CogBlogged Tagged ‘howto’

I’ve got an interest in beefing up my JavaScript tools in 2012- I’ve mildly dabbled on and off, but am far behind in the current state of the code. I started doing more trying to build more of the onboard interfaces for the StoryBox, mainly because I lacked the python chops to do so. But there is a lot of power in moving interaction browser side, especially with sophistication of jQuery libraries for a lot of functionality. I am seeing things I typically do in PHP that I can see doing in JS. This was the thinking when I decided a few nights ago to build a web tool to randomly generate some words that have no English Equivalent: I will roll through some technical stuff which might be hairy or not. But just want to share what I am doing; there are likely much more elegant ways to do [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ailatan With a relaxing day of nothing definite to do, I decided to poke around the corners of the blog house and clean up some dust gathered in the corners of my theme. Themes that predate WordPress 3, like mine, do not take advantage of the newer menu editing options. Old school themes were typically set up to turn Pages into menus, for example mine is wedged inside the header.php template: <ul class="menu"> <li class="<?php if ( is_home() or is_archive() or is_single() or is_paged() or is_search() or (function_exists('is_tag') and is_tag()) ) { ?>current_page_item<?php } else { ?>page_item<?php } ?>"><a title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>" href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">Da Blog</a></li> <?php wp_list_pages('depth=1&title_li=&include=1358,887,2929,1620'); ?> </ul> where I have picked the pages listed by their id numbers to appear. This is rather tedious to edit and manage, and I also ran into issues because I [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by klynslis Someone in my twitter flow, I cannot recall who, tweeted in angst asking if anyone has had a good webinar experience in Adobe Connect. The subtext was clear- he/she had a lousy experience, and wonders if te problem is the technology. Heck, I do this all the time. I have b and m-ed about those WebEx sessions where they dont let the audience see or chat with each other. I am not about to become a raging fan-boy of Connect, but having used it over the last few years to run at least 30 or more sessions for NMC (Our regular Connect@NMC sessions a year of Adobe First Mondays, MIDEA webinars, and other scattered sessions and live meetings), I have some sense of what has worked well for us. It’s not iron clad, and I will first start out by saying that all [...]

Note: Updated December 7, 2010 for use of new theme…. Nothing like a little WordPress hacking to get back in action. A few months ago I registered the domain barkingdog.me as a place intended to set up a photo gallery, but decided today to finally get around to hanging something for real there. My goals were to have a clean site with ginormous images, and also something that would be little fuss to add. On my NMC work in creating the MIDEA site I had set up an account to have access to the Graph Paper Press themes — yes, these are paid for themes, but are very elegant and sophisticated. I did moderate hacking to the Modularity theme for the MIDEA site, but was liking their photo gallery themes, and landed on Widescreen Fullscreen. With a few hours tweaking and adding one moderate hunk of code, I have what [...]

I have not even seen a glimpse of MTV for at least 10 or 15 years. I am so old I can remember when the “M” stood for “Music”: I can remember the riveting teen age moment when MTV first launched- it was radical, different, spoke to me– and it felt at the time like a game changer (not that I knew there was a game)- and I was there from the start. It was like maybe how future people will be writing about their first experiences with the web or YouTube or … It was jam packed with media. It had a fast pace, It had edgy graphics, and had I know it was a word then– it had snark. And it felt so personal- the first “VJs” were all young(ish) and unknowns (quick, how many can you remember? I failed too, had to look it up). I think [...]

It’s been a while but it is time to add to my collection of WordPress Dissected where I break down web sites I have been building using WordPress but with some moderate to severe template wrangling. Today I present an NMC project set that is sort of a Zen Riddle. If a blog has no posts is it a web site? This is the editing area for a finished web site: How? Why? The web site is made up entirely of WordPress pages, because there is nothing chronological in the site’s structure (though if we ever added a news section it would be easy). There was a reason I organized it around Pages… and I cannot remember why, but had something to do with being able to list the pages in a sidebar. I think. To be honest, the work started more than a year ago and the site sat [...]

My colleague Rachel Smith presented a nice little WordPress challenge to re-create what she had done previously as old skool manual HTML page updating into her WordPress blog (see Postcards back through time). In the spirit of previous documentation of WordPress Theme hacking, here is the under the hood things I did, some variations on ones I have written previously WordPressing Dissected: Pachyderm Services and Making of a New Site: NMC Virtual Worlds. This current write up includes a custom category template, direct database querying, custom fields, and maybe a little elbow grease. Firstly, the original site of Rachel’s postcards features her original artwork, with the most recent one at the top, and icon links to previous works below. I would guess creating a new one is making a new HTML page, copying some source code to the top of the index, and updating the icons below. Maybe it’s not [...]