For a couple years I’ve had a photography site at photography.brentdanley.com that few people visited. I built it as a project to learn the Flickr API and the JavaScript framework Prototype. I’ve been wanting to incorporate it into my main site for a while, and now it’s done.

Click on the Photography link to check it out.

The new Photography page at BrentDanley.com

css · flickr · jquery · photography · php · phpFlickr · webdev · wordpress

I haven’t been satisfied with The Rhetoric’s theme for a long time and have been intending to design/develop my own from scratch. In the past I’ve always selected a well-designed theme and modifying it to meet my needs.

To prepare myself for this adventure I read the WordPress Codex sections about theme development. I also read the applicable chapters of WordPress 2.7 Complete: Create Your Own Complete Blog or Website from Scratch with WordPress by April Hodge Silver and Hasin Hayder.

Yesterday I spent a long time in Photoshop doing design mock-up. The early stages were frustrating and a bit humorous as the design shifted wildly and often in not-so-good directions. I was only vaguely sure of what I wanted; I know I want a fairly simple and clean design that fits my personality.

Design mockup - The Rhetoric

This afternoon I readied a local sandbox for theme/plugin development: I created a MySQL database with a copy of data from this blog for testing, installed and configured WordPress, and created a folder to hold the files for the new theme. A development sandbox allows me to play around with the new design without confusing and annoying the visitors of the live blog.

When the new theme is done I’m going to create several custom plugins. That should be fun, too.

Then I’ll update my resume.

codex · custom · mysql · php · plugin · theme · wordpress

Tweeting is nice because it’s terse; I can update my tweeps about what I’m doing, resources I’ve discovered and articles I’ve read between more lengthy and media-rich blog posts (and to publicize those posts).

The Twitter Tools plugin is a great way to integrate tweets into a WordPress blog. The most obvious benefit of this is that it keeps the content on the blog page fresh and allows bloggers to communicate bitlets of information that do not require their own post.

In addition to other worthwhile features, Twitter Tools allows a blog admin to display recent tweets in a sidebar widget, and to automatically publish tweets in a daily or weekly digest format. Twitter Tools caches tweets in a table of the WordPress database to reduce the number of calls to Twitter.

There were a few things about the plugin I didn’t particularly like out of the box. First, there was a link below the last tweet in the sidebar widget to take a visitor to my Twitter page. I prefer to have the widget title be that link. Second, the digest post title date format was ugly: “2009-06-29″ instead of “June 29, 2009″. Third, the link at the end of each tweet in the digest post had a simple ‘#’ instead of the date and time of the tweet, which also serves as a link to the original tweet.

(more…)

development · php · plugin · programming · social networking · twitter · wordpress

WordPress 2.5 won .net magazine‘s Open source application of the year for 2009 (issue 184). WordPress is an awesome blogging platform and CMS. It deserves all the accolades it receives.

Version 2.7 is better yet (I upgraded three blogs in the past day). Thanks a bunch, Matt. And congratulations.

.net · 2009 · award · blog · cms · programming · wordpress

Last night I upgraded my blog CMS to WordPress 2.7. It should have been simple; it should have taken less than five minutes. I won’t bore you with the details. The problem was that an index.php file wasn’t replaced by the FTP client which completely broke the site.

As a result of the frustrations and troubleshooting I decided to go ahead and move the root to a different folder on the server. It had been in /brent/wp_blog which was superfluous: nothing else was in /brent.

Moving the files was a simple drag and drop in the FTP client. The drawback was that it broke pictures and links looking for ‘wp_blog/’ in 228 posts. I needed a search and replace or I would be doing it manually all day.

Lorelle on WordPress came through again with her post about doing just what I needed. The solution was a simple MySQL UPDATE query on the wp_posts table.

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (
post_content,
'wp_blog/',
'');

In 0.0158 seconds 196 posts were updated. Pretty cool, eh? No more broken internal links.

Unfortunately, all the links to The Rhetoric content across the interweebs are now broken, but that shouldn’t be many. The upside is that the document tree is cleaner and more simple.

Perhaps now I should run queries to update style selectors so I don’t have to keep hanging on to legacy declarations. Hmmmmm.

find · mysql · replace · search · upgrade · wordpress · wp

Kirsten wants to write more personal and edgy blog posts than are really suited to our family blog, Danley.org, so she asked me to help her set up her own. I had set up a blog for her a year ago but she never even made the initial post. Regardless, I was thrilled at her suggestion. I love to read her writings and I think it’s a healthy exercise.

I dropped the tables from her database and wiped the old WordPress files from the web server then installed the latest version of WordPress. It took less than five minutes. Then I had her select a theme we could customize to her liking. She chose metamorph_DNA for its simplicity, feature set, and strength of styles. I told her it would be no problem to pinkify the colors and shrink the header.

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blog · cogitations · customize · kirsten · theme · wordpress

The Rhetoric uses the WordPress CMS as it’s blogging engine. Until yesterday it was on version 2.1. I’ve intended to upgrade for some time to take advantage of the new features, themes, widgets and overall ease of use. Yesterday was the day.

The Rhetoric is now running on WordPress version 2.6.3.

I chose the iNove 1.0.3 theme for it’s simplicity and power. I don’t know if it will stay, but so far I like it. I’m just kicking the tyres for now. I’ll continue to configure it a bit more. Suggestions are always welcome. Please leave a comment.

The upgrade process itself couldn’t have been more simple. I backed up the MySQL database, backed up the files, deleted the old files, downloaded the new files and copied them over to the web server, ran the upgrade utility and installed this new theme. None of it was complicated and I had zero issues. Backing up the files was by far the most time-consuming part. The complete upgrade took no more than twenty minutes.

I hope you like the changes as much as I do.

blog · cms · wordpress