BrianJarrett.com

After an excessive amount of hacking CSS and Wordpress php pages I’ve finished the changes to the site design (for now). For the most part it should look pretty similar but now my sidebar and my main content area are truly in two columns instead of the old jacked-up “two columns in one column” approach. I’d been wanting to fix it for some time but just hadn’t.

I also added some cool little arrows at the bottom for previous and next navigation and improved the footer while I was at it. I’m all about increasing my pieces of flair.

I originally based this on the Simpla theme by Phu and then …read more »

Well, I finally got around to writing my first Wordpress plugin. This plugin allows you to integrate the five most recent posts in your phpBB3 forum into the sidebar of your Wordpress blog. The plugin creates an unordered list of links to these posts using the post title as the link text. You can configure the number of recent posts easily within the plugin code. I hope as I have more time to be able to extend and …read more »

Update: The plugin author, Brad, has fixed this issue and has released an updated version.

If you don’t already know Wordpress 2.5 RC2 is out now. I’m now using it but I had a major issue with one plugin: CoppermineSC. This plugin allows me to tie my Coppermine photo gallery into my Wordpress blog. When activated it broke all my other plugins and WP functions. I really can’t run my sites without this plugin so it was imperative that found a solution to this problem. After several days of fretting and research I’ve solved the problem.

When mysql_connect() is called more than once with the same host, user, and password then the connection becomes shared. Wordpress makes the DB connection once and then …read more »

Something screwy is going on with my webserver and Wordpress; I’m not sure what it is but there has been some erratic behavior on the admin side. Overall it works but I think maybe after installing some things and upgrading there might be something that’s not playing nice with Wordpress. [this problem seems to have been fixed with WP 2.5] The only really important thing was …read more »

Finally I was able to upgrade my site to Wordpress 2.3 . Initially it broke during the process and I had to restore everything then try again when I had more time. Turns out the BlogStats plugin didn’t work and I had what appears to be a deprecated category function call in my theme (wp_list_cats).

One of the more interesting things with this upgrade is tags. Tags, at least how I’ve implemented them, are sort of like micro categories. I like to think of categories as macro and tags as micro. For instance …read more »

[*Note: This version is not 2.3 compliant. I hope to release a 2.3 (and widget) compliant version soon sometime...maybe*]

After considerable customization efforts I’ve pieced together my first Wordpress theme. I call it Elegy. It’s a combination of my favorite concepts from several themes, primarily the Simpla theme by Phu.

This is the theme I’m currently using on the site. The name comes from an old Twilight Zone episode from the original series.

To use this theme out of the box you’ll need several plugins (see the sidebar code). My suggestion is to either download and install these plugins or just remove the function calls from the sidebar. You’ll probably need to know at least a little bit about customizing Wordpress themes to get something out of this theme. I might consider releasing a generic, widget-ready theme down the road; for now this is what I have.

Here’s a screen shot:

Feel free to download the elegy theme. Hope you like it.

(This theme is released under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license.)

I wrote an article some time back about getting online for little to no money. By getting online I meant an online presence, a website of some kind to provide the rest of the world with information about your life, your interests, your rants, or whatever else you’d like to share. In this article I mentioned Wordpress.com blogs. I also promised a follow up article on MySpace and its role in the grand landscape of personal online publishing.

The blog concept started out basically as a “weblog”; a simple online journal. That, in and of itself, is not too impressive. Not much more impressive than a pad and pencil; the way we’d been journaling for years. The primary advantage is that that pad of paper is now available literally for the entire world to read. In the past, exposure like that went for big bucks; now anyone with a computer and the ability to read and write can attain that same potential exposure. Sure, with the deluge of blogs and self-published content out there …read more »

Things in the world of personal pages have changed pretty dramatically over the past several years. When I first got online, around 1998, personal pages were clunky and difficult. That’s why I ended up teaching myself html. Companies like Geocities and Angelfire offered webspace and maybe some rudimentary tools for designing pages and that was about all. html editors were on the market but despite allowing users to create html pages it provided very little in the realm of site design and navigation.

Somewhere along the way (I was a little late on this trend) weblogs, or “blogs”, came into being. The blog allowed end users …read more »

Below are the Wordpress plugins I use on this site. All these plugins, as far as I can tell, are compatible up through version 2.5. Based on Wordpress.com stats this is consistently the most popular post on the site. Go figure.

Coppermine Photo Gallery Integration

• The CoppermineSC plugin allows you to integrate thumbnails and full-size images into your posts simply by including a bracketed tag within the post. You can also add it to your sidebar or wherever you like. (See this post if you run into problems with this plugin.)

Simple Visit Counter

• This counter uses a database table backend for visit counts. It also uses a text file to keep track of recent visits and won’t count visits from the same IP within a ten minute windows. Shows total visits and current visitors online.

Compact Monthly Archive

• Compacts the Wordpress archives listing into a smaller format. There are two compact options to choose from. Good for blogs that have a lot of posting history.

Wordpress Video

• Allows you to simply and easily enter bracketed tags into a post and display various video formats including YouTube or Google video.

Random Quotes

• A simple and fun plugin that allows you to display a random quote in a sidebar or wherever. Uses a database backend and a simple admin interface to enter new quotes.

Blog Stats

• The GeneralStats plugin displays various statistics about your blog, such as number of posts, comment, categories, etc. It’s got a nice drag and drop configuration gui in the admin panel.

Chuck Norris “Fact” Generator

• Displays facts you may or may not know about the mighty Chuck Norris. If you don’t know them then he’ll probably hunt you down and kill you with a roundhouse kick to your pathetic face.

Collapsing Page Menus

• Enables your blog with collapsing page menus for sub pages. Very cool plugin; I’d like to see this feature available in the core source code.

Wordpress.com Stats

• With a Wordpress.com API key you can track various statistics about visits to your site.

Akismet

• This plugin was created by Automattic (the Wordpress.com team) and does a very good job of keeping spam comments off your blog. You’ll need a Wordpress.com API Key but it’s free. You can also use the same API key on different self-hosted blogs.

Random Posts

• Allows you to display a random post in your blog. I use it primarily in my sidebar but I also display a random post on my 404 not found page.

Reverse Order Comments

• By default comments are displayed from oldest to newest, top to bottom. This plugin allows you to reverse the order. I use it for my guestbook page.

Search Pages

• By default Wordpress search only allows searching posts. This plugin enables searching pages as well. (Page searching was introduced natively in version 2.5)

SemCodeFix

• Displays text tagged as code to be displayed in a plain text, scrollable text box.

Daniel’s Dropdowns

• Displays post categories and/or archives in a compact drop down box.

TinyMCE Advanced

• Enables an advanced editor for writing pages and posts. Allows choice of fonts types and colors, tables, advanced links, etc.

Image Caption

• Produces a caption beneath images in your posts. If you don’t want a caption simply set the “title” tag to a null string (img title=”") and the plugin won’t produce the caption.

I’ve been hard at work lately on the family tree and my websites. I’ve recently added some information from some family members I recently met. I’ve updated the family tree with this information and we’re still working on gathering more. Also my family site has been redesigned. It now uses a Wordpress front end, just like this site.

I’ve also finished scanning my grandmother’s photos. I’ve completely reorganized the photos and put them online in the …read more »