LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

Meta

john + the internet = awesome

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Watch as I harness the power of the interweb to bring about my master plan. Even now, as I sit here in the heart of my evil, if slightly chilly, lair typing this message, my evil plan is coming together. You see, once Brad got a website and Lauren got a website, I realized that anyone could have a website. Then (this actually took a while, but for narrative purposes lets say it it pretty much happened next) I thought, what if all the people who I always wonder what they are up to, but never talk to, had websites?

I have a picture with Sam in it somewhere too.

Normally, that sort of idle wondering would have been enough for me, and I would have gone back to reading a book or something. But not this time. No, not this time. This time I have set forth a chain of events mighty to behold and… um… now I sort of need some help. See, John and Cheri have a website: www.schmidly.com, and as we know, the fun bit about having a website is having other people post comments about the things on your website. So, for a limited time only, everyone who posts a comment on their site can be one of my evil minions.

Evil minions don’t have health benefits yet, but we are starting a 401k program at the start of the year. Ah yes, soon my plan will be complete.

Too much multimedia

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These Geeky posts are in the Meta category so that they don’t appear on the main page, but so that I have a spot to look back and see what changes I’ve made in case I ever need to undo them or duplicate them.

I had to add a plugin to WordPress to get the movie to showup on the MRI post. But it’s a fairly comprehensive plugin, and it also changed links to songs (.mp3) to “click to listen” buttons. That’s not what I wanted –at least not to the links to songs that were already on the site. I changed the file anarchy_media_player.php in the Anarchy Media plugin by changing the tag that it searches for to do the replacement from an anchor (A) tag to an (A3) tag which doesn’t exit in html. I’m assuming here that an actual (a3) tag would become a “play me” link, but I have not tested it.

Recent Comments Plugin

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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

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Messin’ with the Theme

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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:

  1. 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.).
  2. Moved the date/time posted from below to above.
  3. Added Brad’s number of posts tag to the post a comment section below the post.

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