all things me

I just installed a WordCount plugin I found at False Hopes. I’m tempted to put the total words in posts somewhere but that would require lots of queries to the database, I think, and I don’t want that. [edit]Oooh! It doesn’t add loading time nor queries considerably! I added it to the menu there, under Blog Archives[/edit]

On Tuesday I’m going to my aunt’s for the rest of the week. Had to change my WP configuration or I would’ve ended up with a blank index page by the end of the week. I had the setting “show posts from previous 7 days” and it’s not a smart one like on Greymatter but it’s actual, “physical” 7 days. I noticed that when I had only 4-5 entries on the front page (I’d been a lazy blogger!) and it seemed really short. Anyway, now I set it at “7 previous posts“. My behind’s covered.

I also deactivated the Condensed Content plugin after getting tired of having to view each post’s individual page when looking for quotes to decorate with a nice left hand side dotted line. Now it’s still paginated but posts are shown in full.

Thought of the Da…Night Every post categorised as something else than Miscellany is yet another victory!

I went to see Spiderman 2 today (hence the title). Tobey Maguire looks a bit silly when he wrinkles his face in strain, but what can I say, all that Spiderman acrobatics appeals to me I found this —> picture, but it’s a bit dark and the spiderman suit is all torn but it’s the closest I could find (crouched and one leg straight on the side — like Trinity in Matrix Reloaded when she jumps off the motorcycle and lands very coolly ). If anyone finds a better one, I’d be mooooore than happy to drool over it. Anyway, I go swoon now.

I “installed” a category image plugin for WordPress. You see those tiny images below a post’s title? That’s them. If you mouse-over the images you get an explanation on what they mean, but I’ll list them here:
Miscellany — very “clever” picture of two unknown variables
Books — a stack of books
Computer — string of zeros and ones, the binary
Dreams — a thought bubble, by dreams I mean the nightly kind, by the way
Games — a Pacman
University — a Greek-style column
Site — a home as in homepage, I know stupid, what else would describe a homepage though?
Fanlistings — a heart, I couldn’t think of anything else to depict fandom
Tweaks — tools are for tweaking
Updates — an idea light bulb
Language — a person speaking, although language means written too
Quote of the Day — quotemarks, hopefully not too close to the Finnish (or capital city area) library logo, no copyright infringement intended!
Word of the Day — ok, this might not be so clear, but there’s a page of a calendar and a W on it
(Odd) people — a bunch of people and a questionmark
I Don’t Understand — questionmarks
[edit: New categories]
— OT but not in the meaning of Off topic as usual. Posts that, as the name says, stay on one topic.
— WordPress
— Amadeus, our dog
[/edit]

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.

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.

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.