Little things

You know, sometimes it’s something little that makes your day. I sit and read my feeds and see something that’s either really sweet, or slap-knee funny, and just puts you in a good mood. Here are a couple examples of such that I ran across today:

“Portnoy’s Picnic…” by Sad Old Goth and “Honey, I’m Home” by SondraK.

Of course, I had meant to try out the Cuss-o-meter (courtesy of Rachel Lucas) on my site, but won’t have time to do so until after I get home.

So, until then … Go. Play. Wander.

Welcome new Cotillion member, Nice Deb!

Tip those tiaras, ladies! Another new member joins the ranks today: Nice Deb. I’ve been reading over her blog the last couple of days and am really impressed. I’m told she also co-blogs over at Ace of Spades as well. I think she makes a fine addition to our ‘roll and hope that some of you will get a chance to mosey by her blog and take a peak!

So far, so good?

Finally updated

I updated all of my blogs to WordPress 2.5 last night. I have some mixed feelings about the upgrade. The upgrade process itself went more easily than I had anticipated, and even though I still need to update my theme with new “features” (avatars, etc.), it’s not bad.

I’m still getting used to the new WP Admin layout, while it loads MUCH faster than the previous layout, I’m a little displeased with a few changes they made. For starters, in the write post pages, the categories listing has been moved down towards the bottom of the page. While, it’s not a huge deal, as I have to scroll down anyways to edit my tags, it’s still an annoyance. I personally enjoyed having them sitting right beside my composition box.

I have noticed that the tags, excerpt, etc. boxes aren’t ajax’d, so I can’t rearrange them. It isn’t big deal, but I’m particular about my setups and preferences. :mrgreen:

I know … big shocker there.

Something else I’m seriously missing is the “Save and continue” button. One of the developers mentioned that it was unnecessary considering WordPress now auto-saves .. but honestly, I would find myself using that button often — especially after any large additions to a post, or during storms (when a power outage is feared the most!) — times like those I do not like sitting and waiting around for WordPress to save. It would be nice to adjust the auto-save timing.

I want to speed mine up!

Much ado about widgets

They’ve also overhauled the widgets admin layout as well. It took me a bit to figure out where was what. I really like that text widgets now display the title (if set), so you can tell which ones are which. (That was WAY overdue, IMO) But one complaint I have there is that if you have more than one sidebar, you cannot edit them at the same time. You are forced to switch back and forth between them. Also, the way you add text, rss, etc. widgets has also changed from a drop-down menu to a text link — you cannot add them in bulk anymore, and must add one at a time.

Most users will not miss that feature, but it sure makes things easier for those of us widgetizing old themes!

Visually appealing

I’ve read that the visual editor has improved, but I have not yet tried it myself. If it works as well as everything I’ve been reading, I may just switch to it from the old text editor. We’ll see how that goes…

Plug it in, plug it in

I haven’t had any problems with plugins yet. WordPress now has the ability to automatically update your plugins for you. It downloads the updated version, removes the older version in your plugins directory, copies over the new files, and if it was already activated, it will attempt to reactivate it. This is a great feature for those who are not very tech savvy and often need help updating plugins.

However, those like me who fiddle with plugin code, this is no help. I have a handful of plugins that I have modified to fit my theme and/or fix things, and will still need to download the updated versions to compare line by line and make the needed changes accordingly.

Overall

All in all, I guess I can’t complain too much. It does seem to load faster, and I think overall that these were great improvements for WordPress.

Now to start testing its security …

Something’s right here…

Today’s funny courtesy of ICHC:

Even they notice …

(x-posted to Bama Angels site)

Don’t test me!

I just finished updating Jim’s site to WordPress 2.5. He comes over to say thanks and leans down to kiss me … then quickly turns his had and says, “Syke!” and laughs.

I grabbed his shirt and said, “Don’t test me, I can put that shit back!” :twisted:

He laughs then gives me a quick kiss, a “That’s my girl!” and a couple chocolate mint cookies.

Damn skippy, don’t deny me my sugah!

New WordPress Plugin: Blank Target Replacement

Ok, I haven’t tested this one a whole lot, so if you find any bugs, please use the comment box below!

Basically, I wrote this as an alternative to using the outdated target="_blank" in a link’s attributes. Using a tiny bit of javascript and the rel=”external” attribute, it’s a (hopefully) more XHTML compliant option.

This plugin allows you to mark any (or all) of your Blogroll links as ‘external’ and implements a small bit of javascript to open links in new windows. With this plugin enabled, you can also add the rel=”external” tag to any links in your post (or anywhere else in your blog) to have them open in new windows (or tabs depending on the user’s browser settings).

Requires

WordPress version 2.2 or higher — may work with previous versions, I hadn’t tested!

Instructions

1. Upload the blank-target-replace folder to WordPress plugins directory and activate on the Plugins page in WP-Admin
2. Go to Blogroll > External Links
3. Choose the links you want to open in a new window, or tick the top checkbox in the gray bar to check all links as external. Click the “Mark Links External” button at the very bottom of the page.
4. That’s it! To do the same for links in your blog entries, simply add rel=”external” to the ‘href’ statement for each link.

