Continuing this series of articles…

Some Thoughts On WordPress 2.6 (and Plugins Galore) – Part Two
Some Thoughts On WordPress 2.6 (and Plugins Galore) – Part One
Site Updates!! WordPress 2.6

… I wanted to describe a few more plugins I’ve installed on this site and/or afewgoodlenses.

On Saturday, I installed Lightbox 2 from Rupert Morris on both of my sites. Lightbox 2 is one of several similar plugins that add real snap to the appearance of images on a site, and I especially like it on afewgoodlenses. When you click any single image from an article, the background fades to black (or gray, dark gray, or white, your choice) and your visitor can page through the full-sized versions of your images. I liked all the lightbox plugins a lot; this one turned out to be my favorite just because I liked the way the display looked and the color-changing options. I did notice one thing about the lighbox plugins (all of them that I tried) that I don’t understand: the images displayed in the sidebars by scripts like the Flickr badge or MyBlogLog recent viewers are not overlayed by the lightbox images. I’m sure that’s something about Javascript that I don’t understand, but I’m curious about it if anyone can explain it.

I also installed Postalicious by Pablo Gómez Basanta. This post was created by Postalicious, which mimics the delicious daily blog posting function, with much, much greater flexibility than what delicious provides. You can configure a comprehensive set of options for automatically posting delicious links to your blog, by setting such things as a minimum number of bookmarks, the timings between posts, a scheduled time for posting, and an hourly search for new bookmarks. You also have control over the appearance and content of the generated post, with the additional options of specifying a layout for the titles or bookmarks, as well as date and time formats. And, if that wasn’t enough, here are my two favorite features: you can instruct Postalicious to create all new posts as drafts for you to edit later; and you can collect recent bookmarks into a post on demand by simply pressing a button. Smashing! I turned off the delicious daily blog posting function as soon as I saw what Postalicious had to offer.

I am looking into a sporadic problem I’m having with afewgoodlenses, where the WordPress wp_options table is getting corrupted. It happened twice on the weekend (and when it happened, my heart almost stopped when I accessed my site and was prompted to install WordPress), but hasn’t happened since. In both cases, I lost my Internet connection while writing a post using Windows Live Writer, so that may be the root cause. In any case, the experience prompted me to install the WordPress Clean Options plugin — but, honestly, I need to spend a little more time learning about the things it told me about wp_options.

In one of the previous posts, I mentioned that I hadn’t explored the new media library capabilities of WordPress, because I’m using Windows Live Writer to post images and articles. I directed you to a short training video, Managing the WordPress Media Library, but also now wanted to point you to this fine article from Rodney Smith of Hippo Web Solutions:

Managing images with the WordPress media manager

Thanks, Rod! Thanks for stopping by and for taking time to write that article.

Finally, please take a few minutes to read this excellent piece on WordPress and the WordPress community by Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection:

Be Kind, Educate

Mark’s article means a lot to me because, as I spend all this time gradually building — and building up — my two sites, I sometimes get a little discouraged about the amount of actual admin or maintenance work it takes to keep things moving. And, of course — like everyone — I get frustrated when something doesn’t work and it’s a struggle to figure out what’s gone wrong and get it working again. To be fair, the problem is almost never WordPress or a WordPress plugin; more likely, it’s one of the many sites and services that are connected to the blogs that are hiccupping in one way or another.

As I have probably said somewhere here before, I’m not a PHP or MySQL programmer, though I have a smattering of HTML and some web design skill. What I do have, however, is a technical background in various platforms that goes back decades, a willingness to experiment, and a fairly high degree of tolerance for stuff that goes in the ditch. And, I think, I do a decent job of explaining how I do things, or how I fix things, or, sometimes, how I just get over things when the doing and the fixing doesn’t work. So, even though I never intended for either of my sites to have a technical orientation, I realized after reading what Mark had to say that part of being a member of this community means sharing those technical and personal experiences  that make the community what it is. Bravo, Mark, and this post is my answer to the questions you posed at the close of your article.

This week is turning into a very busy one for me, and even though I haven’t had time to respond properly, I did want to acknowledge a few folks that have left comments on my site or sent me e-mails. Most of my evenings this week will go toward working on a research proposal for my Exploring Place: History class, for which I’ve decided to study the history of and community that has developed around Oakland Cemetery, which is near my home. I spent most of Sunday afternoon on a guided tour of the cemetery, then went back as evening set in to take some (like, 150) pictures. I hope to wade through the pictures also over the next few days and get them out on Flickr. Anyway, I didn’t want anyone to feel like I was ignoring them or disregarding the time they spent contacting me, so here are my shout-outs and link-backs:

Chef Tom: Thanks for the Le-Le-Lemon Cheesecake recipe. I picked up the ingredients tonight and will be making it tomorrow night, to serve at a dessert-party for my best friend’s 50th birthday on Friday. I think it’s going to be excellent!

