all things me

When I get home tonight, there might be a puppy waiting.

My parents and little sister are going to my sister’s friend to see their Pekingese Chinese Crested (see for example Dog Breed Info Center) puppies and my sister has her eye on one of them, a full white one (not albino, I was told) called Nipsu (it’s the name of the goofy, big eared Moomin character (looks a bit like kangaroo), if you know those).

Dad has been wanting another dog/puppy for a long time and he’s been telling how cute these Bichon Frises are (fluffy dogs, feel like you’d break them if you held them); he’s seen them at work (CEO’s dogs). Of course, I think dogs are wonderful and I wouldn’t mind having Nipsu around. I’m just not so keen about the puppy age……..

[edit: Nov 2] Well, there wasn’t a puppy but it’s pretty certain that we’re getting Nipsu (or whatever his name will end up being, sister suggested Frodo but I oppose). The breed changed from Pekingese to Chinese Crested because sister remembered it wrong. Luckily “Nipsu” would be the powderpuff type, i.e. not hairless. [/edit]

[edit: Nov 3] Last night we (sister and I) came up with the name Wolfgang Amadeus. Nickname is still undecided but I’m rooting for “Ami” (I think that’s French for ‘friend’, at least there was an XF episode called “En Ami” and it’s title was a play with the idea that it means ‘friends’ but for the English speaking sounds like ‘enemy’ (CSM was being unusually friendly towards Scully). [/edit]

I got my first comment spam today (3 messages)!! Probably because my url is in my profile at WordPress forums, but oh well. They were all moderated, though. Soon I’ll be installing all kinds of spamihilators…

There he is. And on Friday he’ll be here.

He arrived on Friday night. Amadeus.

A shaky white bundle of fluff, unsteady on his feet but eager and quick to run around. He enjoys sleeping in someone’s lap, but also whenever someone stands or sits in one place for too long, there he comes, lies down and sets his head comfortably (for him) on one’s foot.

He likes eating fingers and toes (with or without socks; the smellier the better, it seems), my funny zigzag-hemmed shirt is extremely interesting as well as the fringes on the carpet and table cloths.

Sometimes he gets “crazy fits” and races around, growls in a cute baby voice and shows the toy mouse who’s who.

There’ll be photos, I promise.

I renamed a file ‘readme’ to ‘README’ so it would be more visible in the file listing of a website (with no index page). Though it was visible in the file listing on the command line (ls), it disappeared from the file listing of the web folder. I was puzzled for a while and then changed ‘README’ to ‘README.txt’, and — acrabadabra — it appeared as text under the file listing!

Extremely wow.

(or Persnicketiness as the Americans say)

I sent feedback to the library service because there was a separately written compound word (“nouto kirjasto” — the library where I want to pick up the book I’ve reserved) in the Reserved works table. I asked them to correct it.

Here’s Amadeus at 8 weeks old, just before he arrived here.
That’s not my hand, it’s my sister’s.

I wanted to add an introduction text to category pages. I already had a nice looking introduction text to the blog which only shows on the main page, so I thought I’d put the category descriptions in a similar box.

<!-- don’t show on a post’s page or monthly archives -->
<?php if (!$single && !$monthnum) { ?>
  <div id="intro">
    <!-- don’t show on category pages, either -->
    <?php if(!$cat) { ?>
      < Blog introduction >
    <?php } ?>
    <!-- show on category pages -->
    <?php if ($cat) { ?>
      <!-- single_cat_title(prefix,display) displays (with ‘true’ parameter) the category title -->
      <h1><?php single_cat_title('',true); ?></h1>
      <!-- category_description() alone doesn’t display it, that’s why you need to have the ‘echo’ there -->
      <p><?php echo category_description(); ?></p>
    <?php } ?>
  </div>
<?php } ?>

In the attempt to shorten the menu, I decided to put the lists of monthly archives and categories into drop down menus. I just realized that in time they will (at least the monthly archives) get longer and longer and longer…

So, my first problem was that I’ve made a hidden category for static pages and it would show on the menu if I used WP’s built-in dropdown_cats tag.

Luckily, Ria at Typed by has made a Drop Down Cats Plugin with ability to exclude. What’s nice about it is that it a) formats subcategories differently from parents (indented with a hyphen), and b) it includes a post count parameter.

Archive tag (wp_get_archives) has an option to format the list of archives as an option list. You just need to build a drop-down menu function around it. Thus, as found at the WordPress forums…
(remove the spaces after dots in “window.location=” if you’re going to cut-and-paste that — I needed to separate the words because it wouldn’t wrap nicely)

<form name="archiveform" action="">
  <select name="monthly_arch" onchange="window.location = (document. forms. archiveform. monthly_arch[document. forms. archiveform. monthly_arch. selectedIndex].value);">
    <option selected>Monthly archives</option>
    <?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly&format=option'); ?>
  </select>
</form>

It includes a little JavaScript, but I don’t know if that can be avoided. I’m disappointed to notice that formatting the archives as options is not compatible with showing the post count.
But
In the same thread there was a solution to that too. It involves a little tweaking (or correcting…) in template-functions-general.php, function get_archives_link around line 180, changing

else if ('option' == $format) {
return '<option value="'.$url.'">'.$text.'</option>'."\n";

to

else if ('option' == $format) {
return '<option value="'.$url.'">'.$text.$after.'</option>'."\n";

Following some tips on ScriptyGoddess I’m attempting to get my blog not accessible from search engines. Sorry for the inconvenience but I hope you’ll find me without search engines. Other parts of the site(s) are accessible as usual.

[edit: Nov 22, ’04] Well… I want people to find my cool code snippets and stuff. So I removed the blocks. [/edit]