A day in the life II » hacking

Even more tweaking

Malcolm — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 03:33:18 +0000

With even more hacking, I implemented the image overlay thing the Cutline authors did on their blog. This floats another image on top of the randomly changing header.

I also tweaked the vertical spacing in various header elements to make things look right. The only thing that’s really a hack is the Cutline guys’ deal where they hyperlink the floating image by hyperlinking random text associated with a particular region of the floating image, but they hide the actual text by left indenting it by -9999 pixels. Which took a little tinkering to figure out.

But I think I’m happy now with what I’ve got. Everything’s actually working and nothing looks like ass.

So maybe I should go to sleep so I can get up early tomorrow to clean the cat boxes and take out the trash.

More Theme Tweaking

Malcolm — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 01:56:06 +0000

I successfully implemented the “Totally Random Header Images for Cutline” feature, with a little hacking. I made my header images largely out of my own photos and completely out of freely available images, and I changed the cycling pool from 5 to 9. Almost everything went swimmingly, except that despite the fact that Cutline’s header images are 896×163 pixels, the sizing in the updated header.php the Cutline folks provided resize the images to 773×140 pixels… for no apparent reason. So I fixed that too.

However, even though I wanted to make a “Post” link that shows only if the user is one with author permissions, I didn’t get that to work at all. But that’s okay. I was just tinkering.

Theme fixed!

Malcolm — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:13:43 +0000

Okay, here’s where I catalog all the changes I made to get Cutline where I wanted it to be.

Added “Edit” link to single posts and the main page (per post):

Edited index.php and single.php, inserting following line at appropriate place (lines 13 and 11, respectively):

This conditionally inserts the edit link depending on logged-in user’s permissions.

Added “Edit” link to single comments (also conditional, depending on logged-in user’s permissions):

Edited comments.php, inserting following line at appropriate place (line 88):

Altered the no comments message so that it reads right:

Edited comments.php, changing “below” to “above” and adding an exclamation point (line 108).

Altered the tag cloud so it looks like one again (instead of a list, as in the Cutline theme):

Changed sidebar.php (line 42) from:

to:

Inserted an additional sections and links in the Sidebar for features I miss (the Akismet spam comments counter, conditional linking to Site Admin and logout).

Edited sidebar.php to add to end:

Site

Meta

WordPress

Changed the theme’s CSS to add a little more color.

Edited style.css.

Changed the main linking color from dark grey to blue (line 171).

Changed the tag linking color from dark grey to dark green (line 213).

Fixed the Permalinks by adding the Permalinks class to the style.css section (lines 300-310).

The missing class in each style was “ul.sidebar_list li.linkcat“, and the comma to delimit from the other style names, of course.

Created an Archives page according to the official WordPress instructions and tied it to the proper archive.php file.

Because I created the Archives page at the wrong page name, I had to edit the Header so it pointed to the right Page:

Edited header.php, changing the link to the Archives page to the right page name (line 49).

Created a Sitemap page in a similar way to the above creation of an Archives page.

Various updates

Malcolm — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:55:30 +0000

Various updates from the past couple of days:

This weekend is our tamales party! Yay! Sunday Sunday Sunday!
I am looking for a cheap source of soursop/guayabano nectar. I have been buying it at H-Mart for $1/8.3oz can, which is pretty expensive. I shall delve. Reason? It makes absolutely fantastic Batidas with the Cachaça I like, and I’m not always in the mood for just a Caipirinha. Not that I’m a regular drinker. It’s still pretty irregular for me.
I am going to go out to dinner with misia tonight, then I’ll stick around the area while she goes home, then go to the Blade Runner Final Director’s Cut showing in my area. I hope it’s fun! My co-worker/friend Rob should be able to give me a ride home afterwards.
For the past few days I’ve been coming to work without my personal laptop and without my passwords wallet, so my LJ account is not accessible to me, just sayin’. This means that if you really want me to get some information, you should e-mail me, which you should have started doing by now anyway, so whatever. But I can’t read or comment on locked posts at all. This should change back by next week.
The ADSL issue continues. Am waiting for the new modem. Will deal with the modem when it comes.
- Have asked Verizon (non-DSL) repairs to come look at the outside “Network Interface Device” (the grey box bolted to the back/side of my house). There appears to be vaseline in the phone jacks in there, and no signal is getting to my modem plugged into the active phone jack. The repair guy is scheduled to come by on Thursday.
- Have acquired a jack with which to test the outside “Network Interface Device” anyhow. I’ll just wire it up to the posts that are serving the line that goes inside my house and test from that. Don’t know whether post 4 or 5 is tip or ring, but since it’s only two choices, I’ll try one mode and then the other. And I already have a punchdown tool.
- I still have to test another inside phone jack to see if it’s the jack near my modem/router. Will do so with new modem I bought on Wednesday.
- Regardless of all testing planned and actualized, the DSL still works, just not very well, so for now (and for the past few weeks before I actually did a speed test), it’s frustratingly slow but tolerable (and still faster than conventional modems).
- If the new modem from Verizon doesn’t fix it, or the work on the outside Network Interface Device doesn’t shed light, I will probably switch to (more expensive but should actually work) Speakeasy. This’ll be on a dedicated line, which is already as far as I know wired, so it’ll need enabling, and I hear Speakeasy is less irritatingly obnoxious and stupid than Verizon is.
Last night, instead of doing the DSL stuff, I was instead implementing the second part of my cable management plan.
- I used a couple of 8″ 3-prong extension power cords to free up spaces on my UPS and get rid of the last power strip I had on the rolling TV entertainment center.
- I installed a new network switch on the entertainment center and made 5 Cat 5e Ethernet cables out of an old longer cable, and made just one network wire link to the network switch I had hiding under the apothecary’s chest. I love my cable stripping/crimping tools even though I don’t use them very often. I had a little trouble recalling the proper wire order in the jacks, but tested them all and they’re all doing fine.
- I still have to do the actual cable tie/cable wrapping (with the spiral wrap), need to find, acquired and install an appropriate wire basket for the transformers and the wire slack, and since I’ll be loaning my Wii out to a friend for a couple of months, will have to redo some of that when I get it back.