An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

It seems Google AdSense and sites served as application/xhtml+xml don’t get along well due to the document.write calls the Google AdSense Javascript uses so seeing as I am experimenting with adding some hopefully unobtrusive AdSense ads to select posts I have temporarily reverted to serving text/html for all browsers until I can come up with a workaround.

ASO just upgraded the server I am on (Pi) to PHP 4.4 and MySQL 4.1, this should not cause any issues with my site and in fact should greatly improve performance however there could still be some breakage so if you notice anything broken can you please let me know? I’ve checked what I can and everything seems to be operational but I might have missed something.

Can someone please tell me what is the attraction in posting their last X played songs on a blog or forum post?

I know I have a Current Read section but a book lasts a lot longer than an average 3 minutes for a song and says a lot more about a person than the last 5 or so songs they played. My music tastes vary so much as well especially as I have my Ipod on shuffle most of the day, one moment it could be Break Stuff by Limp Bizkit, then Truly Madly Deeply by Savage Garden, then Milkshake by Kelis, then Banana Pancakes by Jack Johnson and then Jump Around by House of Pain.

I think a lot more insightful thing to post would be your top X played songs, although I think my top song is Break Stuff from Limp Bizkit so that would tell people I get frustrated and angry a lot at work and that probably wouldn’t be a good thing.

I can see from my logs that I do get a decent amount of traffic but nobody seems to want to comment and seeing how I always like a little validation here & there I thought I would try running some polls to see if I can get my visitors to interact with the site as I know leaving comments can sometimes be a pain.

The first poll is about Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince, I really can’t see how Harry Potter is so damned popular, I read the first book way back when and was utterly unimpressed so much so that I had no inclination of reading the next books or seeing the movies. However I’m interested to see what everyone else thinks so vote away!

The poll is using a script from http://blog.jalenack.com/archives/democracy/, which had a few errors upon install with a MySQL insert failing and some weirdness with the answers of the first poll but that all seems to be sorted now.

I was getting bored of the previous theme as it was lacking in wow factor and even though it was fun coding the CSS Dropdown Menu I had it wasn’t really being used plus was rather bland looking so it got the chop…

Please leave me a note and let me know what you think of the new theme, one of the next major things I am going to work on is getting the moblog script to use that polaroid script and once that is working I’ll look at packaging that together with the actual moblogging script and also the code for showing the location with the Google Maps API.

I have finally found something I can channel my technical and creative skills into and am currently working on a new website named Hip in Houston. Hip in Houston is a new online community for promotion and discussion of Houston bars and clubs, it will feature discussion forums, an event calendar, photo galleries, reviews, happy hour schedules and lots of other content that will make Hip in Houston the source for bars and clubs in the area.

I’ll be trying to line up drink specials and do things like arrange special Hip in Houston happy hours and VIP events, plus eventually with any lucvk we will have Hip in Houston merchandise like T-Shirts to give away. It will take me several weeks of development to get the site ready for development but I am using Mambo for the Content Management System and Simple Machines for the forums so a lot of the hard stuff is already done so I just need to develop content and layout.

So stay tuned for the public launch event!

Apparently Spam Karma was giving off some bad karma of it’s own and blocking a lot of valid stuff so I have upgraded that to Spam Karma 2, which seems a lot better based upon a few tests I did and also has much better configuration. Please let me know if you experience any problems posting comments from now on as I suspect that is one of the reasons comments are so few and far between around here!

I also fixed some breakage that was caused by living on the bleeding edge of Wordpress so now everything should be in working order once again.

After much hair pulling I am finally able to MobLog from my s710a to my Wordpress 1.5 blog and the above two posts are examples of this.

I ended up adapting this script to my needs, mainly just by extending it to create thumbnails for larger images so once I have done a code cleanup then I will post my modifications here, if you must have it right now then leave me a note to motivate me to clean up the code.

Can you please remind me not to get any hair brained ideas before I have had an adequate supply of coffee in the mornings again?

I thought I would trash my current hodge podge under www and replace it with an svn checkout of Wordpress so I could update it easier and participate in development but instead of copying the public_html directory I copied the www symlink, then after a rm -rf * in public_html I discovered that Subversion wasn’t even installed on the server so I shrugged and thought I’d restore from the “backup” and raise a support ticket to get SVN installed.

Then I realized my error and had to raise another support ticket to install my home directory from a backup, which gratefully Tim just completed for me and everything seems to be back up fine.

Now next time I am going to plan that move just a little bit better!

Okay finally here it is, the first draft of my instructions on how to implement the above CSS based dropdown menu:

0. You might want to upgrade to a recent nightly just so you have a similar codebase to me
1. First set up your Pages in Wordpress to be some sort of hierarchy otherwise using the menu doesn’t make sense
2. Edit your theme’s header.php inserting the below code within the head tags somewhere:
<!--[if IE]>
<style type=”text/css” media=”screen”>
html {
behavior: url(http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/default/csshover.htc);
font-size: 70%;
}
#menu ul li {float: left; width: 100%;}
#menu ul li a {height: 1%;}
#menu a, #menu h2 {
font: bold 0.7em/1.4em arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
}
</style>
< ![endif]–>

This is to work around problems in Internet Explorer and make sure the menu works there, you can download the required file here.

Note: It is very important that this file is served from the exact same domain as your blog if you reference it from www.yourdomain.com and users view your site just by yourdomain.com it will not be included due to security in Internet Explorer.

3. Then add:

<style type="text/css">
@import “http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/default/multimenu.css”;
</style>

Downloading the file from here.

4. Then download the modified template-functions-post.txt and either place that in your wordpress/wp-includes directory (after renaming it to .php of course) or edit your existing file looking at the //jb comments in my modified version (the comments aren’t verbose at all yet)

5. Go back to editing your themes header.php and within the header div, just after the headerimg div paste the following:

<div id="menu">
<?php wp_list_pages(false,false,false,false); ?>
</div>

And I think that is it, if you’re interested in this then please give it a go and let me know how you go, if you have any problems with it then please just contact me and I will help you out as soon as I can!