NOT!

Do love Akismet, though

In other news, I want to make a concerted effort to keep this blog updated. I’ve sort of neglected it since graduation nearly two years ago. I’ve got ideas for tutorials that I’d like to post, and hopefully I’ll find the time to work on them!

Whoops. My bad. And, that’s what I get for neglecting my personal projects. Serves me right.

Anyway, the new layout is an experimental layout that actually makes use of the Geolocation API that’s supported by Firefox 3.5 and up, Google Chrome, Opera 10.6, IE 9 and Safari 5. Anyone using Internet Explorer 8 and old is shit out of luck. Psst: upgrade or use a better browser — if you have a choice. If you don’t, please kick your IT person in the head and tell him/her that it’s 2011, not 2001.

So anyway, Geolocation. Yeah, cool stuff, that. Basically, the new site features an Easter Egg that should be easy to locate. What does this Easter Egg do? Well, it uses Geolocation to grab your latitude and longitude — you know that prompt about wanting to know your location? Well, allow it or you won’t get the goods. Get it? Good. The next thing that happens is that the coordinates are passed via Ajax to a PHP script that uses the coordinates to query Weather Underground and get the current weather for your location. I may switch it to NOAA or just make the query more general because I have a feeling that I might run into caching issues with the script.

..and instead of writing blog posts, I should be going to bed =D

1. Need a proper favicon. Took care of that.
2. Keep an eye on the performance of the caching script for my Last.fm and Twitter accounts — Last.fm user-name is ardathksheyna, if anyone is curious.
   1. Eventually, the Last.fm module will be expanded to a plugin. One of my ideas is to have a page that displays 10-20 of my most popular tracks. (Looking at my top tracks, Just Stop by Disturbed is currently the ranking champion.)
   2. Twitter module: no ideas yet, just keeping an eye on how the regex handles multiple links; multiple mentions and I may have to throw something for retweets in there, eventually.
3. Create sidebars for the Portfolio (Works) section, and change the sidebar for the single posts template.
4. Up in the air: Resume & Contact forms.
5. Up in the air: Add Gravatar to posts. (Privately, I wish Livejournal supported Gravatar :\)
6. Search template needs to be styled.
7. Portfolio: Child-posts should show up in taxonomy listings.

So what happens to Dumpster-fairy.com once the merge is complete? I’m thinking that for a few months, I’ll have Dumpster-fairy.com do a 301 to Jes.Gs when I move the site to the main url. After that, I’m not sure what happens. Dumpster-fairy.com is mine for another two years — I believe that it doesn’t expire until November of 2012. So, there are three possibilities: sell it, give it away or, allow it to expire.

Freebies. I’ve been working on a set of scrap book-influenced freebies that contain some of the design elements that have gone into my current Dumpster-fairy.com layout. I really don’t have a set release date for the set, though I’m quietly gunning for a June release. While I’m on that subject, I am also working on a free WordPress theme. I’m looking at a July release for the WordPress theme; it still has to be cut up from Photoshop and the theme has to be coded.

Finally, I’ve been thinking about selling my design skills. I feel that I’m pretty good at what I do and I could use both the money and the experience since I am set to graduate next June. I also have a few other commercial ventures planned that will probably start in the next few months. I don’t want to say what just  yet, though

Till next time!

The reason is the hook that is called when Manga+Press is deactivated. The hook deletes all of the options and the two tables Manga+Press uses to keep track of comic posts. Since the proper way of upgrading a plugin usually involves deactivation and deletion of the files, this could be a problem for some users. However, I went ahead and tested the deactivation procedure on the server and…nothing happened. So either there is a bug in 2.7 (fortunate in this case) or the hook in question is no longer being used. Either way, I suggest either downloading the patch I’ve provided or backing up your database; the latter always being a wise choice whenever you’re upgrading a plugin, of course.

Manga+Press: http://manga-press.silent-shadow.net/
Download Patch: mangapress patch

How to use LightGallery? First off, start by inserting this code at the top of any page you’d like to display your gallery:

Followed by:

$path = '/path/to/my/images/folder';
$thmb_size = 'thumb-height thumb-width';
 
$gallery = new Gallery($path, $thmb_size);
$gallery->Output();

$path is obviously the full path pointing to the directory where your images reside. Replace thumb-height and thumb-width with the desired height and width of your thumbnail. The beauty of LightGallery is that it is one PHP Class that can be used as many times as need be. If you need to create a new gallery, all you have to do is create a new directory, upload your images to that directory and create a new Gallery object with $path set to that path.

Some limitations include:
The gallery directory has to be one level below the root directory where gallery.php resides. Another limitation is that LightGallery uses jQuery and ThickBox and ThickBox is hard-coded into LightGallery, though I plan to change that at a later date.

Tips:
If you want your thumbnails to display tool-tips and have captions in ThickBox, edit the album.xml file that is created in the directory where your images reside. Specifically edit the and tags so that they contain your desired title and description. Another planned edition to LightGallery is a single-user backend to allow easy editing of titles, descriptions and possibly deletion of images.

Create a PHP file and name it…something…test.php…whatever, doesn’t matter as long as you can remember what it is Insert the following lines of code into your file:

Upload the file to your wp-content/uploads directory and then open it in your browser. The filename part may or may not be necessary; I tried it both ways and it seemed to work when I added the name of a file that was inside the directory I was trying to change. Try it without the file name first, and if you get an error; add the name of a file inside the directory and if you still get an error then try changing the permissions on the test.php file itself to 777 or 755. If you’re still getting errors, then it’s time to contact your web host and have them set the correct permissions on the folders in question.

At this point, what I want is feedback from anyone who has downloaded and is using the plugin in question. If you’ve run into errors, I’d like to know about it. If you send me a bug report, be sure to include the following:

• WordPress version (very important)
• Plugins installed (also very very important)
• Screenshots of the possible bug in question
• and, if you have access to this: Web server configuration info
  • Server version and config info
  • PHP version and config info
  • MySQL version and config info

Look for my email address in the readme.txt file that comes with the plugin. Sorry, but I really don’t want to give spam-bots a chance to harvest my email address. You can use the contact form here if you like but you won’t be able to send screen-shots.

Enjoy, and Happy New Year!

I’m aiming for a Friday release, so check back for more info!