Tag Archives: Development

Get ready to ‘See Emily Play’

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It may not be much just yet, but we are ready to launch the mpomy subdomain See Emily Play.  This will be Em’s personal blog with a focus on whatever the hell she wants to focus on.  I’m assisting with set-up and design implementation, as well as the obvious domain and hosting issues.  All content, as currently contemplated, will be courtesy the lovely Emily.

This is a special moment for me, because mpomy.com is really an exercise in vanity and catharsis.  Google Analytics has confirmed that there’s not a whole lot of traffic, and that’s fine.  The more important result has been that I’ve become somewhat comfortable with the best platform on the web and I’m running it locally on my host provider, so it’s my bandwidth, my rules, my domain.  If there was something extremely interesting going on out there, I would have a journal entry here that would help me remember for later.  Links can be preserved and pictures saved and it just goes on from there.  Any fine writing is purely coincidental.

Emily, on the other hand, presents a totally different approach.  She has had to be dragged into this kicking and screaming.  Well, not quite, but it has taken the encouragement of a professional, published author, who recognized Em’s talent and encouraged her to act as a guest blogger.  That’s a lot different than a partner or family member saying, “you’re such a great writer, you should just start writing a blog.”

So, today I spent the afternoon assigning a subdomain, setting up another mySQL database, installing a separate and discreet WordPress installation, and getting some very basic customization underway.  Even now, the earliest entries are beginning to take shape across the room as we engage in the age-old exercise known as “dueling laptops.”  Update your Google Reader accordingly.

Other stuff (not Wayne Shorter-related)

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F1 racing – is getting ready to tear itself apart.  Teams refuse to be subject to standardized technology and budget caps.  To make matters worse, the proposed changes are voluntary, meaning that the 2010 Championship is expected to be a two tiered affair.  I’m very much in favor of some measure of fiscal control on the sport, but standardized technology takes away a key element that is really integral to the tradition and definition of F1 racing.  And a two-tiered championship is absolutely unacceptable.

Phillies – pulled out a nice squeeker tonight.  Hamels gets the win, although it seems he’s not quite as sharp and dominant as he was last year.  Same with Lidge – BIG TIME.  But he did get the save tonight and was a damned entertaining game to listen to.  Franzke is coming into his own (as Scott Graham did, a few years back) on those exciting calls at the end, particularly Lidge’s strikeout for out number two with two on in the bottom of the ninth.  Nice job.

John Scalzi – is a fine SciFi writer, a real professional.  He’s been blogging prolifically since 1998.  That’s some pretty good output for one guy.  Getting the benefit of really good writing on a daily basis is quite a treat.  But when its Scalzi’s twisted sense of humor, well then it’s priceless.  And, hey, it is priceless, totally free!  He recently featured an interview with a stick of butter, and today confronts his inner geek as he contemplates the purchase of a new computer powerful enough to play fancy new games:

As an example of this problem, note the picture above, of CyberPower PC’s “Lan Party Commander.” Leaving aside the name of the PC, which screams “I am encrusted in the residue of Cheetos and Mountain Dew,” this rig is one of the more subtly-designed of the gaming rigs CyberPower puts together, and it still looks like a cooling tower at Chernobyl. If I walk into a room and something is glowing like this thing is, my first instinct is to dive toward the lead shielding.

Read the entire post here.  I particularly like image of him encrusted in the residue of Cheetos.

WordPress – is ready to getting ready to go to 2.8 and only just installed this version (currently I’m using 2.7.1) on March 26.  That’s less than two months ago!  But it’s a dilemna because the last update (that I just installed) was terrific.  Fortunately, it’s still in beta testing, and I’m not feeling that adventurous at the moment.

I just have to say…

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The design is adapted from a really user-friendly template developed by these folks.  Those nice looking links at the upper left are a bit of a bother, because I kind of let those ‘pages’ get away from me.  The real music content is, of course, over at Blogerantz.  Also, this VodPod thing on the right is going to get on my nerves.  It looks too much like an advertisement, and, unless I’m the guy getting paid, there’s no advertising on this page.  And when I say paid, I mean getting paid real money.

UPDATE: VodPod thingy is gone. That didn’t last long. Maybe I’ll use it on the video pages, but not here on the front.

Categories and Pages

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They don’t seem to get along. I want all motorsport posts to automatically apperar on the motorsport page. That could happen if the motorsport page was not a ‘Page’. Thins being the way they are now, what I really need is to put the pull down on the main page and that will automatically generate an archive page that has the content I desire. Let’s try that.

As they say in the song…

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‘Now we’re getting somewhere’

The music page has turned into a zone of experimentation. I’ve kept the header, but chucked the template. I had hoped to steal a template that would work for what I wanted to do (music player and links to categories), but nothing really worked. So, I found a widget (neon sign!) to do my dirty work. Code is poetry, but prewritten code is easy. It’s sort of funny that all the links and text, as well as widgets, all go in the snarfer.php template. It’s not really a template if it has all the content, is it?

I’m sort of fascinated that the Pages don’t lend themselves to blog entries. For example, I will do some law bloggin here and I want to attach a brief I wrote recently on an esoteric technicality in NJ Auto law. I would think there would be a possibility of having a companion or child blog under the main blog. Without having gone on an exhaustive search, it seems that all the blogging needs to be done right here. And then I’ll link to other stuff at a ‘Law’ page, like a pdf of that brief, for example.

Now we can get back to pages

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I think that should close the book on favicons for the moment – what an epic. It didn’t help that one of the instruction dox was out of date, but that’s OK – everything is working fine now and I’ve got my little ‘Mp’ up in the corner.

The next task is to get the ‘Pages’ for music and video to look a bit different and to embed the mp3 player in a permanent position, as opposed to simply putting it in a post.