Update: Move went smoothly and everything seems to be working. Please let me know if you have or see any problems on the site. Thanks!

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From now on, anyone who wishes to subscribe only to the Humpday Hilarities can do so via RSS or Email. Of course, I welcome everyone to hang around the whole feeds, but understand completely for those who don’t.

All Humpday Hilarities posts (as well as the corresponding tags and category) will display the following invitation:

Did you know you can get these weekly funnies sent directly to your email? Click here and fill out the email subscription link. Mailing frequency is once per week, with the rare exception of extra funnies posted for special occasions.

Your email address will never sold or given out to anyone!

Please let me know if any part of the site looks funny or acts up. And of course, submissions are always welcome. (Read: send me your funnies!)

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Thank you for submitting for the 2009 Gold Award. We enjoyed reviewing your website.

We are presenting you with the Silver Award. All we ask is if you decide to accept this award please link the award back so others like yourself can submit for the awards.

Your site is listed on our award page with a link.

Thank you from the NEOVIZION, Inc. review department.

Thank you!

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I’ve deleted all the posts and removed the plugins. I may look into it again later.

Was a cool idea though …

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Congratulations! I’m honored to present your site with my Award of Elegance.

Thank you for your interest in my awards.
Cheers, Lady Rohan

Thank you, Lady Rohan!

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It is an honor to present you with my Purrrfect Page Award.

Fresca

YAY!

Thank you, Fresca!

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Congratulations on your win for the Fantasy Fights Diamond Award for 2009. The Fantasy Fights diamond award is a Free service and is presented to those sites whose web design originality and content have achieved the highest levels of excellence. Each year someone/ you must resubmit your site in order to win each year award. All 2009 awards will be removed and ready for the 2010 winners so be sure to sign up each year.

Ladie Mikala

Thank you, Ladie Mikala!

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There is a much easier way to do this with CSS. I had ran across this a long time ago, but never bookmarked the link.

Bad designer, BAD!

Luckily, I ran across it again recently and thought I’d post it here in case anyone else was interested in how to do this.

In your stylesheet, add the following:

.hiddenpic {display:none;}

Then add your image that you want pre-loaded just following the </HEAD> tag. For example:

<img src="/images/navhover.gif" alt="" class="hiddenPic" />

OR, you could put several images inside a DIV:

<div class="hiddenPic"><img src="/images/hover1.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/images/hover2.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/images/hover3.gif" alt="" /></div>

Just keep in mind that these images will load before you page does, so don’t overdo it with HUGE images!

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Great … what a way to start the week.

I go wake Jim up (God love him for putting up with me!) and start pacing because the car parts store wasn’t open yet, I was going to be way late for work, and I just knew that it was not going to be something as simple as a dead battery … it’s probably something catastrophic, or expensive, like the alternator, etc.

Two hours (and a hundred bucks) later, I have a brand new battery and am told that my car’s alternator is fine. Yay. I finally make it to work just in time to discuss lunch.

The day has gotten better as it’s gone on, though … I was reading through my email and received the following:

Congratulations you have won the “World Web Award of Excellence” for web site design, creativity, and ease of navigation. Keep up the good work. You have obviously worked very hard investing your time, and skills into making a great web site.

Regards,
Art Space 2000 Awards Department

Very cool.

Though it’s now occurred to me, I have no place to display my accolades. I guess I’ll just have to create something and add it to the sidebar!

YAY — something to keep me busy for the rest of the day!

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And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

– Luke 2:8-20 NIV

Christmas comes early for some …

I received an email today from Soldiers’ Angels notifying me that the infantry where two of my soldiers are has a “mailstop.” This means only one thing …

THEY ARE COMING HOME!!!!

I know their families have got to be so excited!

God bless you, Casey and Steven. Wherever you are and wherever you’re headed, I wish you a safe trip.

Thank You!

