comment" id="comment" cols="40" rows="6" tabindex="4"></textarea>

and add this directly above it:
<script type="text/javascript">edToolbar();</script>

And add this BELOW the textarea field:
<script type="text/javascript">var edCanvas = document.getElementById('comment');</script>

This is the method I’m using on this site – although I added the “h3″ tag just for the one I use, since that’s what I use to stylize code on this site. You can easily add more… or start from scratch using Alex’s.

By Mark Jaquith. It was a total snap to install and its a gosh darn terrific plugin!

I just installed the Search Everything Wordpress Plugin by Dan Cameron. It makes the little search button on my blog search comments as well as posts.

I just upgraded from Wordpress 1.5 to 1.5.1.3.

[mini-woot]
It was really quite straightforward.
1. Backup backup backup
2. unzip WP 1.5.1.3 on my computer
3. upload it to my website, overwriting everything that might be overwritten.

Done.

All my plugins and add-ons still work just peachily.

Thanks PhotoMatt

I put a new set of random images in the upper right corner of the blog. Click on an image to make it larger. You can view them all here (sorry about the poor interface, but hey). Most of the images on the site are shrunk-down versions. Contact me if you want a full-size version of anything. (If I don’t know you, I may or may not oblige)

The Random Image script that I had gotten from Photomatt was ok but it isn’t able to show images when it’s run from alternate folders.

I’ve replaced Matt’s script with a slightly modified version of Matthew Dingley’s Random Image Generator. The code is a bit more elegant, runs quicker and it runs from arbitrary locations.

I’m very happy with the new script. You can view the results in the upper right corner of each blog page.

Here is the source code for it.

The new green color theme is an attempt to harness the powers of springtime. I dunno. Maybe I should go back to the drawing board.

WP Paginate from Scriptygoddess because my beloved Page Navigation doesn’t work with WP 1.5.

Feel the love…. I guess. So far it seems like 6 of one, half a dozen that have to be hauled in from the garage… of another. I’m sure I’ll appreciate it soon… after I’m done picking all my plugins up off the floor. Hurumph.

If I put a number and then an apostrophe in the body of my blog, it breaks the RSS and Atom feed but not the RSS2 feed.

1′ breaks the feed
2′ breaks the feed
a’ doesn’t break the feed.

(you might notice that my RSS and Atom feeds are currently showing an “Error: XML Parse Error” error. That’s because of this post.)

WP 1.5 just came out this week so I won’t bug the developers about it. In a month or three (after they’ve worked the bugs out of it… there are always bugs) I’ll probably install it.

When you mouseover items in the blog, they now look a bit snazzier. This is due to Nice Titles.

It uses Javascript to snaz-up the title field of a link. I like that the site still works perfectly well without the script…. but the snazzing is well appreciated.

I was also going to use the nice looking semi-transparent .png from the site above (here’s a great transparent PNG maker) but Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t properly support transparent .png files Phoey on them! There are ways around this problem, by using the IE AlphaImageLoader Filter, but it’s a pain in the neck. I’m not much interested in jumping through Bill’s hoops when an internet standard exists and Bill doesn’t follow it. Besides, you know that such a browser-specific solution will require upkeep. Just like when IE 5.5 came out and my old company, Wavexpress had to scramble to re-write web pages because the new version of… I think it was I-Frames, wasn’t compatible with the old. We were working directly with Microsoft engineers on our project and we hadn’t gotten even a 1 day’s heads-up that the new release of IE was coming or that it might mess anything up. So Phoey on Bill.

There’s even a petition with 20,000 signatures asking Bill to put this promised native functionality into IE.

I kinda like the look. What do you think?

VC said that my new blog lacked color. She missed the image at the top. So I’m putting a random image thingie at the top. :-)

Shortly you’ll be able to click on the thumbnails to see the full images. I might eventually get around to putting up some real gallery software.

Thanks to Photomatt for the script. Though I instantly noticed that this script doesn’t let me link to images from thumbnails, it just displays them.

I’m liking Wordpress a lot but the default stylesheet is far from ideal. Well, I guess it’s a matter of preference and customizations… Well, the new style sheet gives nice clean lines. I’m sure it’s a never ending project.

I just found this gosh-darn useful Javascript tool. It’s good for helping to lay out your web page, or understand someone else’s page structure.

From Slayeroffice.com

This favelet allows you to view the properties of any HTML element on a page simply by mousing over the element. The element will be given a gray background, and a DIV element that trails the mouse cursor will contain the element type along with all of the specified attributes of the element.
Hit the “esc” key to turn the favelet off.
Right click on the following link and select “Add to Favorites” or “Bookmark this Link”, depending on your browser.
Mouseover DOM Inspector

I’m such a sellout. But hey… I tried out Google Ads on my Hampsterdance page about a month ago and I’ve ALREADY MADE OVER $0.74 in clickthru advertising!! Hampsterdance is the most popular link on my whole site so I don’t expect to rake in quite so much from the rest of the site.. but hey.

The ads appear in the right column, below my links and such.

This is why: http://livejournal.com/

Temporarily Unavailable

LiveJournal is currently down due to a massive power failure at our data center. We’ll provide updates at /powerloss/ as they’re available.

Continue reading ‘Why I run my own blog: Livejournal outage’ »

I just installed the Page Navigation Plugin, page-navi.php from Lester Chan.

It lets me put a navigation bar on my site like this:
Pages (6) : Previous Page 1 [2] 3 4 Next Page ... Last »

It installed in about 5 minutes (and then of course I had to fiddle with it for 30 minutes…. but it installed very easily. And that’s very nice. :-)

I made a slight improvement in 1.2 that you might want to integrate into the source.

This starts at line 36. New code in red.

$numposts = $wpdb->num_rows;
$max_page = ceil($numposts / $posts_per_page) ;
 
// Return added by LCS 1-15-05. This causes nothing to be displayed if there is only 1 page
if ($max_page == 1) {
    return;
}
 
echo $before.'Pages ('.$max_page.') : <b>';
if ($whichpage >= 4)

Without this change, Page Navi is a little obtrusive when I put it in a prominent spot in Index.php and I’m displaying only 1 post… like when I’m viewing archives.

From here. Very useful. :-)

This is the cutest plugin. :-)

update 8-20-05 I’m not using this plugin with WP 1.5.