Schierer Space

Did I mention that I hate FeedBurner?

That last post was supposed to get published tomorrow, but I mistyped the date to December 8th instead of 28th… so bing… out it went. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, except the FeedBurner plugin snags the post and IMMEDIATELY distributes it to all of your feed-readers with no opportunity for revocation.

This also means that when I edit the posts to correct spelling and grammar that I inevitably spot after posting, MOST of you will NEVER see those changes… because FeedBurner has decided that the first posting is the One True Post… updates don’t seem to be carried through (at least that I can tell).

Hate.

K apparently gets some useful features out of FB which is why it was installed in the first place. Perhaps this will be revisited soon, but obviously this isn’t important enough to annoy her for.

Apologies to those friendly readers who noticed that the comment area was missing from the blog!

This has been repaired. If you didn’t notice, you should comment more… this is intended as an interactive media. If you did notice, but didn’t mention it, well, I guess I don’t need your comments anyways.

Inspired by all the new theme building that John has been asking me about, and the work K&I are doing for the church website, I’ve updated our theme again.

The difference is subtle, but significant. The entire page now scales with window size rather than being fixed width, so for the growing number of people with wide-screen displays, they can spread east and west to their heart’s content. I also put the side bar on all pages rather than just some of them. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t change that earlier.

Let me know if you have any viewing issues.

Shout out to my friend John who is taking on the inter-tubes with his very own blog and photo gallery (sound familiar?) titled The Manlius Formation.

Go click on that there link and show him some love.

Oh and John: You have now been officially added to the link list.

Edit: Just to make this an appropriate welcome to John, I’ve decided to add this photo:

I’m sort-of anal when it comes to having standards compliant markup. So it annoys me to find out that YouTube’s default code for embedding videos is not compliant. Thanks to Bernie Zimmermann (and the commentors) for figuring out how to do this better.

You’ll need to change this*:

<object width="425" height="344">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/b3nodga6qmU&hl=en&fs=1"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/b3nodga6qmU&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed>
</object>


To this:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/b3nodga6qmU&hl=en&fs=1">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/b3nodga6qmU&hl=en&fs=1" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
</object>


Or copy the second block of code and paste the URL of the video of interest into the “data” and “value” fields. Also verify that the height and width are correct.

This is not a real post. You are seeing this only because I am trying to figure out why Evil Eyebrow’s feed is weirdly unformatted.

Peace.

I can conclusively say that the theme has nothing to do with it (although I had to edit out the call to the random quote engine.. but I seriously doubt that’s related.)

I discovered today that we’ve somehow gotten off by a month on our Nathan albums in the Gallery. We, of course, managed this months ago (in like the 4th month). Of course, we should be in Nate’s 12th month now… not the 11th (as was previously in place). Age is a zero-based numbering scheme but the cardinal numbers associated with age are one-based. You’re immediately in your first year, which ends by turning one year old. So all of this geekiness aside, I fixed all of the albums and the links in the blog going back all the way to last summer. Unfortunately, this is a complete manual process.

The thumbnails displayed in the blog are interestingly enough permalinks, so the images are still visible after I change they’re albums. The links to the image pages in the gallery are not… they are ‘meaningful links’ like “Nathan/5th+Month/”. Unfortunately, this means that they break when the album hierarchy changes. Bleh.

I’ll probably look into changing this because this doesn’t really scale well into the future. I foresee all of Nate’s first year albums being organized into a new album when we break into his second year in a few weeks. This will require me to manually edit all of the links again. Bleh^2. I think I better figure out something better by then.

What? You can’t see any difference? Well, you shouldn’t but believe me when I tell you that the code is COMPLETELY different.

I’ve converted our theme into the modern WordPress era by Widget-izing the sidebar. Yeah, I know, you don’t really care, but this will make it easier for us to tailor the site to our whims and change the look from time to time.

I also had to create a brand new WordPress widget to support the Gallery Image Block you see on the left. This will be my first ‘real’ submittal to a project like WordPress, so it will be interesting to see how that process goes. It’s written as a plugin which activates the widget (like most widgets are).

If you care, you can read more about the External Gallery 2 ImageBlock Widget.

With a sweet find from the Gallery 2 forums, I’ve edited some configuration settings for the website. This has forced the Gallery software to use a more modern version of PHP than it was defaulting to. Without any obvious reason why, this has now corrected the server error.

We’ll keep an eye on it, but we’re up and running!