Bohemian Blog

I just ran into a problem on a photo site I have made with WordPress. The photo site is a photo web log where there are multiple authors that contribute one photo at a time (or so I prefer!). I don’ t know how to edit WordPress’s setup so that the upload process creates an image to a custom width rather than the default thumbnail. With that in mind, every author has to click ‘Write Post’ and then upload their pre-sized to 500px wide image to the site. From there they have to click on the ‘upload’ menu’s preview of their image. The one click brings up a menu on top of the photo that looks like this:

• Using Thumbnail
• Not Linked
• Send to Editor
• Delete
• Close Options

If you click on any of the items they will toggle to another option or execute the stated function. In my photo site’s case we change it to the following:

• Using Original
• Not Linked
• Send to Editor
• Delete
• Close Options

Then we press ‘Send to Editor’ and an img tag is sent to the Editor with the correct settings. Everything is as it should be (except that it excludes dimensions and that agitates the standards-loving person that I am, but I let it slide for the sake of ease of use). However, when using Internet Explorer 6 or 7 something funny happens.

1. The ‘width=’ option IS being used, but without quotes around the contents (the same for the alt setting) and it’s set to ‘96′ which is basically the thumbnail width.
2. The file path to the ORIGINAL is provided in the alt specification while the src specification remains pointing at the thumbnail file.

My friend was banging his head against the wall trying to figure it out. Once I discovered this problem I simply suggested that he install Firefox.

In conclusion, I don’t know a lot of people that use WordPress in this way, so maybe it isn’t very well known. Maybe it has something to do with my theme, but that shouldn’t be the case, since it’s within the admin side of the site. Anyway, maybe this write up will save somebody a headache.

Okay, IE7’s implimentation of RSS is basically a built in aggregator. That’s actually pretty nice. However, only dorks are going to know how to get there. So, nice try Microsoft. There is no comfortable way to ease people in to RSS. Firefox doesn’t have a built in reader, but I prefer the way they use the features of RSS to create a more dynamic web experience.

To start, IE’s setup is pretty familiar. If you are on a site with an RSS feed the little RSS icon lights up in a familiar orange. One thing I like about the set up is that the RSS icon is always present on the top bar in IE7. If there isn’t anything available it turns blue like an inactive feature. Very nice. So, you either go to that menu when it’s active or you click on a link in the page to is linked to the RSS feed. You are then presented with a page similar to Firefox. There’s an information block on top explaining what you are doing and it is followed by the contents of the feed. Great. Yes, please add this to my Favorites/Feeds list.

That’s where it goes bad. I just added to my Feeds list, but where the hell is my Feeds list? So figured out how to get the menu bar back, but then there wasn’t anything referring to my Feeds under ‘Favorites’. Wha? Where is it? So, I go back to the ‘house icon menu’ and discover that Favorites/Feeds is listed there and then a familiar favorites list including my Feeds pops up on the left of my browsing window. This is nice. A built in aggregator. Great for reading feeds without going to the sites. But I prefer Firefox’s dynamic links. That’s just me.

That’s all I’ve got to say. Chances of middle aged women using RSS within the next two years? Not very good.

Also, what’s up with the ‘no menu bar unless you request it’ stuff? Now people will never start to learn. Good thinking guys! I had to putter around through the ‘house icon’ menu to discover that I could even turn the old-style menu back on. My parents would be done.

I have recently been getting hit with waves of spam. I’m tired of dealing with it, so I have made registering mandatory for anyone that wants to comment. Most of my content is more informative, so I would say that comments are all that common. However, if anyone has corrections or something to add, please take the time to register. Thanks for reading the blog. I have a good-as-new-used or ‘Refurbished’ Thinkpad T42 being shipped to me via UPS this week, so some new posts on that machine should be popping up.

Includes, includes, includes. You can learn everything else later.

1. ColdFusion: <cfinclude template = “includes/header.htm”>
2. PHP: <? include(”includes/header.php”) ?>
3. ASP: <!––#include file =”includes/header.inc”––>

Of course, each of these should be used within files that have the appropriate extension. The appropriate extensions are .cfm, .php or .asp respectively. Another assumption on my part is that you already have one of the appropriate server applications running to make sense of either of these.

What the hell is an ‘include’? I’ve spent some good amounts of time trying to find just these very simple include ‘tags’. The first hurdle is understanding the concept of an ‘include’. An include can insert the content of a specified text file in place of itself much like an ‘img’ tag replaces itself with an actual image or photo on screen. However, the include tag is part of a script, not part of the xhtml markup. If you look at the source of a ColdFusion, PHP or ASP web page, you won’t find any ‘include’ tags. When the file is received by a browser application it appears to be a normal html file. The advantage of this belongs in the realm of what most Dreamweaver or FrontPage web designers know as ‘Templates’. Only these are much better, because the server handles all of the updating if you make changes to parts of the template (and none of that stopping-you-from-editing parts-of-the-page crap). It’s simple: Your site’s top navigation is one file that is included into the top of every other page of your site dynamically. Updating your navigation no longer means copy/pasting your navigation markup into several or hundreds of separate html pages. Just update the one, single file. All of this is accomplished without buying a fancy Content Management System. Beautiful.

After you get comfortable with these you can always move on to the more complicated applications of these server side script languages. This one single element is huge though. To me, it brings the original meaning of PHP to mind: Personal Home Page. You don’t have to be an html guru to comprehend the impact these tags have on website management.

Please let me know of any other simple but powerful uses for any of these server-side script languages.