meddlingBanter

Tonight I decided to make a few adjustments to speed up my website, though I’ve not actually taken any speed measurements to see if the speed has actually improved.  I’ve shortened the amount of posts I display on the first page from 10 to 5.  I don’t update all that much so I figure making 5 posts the default would be fine, and that’s less time to load my page.  The second thing I did was to edit some of my posts and use the “more” feature built into Wordpress.  All I had to do was insert the <!–more–> tag into my posts and Wordpress does the rest. If you look at the tool bar in the online editor there is a button which will insert the tag as well.  Last but not least, while looking for a plugin to implement the “more” feature automatically to each post I ran into a plugin which adds some AJAX to each “more” link.  Instead of clicking more and being directed from the main page to the single post view, the page expands revealing the rest of the post.  A feature which makes viewing each post much easier.  The name of the plugin is called Ajaxified Expand NOW and can be found under the Features sections here.

Upgraded my Wordpress install today.  There were a bunch of bug fixes, some compatibility fixes with older versions of php, and I think a security fix for good measure.  I had a little problem when I first upgraded while I was in the computer lab this morning waiting for CICS to start.  For some reason when I was doing the upgrade I thought removing the folder wp-includes was optional, turns out thats the case for wp-includes/languages, not the whole folder.  Since I’m not using a language file I just deleted the whole folder and uploaded the new files and all problems have been solved.  Really I was just having a problem accessing the admin side of things, not the main page.

In other news I’ll be done with community service this weekend and probation the following Monday.  Then the celebration will begin.  It will be weird not drug testing and doing PBT testing every week, though I think I can handle it:)  So long for now.

I dunno if anyone might have noticed because I certainly didn’t, but my photo gallery wasn’t working when I tried to look at it today.  I use a wordpress plugin to integrate gallery2 into wordpress and one of the required modules for the plugin wasn’t enabled in gallery2.  This probably happened around the time I updated my install of gallery2 from one of the beta releases to the final release.  I probably should have tested things a little bit better.  At any rate, I enabled the module in gallery2 and now the wordpress plugin is working again.  I think I should fix up my gallery2 intergration into wordpress over the next few days.  Right now its pretty ugly since its all off center and doesnt include my sites side bars.  I’ll make the time to do that over the next couple days.

Today I finally moved my site over to the-bob run by Chris House. With his help my account was setup and I was able to transfer the site and configure it accordingly in a little over an hour. Not bad at all. So yea, let the updating commence.

    Tonight I found a cool plugin for iTunes called Now Playing. With a little configuration after the install you can upload an xml file to your webserver for parsing later. After a few modifications to the authors example php file, one change to my main blosxom theme and everythings up and running. Currently the plugin will only load up the first five songs I’m listening to at any given instance of iTunes. After that the plugin stops working. For $10 bucks you can get the full version so I may just do that. Seems reasonable enough, especially since I’ve been looking for something like Now Playing for quite some time.

    I also removed the google adds tonight. They’re kinda ugly and useless in the blog so yea. Tomorrow I have brunch with my parents in the Grand Plaza in downtown GR. They’ve been staying there the past few days for some abulance convention my dad had to go to. They took me out to dinner thursday after class. Ronald was pretty sloshed when I got there and gave the waitress a hard time at Macaroni Grill. She seemed a little irate, but we all had a good laugh. Grizzled Ronald is always a good time. Good Nite.