Karen: Thanks for the e-mail; I’m glad you joined BlogCatalog and I look forward to neighorhooding with you. I also wanted to mentioned that I read your article Peter the Great…Right Brained Learner? — and I think it’s great.

Morgan: Thanks for you interest in my writing and my studies; as well as for your e-mail reply and kind offer to help. I’m sure I’ll take you up on it, and please do keep an eye on my site and comment any time.

Cooper: Thanks for the provocation… heh heh heh … and your comments on War as a Spectator Sport (Part One). There will be a Part Two, down the road a short spell (next week, probably) and we can continue the conversation.

Jon: Thanks for your comments on War as a Spectator Sport also. It’s interesting how differently we see the photographs, and I’m sure I’ll write about that in the second part of the article. Subjectively, of course. Great site you have, and I really like your writing. Between the waking and the dream was pure pleasure to read. Oh, and thanks for the book recommendations; I will look for “The Psychology of Music” but may pass on Bloom since I’ve read parts of it and may not care to invest any more time in it … ya know what I mean? 

Kukuh: I got your e-mail and the draft article and took a quick look at it. Fascinating stuff; will be glad to help if our schedules mesh okay. I’ve sent you a message on BlogCatalog.

Bye for now!

… well, not programming exactly;  we (meaning: I) have spent way too much time on that today as it is. However, I have gotten the load time on the home page of this site way, way down … from about 16-18 seconds to a pretty consistent four or five. Considering that there’s still a lot of content here, that’s pretty good. I might as well confess that the main thing that motivated me to do this was that I was getting annoyed accessing my own site, which is a pretty strong indicator that my visitors might have felt that way too.

So navigating here is a little different now. The Newsgator blogroll and news headlines are each on their own separate pages: My Blogroll and My News, and there are navigation links from the header and from both sidebars — plenty of places for you to click to get there and take a look at the work of some very fine bloggers. My Blogroll links will take you directly to site home pages; My News shows excerpts from some of the most recent articles in each category, all with links you can click to read more. If you’re interested in links or news only from a particular category, see the “My Blogroll” and “My News” listings in the sidebar, from which you can go directly to that category.  You can use your browser’s back button or click the category heading to return to the home page.

More on this later perhaps, but I should mention that belonging to the BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog communities is introducing me to a whole lot of new and extremely good blogs and fascinating people that I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise — but I’ve not yet added them all to my Newsgator feeds so they don’t show up on the new pages. I think I’m still trying to figure out the best way to pull all these resources together in one place (or a few tied-together places); or at least, trying to figure out the best way to spend my time between newsreaders, blogging communities, social networks, stumblingupons, diggs, twitters, and a few other things. Still, I’m comfortable with the idea of just jumping into all these activities and sorting out the priorities as I go along. If you’re reading this, and you’re a blogger, and you haven’t joined BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog, please do so, and let’s connect.

A couple of lessons I learned from this last set of tweaks:

(1) if you’re an Amazon associate and are including Amazon links in your site like I am, watch out for the “Product Reviews” script. The script is new (I think) and provides a small window with product and review information when you mouse over an Amazon text link. It’s very nice, actually, I liked the way it looked and the images and info it provided — but I removed it from my site after numerous tests showed it was adding as much as three or four seconds to the page’s load time. Your experience may certainly vary, but I would experiment with that script before using it.

(2) If you’re modifying your WordPress templates …well,  don’t even think about changing anything until you’ve made a copy of the files you’re planning to change. I’ve always been obsessive about saving work-in-progress with tools like word processing and spreadsheet software, but for some reason haven’t been doing that with files like sidebar.php. Believe me, ignore this advice and just one time accidentally paste something on top of thirty lines of code and realize it just as it’s too late to stop yourself from pressing the save button … and you’ll wish you had that copy! It’s great to have nice, clean home pages … but not so great when they’re nice and clean because most of the content isn’t showing… yipes!

I’ve recently noticed that over at Georgia on My Mind, Elementary Historyteacher regularly hosts Georgia Blog Carnivals, featuring posts from Georgia bloggers. I think it would be a good idea, following Joe’s suggestion, to spend some part of this weekend taking a look at the sites EHT lists on her blogroll. Yes, I know they meant last weekend, but I just discovered the carnival a couple of days ago and I was painting my front porch last weekend anyway. With Atlanta temperatures forecast to push 100 degrees for a couple more days at least, I know I won’t be out there painting on Saturday or Sunday, so it will be a good weekend to immerse myself in some new reading.