Posts in Category: Tech

Half Terror, Half Joy

I have a new shiny goo-gah to play with at work, New Relic. I’d been ignoring it until the site started acting crazy. Now, it is distracting me mightily. Look ma! Embedded realtime graphs! I might be a little old to learn the nerd life, but what the hell.

Gallery Games

I had every intention of meeting my obligation to put up my daily post last night. But as we all know, there is a famous paved road…

I really wanted to put up some photos, but do it in a gallery format with bigger images. So, since I had already gone searching for a WordPress photoblog theme and didn’t find anything I liked that much, I thought I’d just quickly find a gallery/lightbox plugin to get started on revamping the blog.

This too, turned out to be much harder than I expected. The main problem seemed to be that most of the gallery plugins don’t work with WP 3.1 yet, including the one I was particularly interested in based on the look of the front end. I finally ended up with something called “Fancy Gallery” that is acceptable in terms of the look of the lightbox, but nowthe thumbnail presentation looks all wacked. Very annoying. Example with semi-random photos follows.

By the time I got even this far, I was sleeping with the laptop on my belly and drooling into the keyboard. If anyone knows of a cool plugin, or how to fix this thumbnail display with the images all shoved together, please wack me upside the head with it. Or just leave a comment.

  • Schnoor Bros, 1927 (#1)
    Schnoor Bros, 1927 (#1)
  • W.P.A. 1939
    W.P.A. 1939
  • Weensor 1929
    Weensor 1929 😉
  • Sidewalk Stamp, Chucks and Cat
    Sidewalk Stamp, Chucks and Cat

 

Staying busy part 4: Time well spent vs. time wasted

I’ve spent another hour poking around and I still have not gotten to the bottom of the comment presentation problem that appears when I use the “black hat” theme for the blog. This really disappoints me because not only did I basically like the theme, but I also spent time customizing it. I suppose that means I could be the cause of the problem. Perhaps I should run the original download and see if the still occurs.

I hope it gets sorted out eventually, but in the meantime, I have changed themes. It has a similar look and configuration except for a couple things. For example, the top nav bar displays categories instead of pages and meta links. I don’t like that one bit. But if I have to learn enough php to customize that much of this, I might as well just fix the other theme.

I suppose it could be useful to learn php anyway. If I already knew it, I’d have a paying contract gig helping a friend migrate his various sites into a WP-based site.

But if I were going to learn php, then the time would probably be better spent learning python, for god sake. So much to learn, so little time.

Staying busy part 3: blog troubleshooting

I am finding that just maintaining a blog can keep you busy, and I don’t mean the writing part. I discovered that some older comments from before I moved the blog to this new address are not appearing correctly or at all. I spent more time than I’d like yesterday trying to troubleshoot the problem. All I have found so far is that it only seems to happen with this particular theme selected. If I switch the look to the default WP theme, for example, the comments appear in the correct posts. How can that happen? If anyone has a clue, please let me know. Are there known issues with the “black hat” theme?