An Eclectic Mind

I’ve started collecting — and sharing — them again.

Over the years, I’ve posted almost daily lists of links to articles I’ve read on the Web that I think blog readers might enjoy. They come under the main title of “Interesting Links” and include the date on which I found them. Clicking the “links” tag in the sidebar will display them all, in reverse chronological order.

It might surprise some people to learn that this is mostly automated. I simply bookmark the page I want to share with Delicious. Each night, a plugin on my WordPress blog, checks in to see what links have been added. It publishes the day’s list as a blog post at around 11 PM.

That would explain why an “interesting links” page might contain a single link; I only bookmarked one link that day.

What I like about this solution (other than the automation, of course) is that it enables me to determine exactly what I want the post link to say and include a description of the post.

Some of you may have noticed that these posts stopped appearing at the beginning of December. The truth of the matter is that I simply stopped bookmarking links. I got busy and traveled around, mostly between Wickenburg and Phoenix. I stopped following Twitter — which is a great source of links to interesting information — so closely. And, frankly, I got lazy. When I found an interesting page, I didn’t bother to bookmark it. Maybe I realized that it might be the only link I bookmarked that day and I didn’t want it to be all alone in its blog post.

But I’ve started bookmarking again and hope to continue to share the best content I find on the Web — usually with the help of some Twitter friends.

And I’ll do it legally, by offering just a description and link, rather than a word-for-word reproduction of what I find. (More on slimebags who do that in another post.)

BLog Technicalities blogging, links, plugin, WordPress

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I spend (or waste?) most of a day fine-tuning blog settings.

I spent most of yesterday messing around with WordPress tags for my posts. It bugged me that my tags were disorganized and inconsistent. So I installed Simple Tags, a plugin by Amaury Balmer. This plugin makes it possible to merge tags — the main thing I wanted to do. But it also lets you assign tags to batches of posts at once. Since about 1,200 of this blog’s 1,500+ posts did not have tags at all, this seemed like a good thing to be able to do. I didn’t expect to spend more than four hours assigning tags to posts from 2003, 2004, and 2008. (I’ll get around to 2005, 2006, and 2007 one of these days.)

I also assigned the “links” tag to all my automatically-generated Delicious links posts. There are over 280 of these posts. The result of this change was to make the word links in my tag cloud huge and all the other tags tiny. That’s why I spent so much time adding tags.

I also spent some time removing and modifying categories and tags. Trying to trim up the site and make it simpler to navigate and find content.

And I created a new tag called “helicopter video” and used it to tag all the videos I’ve created from my helicopter and posted on the site. This will make it easy to find and display all of these videos.

Finally, I modified the site’s theme, iNove, to remove the links posts from the list of random and recent posts at the top of the sidebar. (Which list appears depends on the type of page being viewed.)

Yesterday was a big day for the blog in terms of hits. My post, “How to Annoy Other Helicopter Pilots,” was picked up a Just Helicopters forum member and a lot of pilots came to the site to read my account and comment on it. I hope some of them continue to stop by occasionally; I like to share my helicopter stories with other pilots and get their feedback.

Hope to be able to write more interesting posts in upcoming weeks, now that the holidays are over.

This just in... blogging, plugin, web design, WordPress

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Blog feature fails.

I’m not quite sure why, but the polls feature on this blog doesn’t seem to be working properly. Until I have time to troubleshoot the problem, I’ll be pulling the current poll off the sidebar. If I can get it fixed, not only will I put it back, but I’ll come up with a new, more interesting poll.

Suggestions? Use the Comments link or form here.

BLog Technicalities plugin, technology, WordPress

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With 90+ photos appearing randomly in my old site’s header, I wasn’t about to leave them behind.

One of the reasons I chose the Cutline 3 Column Right theme for my site’s redesign is because I wanted a three column layout that was wider than my old site. Studies — including stats from all of the sites/blogs I operate — showed that the vast majority of Web site visitors have their screen resolutions set to 1024×768 or wider. I even use that setting on my little 12″ PowerBook. So the old site’s redesign was throwing away 200+ pixels of screen real estate that could be better used providing content or navigation features.

How Do I Use Those Images?

The problem I faced was the header image. Since I built my blog in WordPress nearly two years ago, I had been displaying images that I’d taken during my travels. The images had to be cropped and fit into pre-established format. I used the Random Header plugin to randomize the display. Over 18 months, I’d added nearly 100 images to the header image collection. I’d even begun writing about them in the About the Photos topic. They had become an integral part of my site and I didn’t want to lose them.

So while I continued working on my Leopard book during the day, this little problem was in the back of my mind. For days. One option was to rework the CSS and change the header image so it only took up a portion of the width and use the space beside it for a Web site description. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough CSS to do this successfully without spending hours on trial and error. With a deadline approaching, I couldn’t afford to waste time experimenting. I had to have an answer and be ready to implement it.

About the Photos Images

Then I remembered the smaller images I use in About the Photos to show the images I’m discussing. What if I put three of them side by side and displayed them with some sort of randomizer? Would they fit? What would they look like?

The images in question were 324 pixels wide. The space I had to work with was 970 pixels. 3 x 324 = 972. My luck, sometimes.

I reduced the size of three images to 322 wide and began some quick experiments to replace the existing header image (the street scene you see in the screenshot above) with the three images. I could get them to fit and they didn’t look bad. But I couldn’t get the spacing between them just righ. And I didn’t like the way they fit right up against each other.

A Short Film History Lesson

Then I came up with the film sprocket idea.

For those of you who began using a camera in the digital age and aren’t familiar with 35mm film, let me explain. Before everyone started using digital cameras, serious photographers used 35mm film. The film comes on rolls and has tiny holes along each side. A camera has gears that line up with the holes. You feed the film into the camera and it grabs the holes with its gears. A mechanical lever pulls the next blank piece of film from the film canister to the place in front of the shutter for the next photo. When the roll was finished, the photographer (or his camera) would roll the film back into the canister and the photographer would drop it off for processing. When he picked it up, he’d get prints and negatives. The negatives are the actual film, with inverse (or negative) images on them.

If a photographer had his own darkroom, he’d likely make a contact sheet. This was created by putting the negatives right against a sheet of photographic paper in the dark, then exposing the paper to light for a short time and developing it. The resulting images were tiny (at least they were from 35mm film) and clearly displayed rows of black boxes on either side of the image with black lines between them — like you see here in the header of my redesigned site.

So anyone who has worked with film should recognize these little holes. Of course, my images are considerably larger and wider, so they’re not exact representations of contact strip images. They’re just borrowing the idea.

When I modified the three images to include the borders and fake sprocket holes, I liked what I saw. I created a Photoshop action to modify the 89 remaining images so they were smaller and included the tiny black boxes and borders.

Randomizing

On my old site, the random header image was randomized with a WordPress plugin named Random Header. But since I had three images to show in my header, I needed a different solution. So I turned to the software I used on Flying M Air’s Web site to randomize some of the images there: Random File.

Random File enables you to display random files anywhere on a template. (If you use a plugin like Exec-PHP, you can even display them within posts.) What’s neat about it is that you can tell it how many random files — well, in my case, images — to display and it will display that quantity without repeating them.

After some fiddling around with the CSS used in header.php — remember, I’m no expert — I added the following code in place of the existing header image code:

< ?php
$files = array();
for ($i=1;$i<=3;$i++) {
$file = c2c_random_file('/wp-content/foldername/foldername/', 'jpg png gif', 'url', $files);
echo '';
$files[] = $file;
}
?>