all things me

Oooh. I’m so proud of myself. You see those picture texts in the menu? Well, not all of them were easy to get showing. For the link list (all things me, other sections) and calendar I had to “hack” a bit. I’ll show you:
in links.php (found in wp-includes folder) around line 563 you get

echo ' <li id="'.sanitize_title($cat['cat_name']).'">' . stripslashes($cat['cat_name']) . "\n\t<ul>\n";

which echoes (i.e. outputs) the link title in a neat unordered list. I wanted to assign an image to each link category title so I modified it to say:

echo ' <li id="'.sanitize_title($cat['cat_name']).'"><img src="'.stripslashes($cat['cat_name']).'.gif">'."\n\t<ul>\n";

instead. I changed the category names to one-word names so they won’t cause any problems as image names. Also, the image source path has to be absolute (http://…) which I don’t understand why, because you never leave the index page you just choose different content. Oh well.

The same thing — slightly simpler — has to be done to the calendar. In template-functions-general.php, line 366 (about) you find <caption> tags (following an echo) which is the caption, or title, of the table… obviously:
[edit Sep 15, 2004] I made it XHTML compliant by adding the end tag to the img tags [/edit]

<caption>' . $month[zeroise($thismonth, 2)] . ' ' . date('Y', $unixmonth) . '</caption>

I changed to

<caption><img src="'.$month[zeroise($thismonth, 2)].'.gif" /><img src="'.date('Y', $unixmonth).'.gif" /></caption>

Naturally, I have to remember to make an image for each month (I already made one for August cause it’s so soon) and year as needed.

Now, I can go to bed.

Ooooh, I found my very first Bookcrossing book here at the department. I didn’t take it though. At least not yet. It’s in Swedish, and one I’ve read (not in Swedish though). But the greatest (?) thing is, it’s Stephen King!!! Svarta Tornet: Följeslagarna — what a coincidence.

I am afraid that some over-zealous cleaning lady or our janitor (or anyone who hasn’t stumbled across this Bookcrossing “phenomenon”) will take it and throw it in the garbage bin…

I removed the slow random FL image script from the (right) menu and replaced it with a random text link (two in fact). Maybe it wasn’t too slow, but on my 56 k modem at home (56 k in theory — 42-46 k in practice) it was annoying. I think if I would’ve got an answer from Scripthost concerning the ability to set image sizes (which they “advertised” but didn’t give instructions to), it wouldn’t have disturbed the page load so much.

Updates:
1) I made a pretty cool underlining for TGWLSK. You can see it for example at the Love (works) page and Notebook.
2) testing out blog times image
[edit] Bah, it won’t change the background colour. Oh well, have to look into that some other time, now it’s ugly bright white but I ain’t changing the site’s bg colour. [edit] I’m such a noob. I had a space after the comma in the colour value… Now it works [/edit] And until I can figure out how to either put it only on main page or remove it from archive (I know the variable for category and single, but not archives), you’re going to have to goggle at it in surprising places [/edit]
3) finished reading Black House (100th book in my booklog); gave it **** and because it’s better than Carrie which in turn is better than Bag of Bones I had to put a minus after Carrie’s four stars… This is getting complicated.

Other “100 things” today: This is the 100th entry. And also, I’m writing a “100 things about me” list. I think I’m at 81 or something (I’m counting *down* from 100)

I’m browsing WordPress plugins/hacks and just installed a paginating plugin by Scriptygoddess. Earlier I installed Wp-grins, i.e. clickable smileys for posts and comments. Hmm… what else could I get.

@ 20:23
(yay, Scrubs is on in 7 minutes!)
OK, I downloaded a Condensed content for date and category archives that shows the first n words of an entry (in monthly archives and category view). I’m having trouble deciding which I’d use: paginating or condensing…

Ahh… I always chuckle at bad layouts (I don’t mean the link above). Chuckle away if this looks bad on your screen, but for me it looks mighty fine.

Today at the grocery store a little boy snatched my packet of minced meat. He was so quick that I didn’t even notice. I was packing the things into the shopping bag and the packet had disappeared. The cashier noticed that the boy had something in his hand (he was a kid to the lady next in line). It turned out that they had a similar package. Hard working shop assistant I must say.

@ 21:05
Joined Dreamweaver fanlisting.
It’s called WYSIWYG but I’ve never thought of Dreamweaver as wysiwyg… Although it really is what-you-see-is-what-you-get and no extra crap. (I haven’t used it exclusively as wysiwyg so I don’t know how it handles the adding and removing and moving of code.)

Now I’m gonna go watch 2001 Space Travesty. Ta ta!

Phew… *wipes forehead* I thought I’d messed up things (this blog) really badly. The post IDs have an annoying auto incrementing number so after I accidentally deleted all my previous 87 posts imported from Greymatter and re-imported them only to notice that the ID was 160 and something (well, 87 + 87 + 2 = 176?) so I deleted them again (ALL messages this time cause I thought that would solve it. Well, it didn’t) — only to notice that the number had gotten to 200+. I know this isn’t a big deal but I want to know how many posts I have without having to do complicated calculations.

