Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

chronicling life in a digital world

Sums Up My Feelings Quite Well

bush_steps Hmm, title says it all. Might as well be a copy of the Constitution on there too. I’ve avoided blogging anything about 9.11, as so much is out there, from the issues with the ABC docudrama, the politicization of the anniversary (for instance, Bush laying the wreath at the site of the WTC, with only Republican representatives with him), etc, etc, etc. I simply wish that at some point, those that differ on domestic issues, can rationally approach our global issues on a united front, and sanely resolve the conflicts that effect our security, both home and abroad. I’d also like to see the powers that be see that the continued death and injury that befalls our military overseas is not a price worth continuing to pay, and find diplomatic solutions to resolve the civil war in Iraq.

Sums Up My Feelings Quite Well was published on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 2:23pm and tagged Politics, rants, Iraq, WTC, 9/11 and Bush. There is currently one comment to this article. Share your thoughts by writing your own.

Category Archives Plugin

(disclaimer)I’m not a coder, and this is my first attempt, I apologize if this isn’t properly documented or presented.

My very first WordPress Plugin! I’ve dabbled with a lot of areas of WP, but until this post in the support forums, I never really had an idea or need to write one. But after doing some reading, I found that there wasn’t a simple way to accomplish this task. All of WP’s archive features are based on date.

So with the help of alphaoide via #wordpress on IRC, I put together this simple plugin to accomplish the task. It worked fine on my test site, but may need some TLC before being good to go. Basically it outputs categories by name in an h2 tag, then lists post titles with a permalink to the post.

I tested this by creating a Page Template, then inserting the plugin code within the content div of the theme.
The code to insert is
< ?php mb_cat_archive(); ?>
(remove the space between the and ?, I’m not sure why that is getting reformatted in the post)
I suppose this could be used in a sidebar, however it may create a very long list…
So to summarize, download the file, unzip, and upload to your wp-content/plugins directory.
Activate the plugin in the dashboard. Create the page template, inserting the above code, save, and upload to your themes directory.
Go to Write->Page, and choose the template you uploaded.
The new page should now list your categories with their appropriate posts.
I haven’t looked into how it handles posts with multiple categories, that will be on my todo list, I’m sure, if the plugin proves useful or popular. I’d also like to add some AJAX to hide the posts until you click on the category (that would make it much more sidebar friendly), and the ability to change the h2 tag to whatever one likes.

You can download the file via:
http://www.miklb.com/blog/cat_archive.zip

Category Archives Plugin was published on Saturday, September 9, 2006 at 10:39am and tagged geek-life, wordpress, plugin, category and archive. There is currently one comment to this article. Share your thoughts by writing your own.

Great Political Prank

VANITY FAIR
What a great idea from a main stream media source. Vanity Fair has a fake cover for The Weekly Standard which dogs the current efforts in Iraq. Simply detach the fake cover from the Vanity Fair, and fold it over a copy on the newsstand, sit back, and watch the shock of the next neocon that approaches the newsstand. Brilliant!

Great Political Prank was published on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 7:43pm and tagged Politics, prank, Vanity Fair and Weekly Standard. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

» Silver Mac

» Silver Mac a great Mac tips site, with several recent tips I didn’t know about. I really like the recent tip on using a dashboard widget on the desktop. As much as I like the idea of widgets, I rarely use them as it requires a few keystrokes. Perhaps if I learn how to use Quicksilver with them…

» Silver Mac was published on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 7:36pm. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

Just a guy wandering the intarwebs looking to make sense of life.

will I be able to code while keeping an eye on the Chelsea/Inter Milan game? I'm going to try…

Side Notes

I’m always on the prowl for cheap (read FREE) iPhone apps, and finding a simple source for such is no easy task, at least in my searches. Unfortunately, all the sites I’ve found that cover this type of information are so full of ads and poorly designed, it’s impossible to actually find anything useful. I have however recently discovered at dealmac.com a RSS feed specifically for discounted iPhone/iPod Touch apps.. I can’t say that I’ve actually found any great deals yet through it, (I haven’t had a chance to play the recent “Let’s Golf!” game posted today), but it’s a start. And don’t get me wrong, I have no problem paying for a quality app, and do so with perhaps too regular of frequency, but still like finding a deal when I can, especially on games, which I know I’ll only play a few times, or very rarely.
Do you have any sites or feeds that you’d care to share? Tips on finding apps on sale?
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I was pleasantly surprised this afternoon by a comment left here on the site that my first Habari theme, Mzingi, had been ported to another CMS, WolfCMS. Though I’ve since passed Mzingi off to the official Habari project, and is now owned by the community and part of the official download, it’s a bit rewarding to see it deemed worthy of porting. You can see a demo of it in action as a WolfCMS theme.
It’s also nice they gave attribution on the official site. I’d not heard of the project before, seems like a young project that is a fork of another CMS project, but their site describes the project as something akin to Habari.
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It’s always great to see new themes released for Habari, even if they are ports. Florian has ported the WordPress theme Clean Home to Habari. The theme’s name aptly describes the design, a clean, black and white two column design with contrasting red headings. The theme seems to be coded for trunk, that is, using the areas feature. One thing I noticed is that the theme still has some cruft from WP, calling for a dynamic sidebar (widgets) with some text that also references a text widget and and admin options. I of all people can understand though of wanting to get something out before working out all the kinks, so I’m sure he’ll update it as soon as the areas/blocks feature is fleshed out a bit more. I also don’t speak German, so it’s quite possible he references that in the post announcing the release.
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You’d think “Canada’s best magazine”, The Walrus would at least link back to my bookmarks if they are going to use my graphics in their post about Infinite Summer. Heck, they didn’t even change the name of the image from the 5x bookmark file. Real professional Nav, real professional…
At least they didn’t just hotlink to the image in my post.
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I’ve recently been using Safari 4 beta, mostly because I had been too lazy to get more RAM, and Firefox was just too damn slow with all the apps I’d have open on only 1 gig. Now that I’m at 4 gigs, I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox, especially with the comments I’ve been reading about the speed improvements of the next version (3.5??). Another reason I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox is that Firebug is just far superior to Safari’s built in inspector. To that end, I’ve recently come across two add-ons for Firebug.
The first, Firefinder, is a handy tool to “find HTML elements matching chosen CSS selector(s) or XPath expression”.
The second is one that Google previously used internally. Today they open sourced it and released, Page Speed. Page Speed allows developers to “evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.”
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Theme Development

I have moved all of my theme development to Beanstalk. If you would like to check out the full svn repository, you can checkout from http://blogworks.svn.beanstalkapp.com/themes.