I just needed a quick spot to put an image so that I could get to it from school quickly.
Diddley Squat
Last Saturday was going to be the perfect Saturday. I had already received confirmation from Lauren that I would under no circumstances be required to Go To Lincoln. My basic plan was to sleep and read, watch the Cardinals beat the (#@%$) Mets, fix Lauren’s website and create this one. Those last two items were on my list so that I would have a reasonable excuse for avoiding any actual work. With luck I would never have to leave the house for more than 30 minutes at a time.
Instead, late in the morning, after sleeping and well into reading, Lauren’s friend Kate called and said that her Fiancé (it’s French, so you don’t pronounce it that way) John had tickets to see The Legendary Bo Diddley and wanted to know if we wanted to go along. I can’t say that I’m a Bo Diddley fan, but I felt like I knew him fairly well from the 80’s Nike commercial where he told Bo Jackson that he (Jackson) didn’t know Diddley.
Recent Comments Plugin
I’ve always like “RecentComments” features, and so I went looking for one. There are a couple of different ones floating around, but this one seemed simple, and simple is usually just about right. I installed it then modified the sidebar with this code:
<li><h2>Recent Comments</h2>
<ul><?php mdv_recent_comments(6, 30, ‘<li>’, ‘</li>’, true, 0); ?></ul></li>
The parameters for the function are:
$no_comments – sets the number of recent comments to display
$comment_lenth – the number of characters to display as a comment excerpt
$before – text to be displayed before the link to the recent comment
$after – text to be displayed after the link to the recent comment
$show_pass_post – whether or not to display comments from password protected posts
$comment_style – sets the style of comment to be used
- 1 = “CommenterName on PostTitle” with CommenterName being a link to the comment
- 0 = “CommenterName: WordsOfComment” with WordsOfComment being a link to the comment
I made some changes to the plugin…
- Changed from showing a certain number of words per comment to a certain number of letters.
- Removed any trailing spaces and added “…” to the end of the comment text.
- Formatted the title of the link a little differently
Messin’ with the Theme
I had to go into the theme and muck up a few lines of php code. It was just moving stuff around and stealing some stuff from Brad’s site (his theme is put together better than ours). Here’s what I did:
- Copied the author name from Brad’s site and added it below the title (I was going to go for next to the title, but I would have had to edited the style sheet again because they used heading tags. That’s not an unreasonable way to do it, but when everything else is CSS, why not use it everywhere? Anyway, I didn’t want to mess with that.).
- Moved the date/time posted from below to above.
- Added Brad’s number of posts tag to the post a comment section below the post.
Stylesheet
I had to edit the stylesheet for the template we’re using. The first edit was easy. I wanted links to be underlined (you know, so you can tell that they are links). But then all of the links were underlined including titles and menues and usernames and posts and some other stuff as well.
A few more edits later and I think I have everything that looks bad underlined de-underlined. I hate stylesheets. The onlything worse than stylesheets is every other way of specifying design.
Threaded Comments plugin
Brian’s Threaded Comments is a plugin that lets people either comment on a post or reply to someone’s comment (or reply to someone’s reply to a comment on a post…). I thought that would be useful after Lauren’s reply to Brad’s comment looked like a comment on the post instead of a reply (the fact that the order was messed up didn’t help either).
Besides, I like threaded comments because you can have a bit of a discussion without having a full fledged message board –not that there’s anything wrong with that.