hacks

I’m suffering from a little bout of writer’s block these days. When you combine that with the fact that I haven’t been cruising the ‘net finding new and funny things, it makes for a dearth of new content on this site. I was thinking that it would be cool to display a single post from the archives at the top of the home page when there’s nothing new to see. Something like, “Hey! Sorry I haven’t posted anything new in x days, but check out this from y years ago …” I got as far as writing the SQL for it, but then I stopped working on it. I think it’s a good idea, though. Maybe someone will decide to write a plugin to do this. (Or, more likely, someone already has and I am just too lazy to find it.)

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I was very happy to see that the WordPress developers included the ability to “tag” posts. For a long time I’ve been using my own bastardized version of Bunny’s Technorati Tags to add tags to this site. A few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and convert to using the tag system that is now baked into this CMS.

Here’s my only problem: The standard WordPress tagging engine is designed so that clicking a tag on a post displays an archives page with all of the other posts tagged with that tag. (Confused yet?) I don’t like that. One reason I don’t like that is because I have not yet managed to transfer all of my tags from the old system to the new, so lots and lots of my posts have no tags. That means if you click a tag for “ovulating kleptomaniac”, for example, you’re not going to get any results. So I have hornswaggled the code a bit to make it so that on this site the tags link to search results for that tag instead. I think it’s a much more “visitor friendly” implementation of tagging.
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Totally awesome: Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote

Awesome LifeHacker DOS trick: Give a folder its very own drive letter.

Looking for a way to clear some of your computer’s clutter? Getting rid of empty directories is a good start. I was looking for a file and realized that my machine was spending a long time searching through folders that I knew had nothing in them. A quick Google search returned a handy DOS trick to zap them all. It took me about one minute to delete just over two thousand empty folders. There’s nothing like a little command-line scripting to get something done.

This domain of mine has had stuff on it for a long, long time — before WordPress or MovableType or even Blogger. The original davidgagne.net is, sadly, lost forever. Some pieces of it have been kicking around on my various hard drives and FTP locations for a decade now.

One file that I could never seem to bring myself to delete was an ancient hand-coded HTML <TABLE> listing of a bunch of important events in my life. A few friends of mine actually built a company based on the idea. It was called “ShareTimelines.com”, had a magnificent interface, was all webbed up, and the site — last I checked — is completely dead. I wanted to have that timeline on this site again. I hadn’t updated it in years and years, and I would rather poke hot needles in my eyes than sit and hand-code a bunch of <td>s all day. “It should all be in a database, of course,” I said to myself. “And I should be able to edit it right in the WordPress Administrator, too. And seriously it should be written so that I can just give other people the ability to add timelines like that to their own sites.” ( I should stop talking to myself.)

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Tags! They’re everywhere! It seems like every site on the ‘net is adding tagging now. Tag clouds — ridiculous, pointless, and annoying — are not the reason. Tagging is a good way to get into Technorati and a good way to get more traffic to your site. It’s a nifty way to organize your posts and to help your readers find what they want on your site. Is it the wave of the future? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Several of the early adopters are now saying that they are useless, and the search engines seemed to be doing a fair job of indexing blogs long before people got tag-happy. But it’s not exactly terribly painful to add this functionality to your site — it only took me about a half hour, so how hard could it be? Plus you’ve got me to explain it all to you.

This how-to assumes that you’re using WordPress to manage your blog. If you are using something else — blogger, MovableType, etc. — then you’ll have to look somewhere else. Technorati is a good place to start.

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Although I can appreciate that it’s a really nifty feature, I am likely never going to use the built-in File Upload feature in WordPress. What has bugged me is that it’s in an IFRAME in the Write Post panel; I think it slows the page load. I was trying to get rid of it, but the best I could find was the Clutter Free plugin from Tempus Fugit. It’s a great plugin, but unfortunately it doesn’t really remove the IFRAME, it just hides it.

So. I dug around in the code and did it myself. If you aren’t the file-uploadin’ type, you only need to change a few lines to prevent the File Upload widget from appearing on your Write Post panel. Open wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php and look for the line containing $uploading_iframe_ID. It’s near or around line 223. There are a few different ways you can handle removing this.

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I have finally updated two of my WordPress hack tutorials so that they are compliant with v. 2.04.

The first one — DropCaps — allows you to put that nifty “dropcap” into a post. This post begins with a dropcap I.

The second one — Amazon Tags — adds two new buttons to your editing screen. They allow you to link directly to an Amazon item by its ASIN or to add a link to an Amazon search.

The second one includes a link to a zipped copy. You can just extract quicktags.js into your wp-includes/js folder and the images into your wp-images folder and you’re set.

Happy WordPress modding!

A few thousand of my hits every day are coming from some little geeks using an old web cam shot of my buddy’s as their avatar in forums. It’s quite funny, because I think they think that they’re actually linking to a different image. It’s pretty annoying, so I implemented scriptygoddess’ code to protect images by modifying .htaccess.

The chances of me ever using the WordPress str QuickTag are pretty slim, so I replaced it with a drop-capper. (The T in this paragraph should appear as a dropcap for you if you’re using a browser that handles CSS properly.)

Pretty nifty, I think.

Want to do it?

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I wanted to add nifty little Amazon links to my posting window … so I did. Grab my zipped version of quicktags.js and you can, too. This is the javascript file that builds the row of buttons above your posting window (e.g. str, em, del, etc.) My version adds two buttons: one for quick-linking to an item at Amazon via its ASIN and one for quick-linking to an Amazon search.

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I use bookmarklets for all my posting and hardly ever enter the MT interface to do anything other than edit old posts. So if you are like me you will need to modify bm_entry.tmpl instead of edit_entry.tmpl, but otherwise this is what you need to do if you were using Scott Andrew’s PowerLinks in your MoveableType blog and they all got lost when you upgraded: Custom Tag Buttons in Edit Entry screen

Trust me. You want to go get HideOutlook from r2 studios. This little app is great! It lets you minimize Outlook to the system tray instead of the taskbar. Click the icon in the systray and Outlook pops open or closed; right-click it and you can create new email messages, appointments, etc. Very hep. And it’s free!