I created a plugin called Thumbnail Updater to address this problem. Thumbnail Updater adds a button to the Edit Media page for each image that says “Update Image Sizes.” Just click the button to update your thumbnails—it can take a while depending on the size of the images and the server speed.

*new* Download: Thumbnail Updater 1.0

Download: Thumbnail Updater 0.1-beta

1. Just unzip into your WordPress plugins directory
2. Open the WordPress plugins page
3. Activate the YaECP plugin
4. Look for the new page called “Exclude Categories” in the Posts section.
5. Finally, select which categories you wish to exclude from the front page.

I whipped this plugin up on the spur-of-the-moment to deal with some issues that I found in the beta version of Manga+Press 2.5 having to do with it’s new exclude comic categories from the front page option. Apparently, if you want to exclude another category as well as the comic category, you can’t call query_posts() again because it will reset the Manga+Press query.

The plugin was tested on WordPress 2.8 so I’m not so sure how it’ll work with versions older than 2.8. I am also not so sure how the plugin will work with specialized themes that have multiple loops, such as magazine-style WordPress themes. Either way, hope someone gets some use out of it.

These were released on dA about a week ago. I figured I’d post them here for download as well. The set contains 53 alpha-transparency PNGs, the largest of which is 335x341pixels. I’ve chosen to license this set under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike.

Download: Ice Cream icons (zip)

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.

Download: snowflakes.zip

Enjoy, and Happy Holidays!

Here is a set of Gel Styles for Photoshop (*.asl format) available for download at Deviant Art [link]. Just click on the link that says ‘download‘ on the left-hand side of the preview screen. I originally created these styles in Photoshop CS, and they’ve worked all the way up to CS3. I recently bought Photoshop CS4 but I haven’t had the chance to test them out.

Web 2.0 Gel Styles for Photoshop by Jessica C. Green is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://ardathksheyna.deviantart.com/art/Gel-Styles-and-Outlines-23252763.