I bet there’s a plugin for that.

The Image Editor was introduced in WordPress 2.9, and was a pretty awesome feature. It still is, but I have one complaint: it’s not extendable. At least not in any way that I’ve been able to find from reviewing the source code. It’s actually a shame, really. It’s like the Image Editor was just dropped in and forgotten. A part of that complaint, is that unlike the Scissors plugin (which — from I remember reading at the time — the Image Editor was based on) which allows you to edit any of the available thumbnail sizes, the Image Editor gives you an all-or-nothing option.

Being able to tweak each thumbnail individually is an important feature and it’s too bad that it was left out. Sure, I could use Scissors but I really don’t like Scissors’ interface. There is already a post on WordPress.org’s Extend/Ideas forum on this very subject, though it was last updated about 4 months ago.

That being said, with development on 3.4 currently starting, it might be worthwhile to see if modifications to the Image Editor can be made to allow it to be extended. The next question would be what parts can be extended, and what can’t be extended. Hey, all it takes are a few well-placed hooks!

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.

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

Completed button

1.) The Metal Ring

1. Start by selecting the Ellipse Tool and draw a circle with a diameter of roughly 65px. Color doesn’t particularly matter because we’ll be using Layer Styles to change the appearance.
2. In Layer Styles, we’ll be using Drop Shadow, Bevel and Emboss, Satin, Color Overlay and Stroke. Use the following settings for each of the styles:
   

   Drop Shadow Settings

   

   Bevel and Emboss Settings

   

   Color Overlay Settings

   

   Satin Settings

   

   Stroke Settings

3. Now, you should have something that resembles this:
   
4. Make sure that you are on the same layer path, and using the ellipse tool again, create a circle that is 10px smaller than the first one and then center it inside the other circle. While the new path is selected, press the - key to subtract from the outer shape area. Now, you should have a ring that looks like this:
   

2.) The Button

1. Start a new circle path layer above the one we just created. Make sure that the new path is slightly bigger than the inner circle of the ring without showing on the outside.
   
2. Once again, we’ll use Layer Styles to adjust the appearance:
   

   Inner Shadow Settings

   

   Inner Glow

   

   Bevel and Emboss Settings

   

   Bevel and Emboss Contour Settings

3. Once you’re through all of that, your button should now look like this
   

3.) The Icon

1. The icon can be anything you want it to be. If you want, you can do a quick search on Google, Bing or Yahoo for the vector logos of your favorite social networking sites to use. For the example, we’ll just use the envelop custom shape that comes with Adobe Photoshop CS4.
2. To add more depth to the shape, place a rectangle of the same size as the envelope custom shape behind the envelope, then apply a Gradient Layer Style to the rectangle and adjust the gradient accordingly.
   

4.) Finishing Touches

Now, we can stop with what we have, or you can continue on and add the reflections. The reflections use a combination of paths and gradient layers.

Button Closeup

Once again, it’s up to you to decide how the reflections should look. Yes, the buttons can be any color you choose. You can see finished examples here.

Have fun!

• 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. Open or create a functions.php file in your theme directory.
2. Then paste the code below into your functions.php file:

<?php
add_filter('page_css_class', 'custom_page_css_class', 10, 2);
/**
 *	custom_page_css_class()
 *	Hooks into page_css_class and modifies the page item class so that
 *	it uses the name of the page instead of the id.
 *
 *	@global int $id.		The ID of the page being viewed. Needed to set current_page_item.
 *	@param array $class.	The page css class being modified, passed as an array from Walker_Page
 *	@param object $page.	The page object passed from Walker_Page
 *	@return array			Returns the new page css class.
 */
function custom_page_css_class($class, $page) {
	global $id;
 
	if ($page->ID == $id)
		/* checks if the page ID matches the current page and if it does,
		    adds the current_page_item class
		*/
		$t = array( 'page_item', 'page-item-'.$page->post_name, 'current_page_item');
	else
		$t = array( 'page_item', 'page-item-'.$page->post_name);
 
	return $t;
 
}
?>

There you go! Yes, it’s that easy.

What the example does is it duplicates what’s happening in the WordPress source code but instead of using $page->ID, it’s using $page->post_name. It assembles the classes into an array and then returns it to be echo-ed out when the pagenav is generated. Note that $class isn’t used but it is necessary to have it as one of the parameters because WordPress passes it to the hook by default and we need the $page object in order to make the example work.

Happy coding!

• WordPress hook directory page_css_class
• WordPress Classes.php Source Reference
• WordPress Support: Add Link with Class to Page Menu