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.

• A Photoshop tutorial on how to create scrapbooking-style buttons for your web-page, similar to the ones I released on DeviantArt five months ago.
• A Poser 8/Pro Cel-Shading tutorial that I’ve been working on since—gasp!—last summer. Will also include a video.
• A WordPress cheat-sheet for theme designers and plugin creators.
• A PHP Date format cheat-sheet.

Since I’m on the subject of Poser, I was lucky enough to snag a copy of Poser Pro 2010 for $50 when it came out—being a beta program participant and having purchased Poser 8 last summer. Because of school, I haven’t had the chance to really use it but I did get a chance to play with it during spring break and 1.) Love the speed, and 2.) Hate the interface. The new interface was introduced with Poser 8 last summer. While a lot of people on the Rendo and Daz boards apparently love the new interface, I’m not such a huge fan of it. I actually miss the old interface, Poser Pro (2008) and prior.

As for Dumpster-fairy.com, when WordPress 3.0 comes out, there are going to be some major changes. The custom post-types and custom taxonomies—which has been around since 2.3—are going to encourage me to do a total reorganization of the site. Instead of organizing by categories, I can spread my content according to the post type: posts, for regular blog posts, tutorials, and resources. Actually, I can see the resources post-type as being a kind of extended version of the attachment post-type.

Now, if I can only survive the next four weeks!

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.

WordPress › Blog » Vote for 2.9 Media Features.

This is a very good idea, in my opinion. WordPress already has fairly strong media managment features but there is more than enough room for improvement. I also think that the idea of Media Albums and Post Thumbnails would be really awesome. It would greatly eliminate the need for complicated hacking, for one. Personally, I hope those two ideas make it into 2.9 as features. A lot of people, including myself, are using WordPress for more than just blogging—for instance, as portfolios—and having a feature like media albums that aren’t tied to a post or even post thumbnails, would really take out a good portion of production time.

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!

Now, enough rambling about CSS hacks. I’ve been busy updating the site, specifically my portfolio. I finally found a WordPress plugin that allows me to display videos so all of my motion graphics works are up, on the Motion Graphics page of the portfolio. Most of the stuff is close to two years old but I am in the process of reworking the Silent Shadow piece because the current one wasn’t really what I had imagined, even though it earned me an A for Broadcast Graphics two years ago now. Speaking of Motion Graphics, I probably should add a link to Motionographer.

What’s in store for the future? Well, I have a tutorial that I need to upload. I’ve already uploaded it at DeviantArt but I should probably either upload it or add a link to it here so people know about it. The tutorial in question was my “long awaited” (yes, that said sarcastically ^_~) tutorial on creating an AO catcher in Poser Pro. Another tutorial I have in the works documents a technique I used for creating an aged photo-look for a flyer that I designed for my Marketing Design class this quarter.

Well, I’m going to cut this short. Hopefully, the server won’t time out when I post this

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!