….where I got the theme. I’ll admit I didn’t design it myself. I wanted a “dark” theme with a 3 column layout and somehow happened upon “this site”:http://www.viewfinderdesign.co.uk/freetemplates/ that had a bunch of themes. Well, I picked out the 3 column darkness theme and tweaked it to my liking. As I said before, I could probably sit down and work out a decent 3 column layout and do all the colors and everything, but it’s so much easier and fits better into my methods of thinking when I have a framework with which to work. I’ve always been really shitty at getting things started and/or gathering ideas to form something coherent. I’m better at taking something that’s already there and picking it apart, editing it, debugging it, what-have-you and then spitting it back out in an improved form. I’ve always been a sort of tangent thinker in that I’m the type that if you give me a “seed”, I can take it and turn it into something bigger and better. I guess I just have an unusual way of thinking. I seriously can’t sit down with a clean slate and come up with anything worthwhile, but give me some guidelines and a general rough outline with which to start and I have no trouble. Hell, just look at this post! It’s gone from a short blurb about where I found the theme to an in-depth analysis of my thinking procedures. Strange. Anyway, here’s a link to the template author’s blog. He writes some pretty intersting stuff. I’ll be adding it to my links list.
Daily Archive for September 17th, 2004
Well, now that I finally figured out how to get WordPress to show excerpts of posts on the main page, then give a “read more” link so you can read the remainder of the post, I had to figure out how to get phpgiggle to “giggle” the keywords in the post like it normally does. Surprisingly it was incredibly simple. So here goes. In order to get wordpress to show an excerpt of the post with a “show more” link, just do this. Trying to actually post that shit to my blog makes it all fucked up and it refuses to validate. So I just put it in a handy text file. 
THEN, to get PhpGiggle to work properly, you have to go into your /wp-content/plugins folder, edit the “phpgiggle-wordpress.plugin.php” file and add the following line of code:
add_filter('the_excerpt', 'giggle_wordpress'); after the existing “add filter” lines. Now phpgiggle will filter your excerpts through the wordlist and create links for you… Neat, eh?
Yeah, I changed my theme to match my gallery a little more closely. However, I seem to have broken phpgiggle in the process of doing so. I have no fucking clue how I did that. Ugh… I’ll figure out what I did and unfuck it eventually. Until I get it fixed, my automatic links to Mozilla, Firefox, itunes, winamp, and whatnot don’t show up anymore. Things like this annoy the shit out of an anal-retentive geek like myself.
I forgot to mention this earlier today, but the new RealPlayer 10.5 is pretty damn sweet. I have a Treo600 as mentioned a million times before, but what makes RealPlayer so cool is the fact that it actually recognizes my Treo. Meaning I can sync music back and forth between RealPlayer on my desktop and the SD card on my handheld. So now, instead of using Palm’s hotsync tool to transfer mp3’s over, or even using “Card Export” to mount it as a removable driver; I can actually have RealPlayer 10 make a playlist for me of a certain length and transfer it over to my Treo. Pretty cool because now I don’t even have to pick the songs, I can just let RealPlayer pick them for me when I’m in an indecisive mood. The thing is, for playing mp3’s and stuff I like to use iTunes from Apple because I like the interface and the ease of use overall. I haven’t used Winamp in so long it’s not even funny. 
Winamp seems to be short on features lately, especially when you have like 4200 mp3’s. I need something with a robust library feature that makes it easy for me to find the mp3’s I’m looking for. So I like itunes. Now, if itunes would just integrate with/recognize my Treo600, I’d be really happy!