Whenever I’m out and about and see a soldier or veteran, I always go up to them and thank them for their service and hand them a small Soldiers’ Angels card. Something Jessie said a while back sticks in the back of my mind every time I meet one … she said, “‘Thank you’ doesn’t seem like enough.”

I know what she means. For such a small phrase and gesture, I hope I’m able to make a big impact on that person, or the people around them. And I hope I come across as truly grateful.

To all troops, veterans, and their families: you have my thanks, gratitude, and support. May God bless you, and those who love and support you!

We’re outta here!

Welp, I’m finishing up wrapping tonight and we’ll pack up the car early tomorrow to head out of town for a bit.

My overnight bag’s packed tighter than a Ju Ju Be, LOL!

Hopefully I’ll have some goodies to share when I get back.

I hope everyone has a safe and very Merry Christmas!

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A while back, Jeremy Flint had posted about how he created his WordPress sandbox using Super Satellite’s WP Content Framework. Basically, you can take any empty WordPress blog and instantly fill it with content similar to that seen on the WordPress Themes preview pages. It comes with pages and sub-pages, categories and sub-categories. There are comments and formatting elements. This is especially handy for those of us who develop or want to update a WordPress theme to ensure that all elements are formatted properly.

I decided to take this a step further and want to have a WordPress test site for each of the last 3 or 4 major version releases. Rather than keep installing on my server, I decided to make it portable.

I love love LOVE portable apps!

I hopped on over to the MoWeS site and created a fresh install of Apache2, MySQL5, PHP5, PHPMyAdmin, and WordPress — it currently has WP 2.6.1, which is fine because you can get any version you want from the WordPress release archive! Once the package is compiled and downloaded, then installed, simply run the mini web server then add more WordPress installs as needed.

To populate your WordPress install, download the framework file from Super Satellite and import into your WordPress install.

Note: In WP 2.7, go to Tools, Import. For 2.6 or earlier, go to Manage, Import.

Choose the WordPress import option. It works so far for 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7 here. I plan on adding 2.1 and 2.3 later tonight.

Once I have everything set up just the way I like it, I copy everything to my handy-dandy thumbdrive and ‘Voila!’ — a “mobile” portable set of test environments for my theme designing and general muck-abouts and funnery.

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Finally frustrated, I hit the WordPress forums and mailing lists. Several posts in the forums pointed to Justin Tadlock’s recent post about making themes backwards compatible. Basically, you save a copy of your current (2.6) comments.php file and name it legacy.comments.php. Then add a small bit of code to your theme’s functions.php file:

This IS very useful and I’ll be needing it to update my released themes, but not quite what I was looking for for updating this site. Checking WP-Hackers, I hit gold — a post by Ryan Boren a couple months back detailing how to separate pings from comments gave me the nudge in the right direction that I had been looking for.

Callbacks

I don’t know why it never occurred to me before now, but using a callback allows you to breakdown a function (similar to the foreach loop used for comments in previous versions of WordPress). Hitting the forums again, I found a reference to Jeremy Clark’s post on using the comment callback function. This gave me exactly what I needed.

I used Jeremy’s comment threading post as a starting point for my comments.php file (view code). I fixed the alignment of most of the coding to make it a little easier to follow (and muck about, LOL).

Here’s a close-up of my modified the wp_list_comments reference:

Here I am changing the avatar size to 70 and will be using a callback function called “custom_comment” to format the results of the loop. Also, notice that the type is set to ‘comment’. For the time being, I am showing only comments (no trackbacks/pingbacks) until I figure out how I want them styled.

Now on to the functions.php file to show you how I formatted and corralled everything (view code).

Taking this route seems a bit overwhelming at first but IMO is the best way to go if you want your comments to look and/or behave a certain way.

Last but not least

If you haven’t already, don’t forget to add this snippet to your theme’s header.php file:

As shown in my example, make sure you add it before the wp_head() call.

Everything clear?

I hope this all makes some kind of sense. Please feel free to ask me to elaborate on anything I’ve posted here and I’ll try my best to explain!

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

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