Anyway, finally I found a “no-no” way to do it. I emptied my posts table in MySQL and that solved it. Now I’ve imported my old GM entries and re-wrote (I had copied them to safety) the two I had added after moving to WordPress. And when I press Publish, this one should get number 90. Will you keep your fingers crossed for me? I can’t, I’m going to slap my hands over my eyes — tight.

WOOOOHOOOOOO!

I’m going to publish this new blog now. Even though I haven’t customized and designed it to exactly what I want it to end up being. But I’m not going to update Greymatter anymore so I might as well change to this one. Now, I haven’t changed the intra-blog links yet. I’m going to do it some day when I get an inspiration. I also haven’t changed all the Greymatter formattings (** for bold) but I’m going to do it soon.
Oh yeah, silly me: I moved to WordPress

There is one annoyance in WordPress, from a linguist’s point of view. In the default CSS the titles in the menu were *made* lowercase (that was in the code itself “text-transform: lowercase”). AAAAAAAGH!!!
Another thing was the abbreviation of June and July to Jun and Jul respectively. That might be because I’m only an English-as-foreign-language person though…
@ 15:47 on July 16 {
Another annoyance. When I choose to see all posts in a category that happens to be a parent category, all the posts to the sub-cats are shown too. Have to look into that if I could change that; I wouldn’t want to make all the categories into “top level” categories.
}
@ 13:52 on July 26 {
I’ve never understood the practise of putting the comment’s permalink in the time… oooh! Away! I put a # sign which I’ve also seen marking the comment permalink and at least it’s logical (at least to people who’ve written HTML), it’s an anchor (or a bookmark) to that particular comment.
}

Also, as a Greymatter convert (I moved to WP mainly because my hostess Shirasade’s webspace provider frowns upon Greymatter and also because it was getting kinda slow rebuilding all the pages after each change. Maybe it was better to move this early (with only 87 entries)) I miss having a nice list of titles-only after searching, for example.

Oh well, I’ll give this one a go.

Well then. Yesterday I went to see Van Helsing with my sister. It had an… interesting… plot and the music (the theme, in a way) was amazing!!
I also bought Christine (an S. King book — do I need to say that?).
Today I went to see Secret Window (based on the Secret Window, Secret Garden novella in Four Past Midnight — by S. King; do I need to say that?) with a friend of mine.
I also bought Rose Madder (an S. King book — do I need to say that?)

I haven’t scanned them for my bookshelf at TGWLSK yet.

Oh yeah. I saw The Song of Susannah in the bookstore. *drooooool* Lovely turquoise cover and a silvery bookmark ribbon in between the pages. A bookmark! Each book should have one of those so that people wouldn’t make dog-ears. Too bad I have Wolves of the Calla as the Grant edition not the Hodder & Stoughton. Although… the Grant edition of SoS is beautiful too… maybe I should look for that? But my first 4 DTs are in that H&S box. Agh. I’m torn.

As much as I like Greymatter and as much as I hate MySQL, I think I’m going to change to Movable Type or Textpattern or some other blogging tool. The main reason is that my hostess’s webspace provider doesn’t *recommend* it, and as I started looking into that, I realized that it really isn’t the best thing out there. I’ve been reading about different options and it’s really difficult to decide!!! But I’ll try Movable Type next if I can get it working. Or Textpattern… At least it should be easy to convert my GM entries to MT (as opposed to my html entries to GM). People with crazy amounts of entries (and sites with lots of authors) use MT so it must be good. I just hope my site won’t become one of those filled with MySQL errors. Those are a pest. Or maybe the webmasters/mistresses are the ones to blame for the errors, not the system. If that’s the case, I’m happy.

I wonder if I’ll be kicked out of the Greymatter Fanlisting for this…

I can see I crave coffee cause everytime I write “correcting”, I write coffecting… Oh, well, r and f are close on the keyboard but anyway… I never mix them up.

Ah… only about an hour to go.

I converted all my old entries (powered by coffee and noodles) to Greymatter. I’m still checking that everything is the way it should be, but there are some links (when I refer to an earlier entry) that I haven’t checked. But all in all, everything *works* and that’s the main thing. There might be some smileys hiding that didn’t convert to GM smileys (all my x) and xD smileys for which there isn’t a picture smiley).

@ 23:55
Joined Emoticons fanlisting
Oh, and the referring links are now checked. Only smileys might remain

I was reading Black House in the bus today (on the way home) and there was this short passage that somehow got to me. I don’t know why. But it’s unbelievably sweet.

Scenario: Jack Sawyer (familiar from The Talisman) is meeting the wife of Fred Marshall at a mental hospital. The elderly woman is one of the patients and a nurse had told Jack about her condition before they (Jack and Fred) went in.

   “Especial–” Before he can finish the question, an elderly woman with a lined, sweet face appears beside him and touches his shoulder.
   “Excuse me.” She tucks her chin toward her throat with the shyness of a child. “I want to ask you a question. Are you my father?”
   Jack smiles at her. “Let me ask you a question first. Is your name Estelle Packard?”
   Eyes shining, the old woman nods.
   “Then yes, I am your father.”
   Estelle Packard clasps her hands in front of her mouth, dips her head in a bow, and shuffles backward, glowing with pleasure. When she is nine or ten feet away, she gives Jack a little bye-bye wave of one hand and twirls away.
— Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub

@ 21:31
Joined Greymatter fanlisting