Download

Click here to download the zip file.

Caveats / Issues

I did this pretty much on the fly. If you have any Blogroll links that have other rel attributes assigned (i.e. me, neighbor, met, etc. – any of the options under Link Relationship/XFN), you may experience problems getting the link(s) to open in a new window. Best thing is to clear out any existing XFN attributes for each link.

Same thing goes for links in posts that use lightshow or another setting for the rel attribute. It may or may not work.

I have not found a graceful work-around for these yet.

Disclaimer

Use at your own risk. No warranty expressed or implied is provided. There is no guarantee that this will work for your version of WordPress, I wrote this out of need for myself and am sharing in the hopes someone else finds it useful.

Copyright / Permission

This plugin is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Have fun!

Assimilated living

Widgetize Me

Ok, after fighting it for at least a year (maybe two?), I’ve fully widgetized my theme. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected, but then again, once I figured out how to re-write things in the functions.php I started zooming right along!

I’ve been playing with a few widgets here and there. I found a Twitter one that works ‘ok’ … but I’m a bit annoyed because I had to tweak its code in order to get it to display the way I wanted. I haven’t been able to find a recent comments widget that I like (yet), so I guess I’ll keep looking for that.

I updated the WP Plugins in Use list on the Links page. Looking at it prior to updating, I hadn’t realized how many plugins I had deleted until seeing that list. I think I got it down to about half of what it was before.

I’m already working on another plugin for WordPress … this time it’s an XHTML 1.0 Strict friendly alternative to target="_blank" for opening links in new windows (many thanks to Mark @ Weblog Tools for the idea and code to get me started!). Hopefully I’ll have that done soon.

Married Life

Something that a lot of people have asked me lately … “How’s married life?”

I didn’t think it would be much different, and mostly it’s not. Sure, I have a new name, a different tax filing status, and small legal changes here or there, but I didn’t think it would be too different. In a way it’s not, but there are times when I find myself marveling at having to call Jim my ‘husband.’ Not ‘boyfriend’ or ‘fiance,’ ‘HUSBAND.’

It’s hard to explain … but it’s cool. Things are good. Money’s tight, but at least we’ve finally paid off the last of the wedding debts. It’s good. We’ve bought furniture. We’re looking forward to maybe going back to Disney World for our anniversary. We’re looking forward to buying a house.

It’s nice. :cool:

Of course I’m still getting wedding advertisements and bridal magazines. Part of me misses that craziness — but then I remind myself of how neurotic the whole thing made me. Heck, we’re still getting brochures from various places all up and down the east coast (from back when we were still shopping for honeymoon spots). The place that runs Branson condos is still sending me stuff once a month, LOL.

I think I’ll call this weekend and let them down easy.

Cut the fat and LOL it up!

Oh my, WordPress, you’ve gotten fat!

I’ve been trying to clean up this blog: deleting old pages that aren’t contributing to the site, inactivating and deleting old plugins that are no longer needed (or that I can live without), … etc. I think the hardest part is trying to figure out why I needed some plugins. One is RunPHP. I know I *had* to have it at one point but honestly do not remember if it’s still in use … so I’m currently investigating that one. I may just end up deactivating and waiting a week or so to make sure nothing breaks before deleting it entirely from my Plugins directory.

So if you see something broken … please let me know. Chances are, it’s probably be something I shouldn’t have fiddled with!

In the meantime, I was commenting on Devilish Southern Belle’s blog and noticed a link to Lucia’s Linky Love. It’s a souped up ‘no follow’ plugin for WordPress that has other “do-gooder” functions, like kicking trackback spam to the curb. YAY! I’ll most likely dump Denis de Bernardy’s Dofollow for it. (Sorry, Denis!)

DSB also uses Feedjit. I had kept meaning to check it out, but couldn’t remember the URL once I sat down to research … so, now I got it again. Heh. :grin:

LOL it up!

And something totally un-related to this: ICHC LOLcats will now be appearing on Jones Soda bottles. I’ll have to buy some just to get the “LOL-bottles”!!! :mrgreen:

Cute quote

I ran across a really cute quote on Ransim’s blog this morning:

“After 1pm I am a lovely, brilliant, compassionate person who is capable of amazing feats of intellectual savvy and physical stamina. Before 1pm I am a zombie and I will eat your brain if you can’t outrun me.”

I just printed it out … and it is ~SO~ going on Jim’s desk this afternoon. :twisted:

Meme: Passion Quilt

I’ve been tagged by Cookie for the Passion Quilt. I had never heard of this thing, but its concept is interesting.

The way it goes:

A PASSION QUILT

THE RULES:

1. Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.
2. Give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt.”
4. Link back to this blog entry.
5. Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

Ok, so here’s my picture, and its title is Find Your Voice

Photo courtesy of Hagit

Here are my educator picks that I think today’s young people could learn a lot from:

• Teresa
• John and Miranda
• White Trash Mom
• Beth of My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
• Conservative Belle
• Greta of Kiss My Gumbo and Hooah Wife
• Jules of Everyday Mommy

Cookie gets honorable mention — he would have been in my list, but he’s already done this meme … and he’s the one who tagged me in the first place!

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