Updates

Well, only in part. I often find myself scratching my head when shopping: I stand in front of a bookshelf or a DVD shelf and can’t for the life of me remember if I’ve bought a specific book or a specific movie.

B.N. (Before N73) I used to carry a small note where I’d listed all the King books I have and, more recently, all King movies I have. Nowadays it’s easier for me to remember which King books I don’t have (that is, only Cycle of the Werewolf and any recently released — currently Blaze), so the book list is pretty much unnecessary. I haven’t listed other books I have because books are things I remember more easily. A.N. (Anno N73) I’ve surfed to my Stephen King site, to the Bookshelf page and waited, waited, waited for the pretty pictures to load. I don’t have to worry about moving too many bits because I’ve never come close to the 25 Mb per month I pay for, but it’s the wait that bothers me.

My “Achilles heel” in the remembering department are movies. Although my movie collection is small by movie-buff standards, I often buy a DVD and put it on the shelf without watching it right away. I also record quite a bit from TV. And I don’t usually have my sister with me (she remembers my movie purchases better because she usually watches all additions as soon as I bring them home; movie-deprived, that one).

Therefore, I decided to create a mobile-friendly version of my movie and King book collections. Possibly in the future I’ll make the different pages modular so I only have to update one or two files but for now the mobi site is plain and simple HTML. I set the font size to 60% so that I don’t have to zoom out on the phone. (I view pages at 50% zoom.)

Without further ado, I present:mobi.all-things-me.net. Pretty much for my viewing pleasure only. The movie collection isn’t complete because I haven’t listed all my VHSs (bought and taped) or all movies I’ve recorded from TV.

Here’s a snapshot of it on my mobile:

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2 and I haven’t had time to inspect all the pages and how the old plugins work. If you see any errors anywhere in the blog, do let me know.

Our dog has a blog and even though I rarely write in it, I wanted to give it some time in the limelight. Well, it may be permanent – that box on the main page. There are some pretty photos and cool changing header image on the site. It’s a sort of sandbox for WP stuff — the rare occasions I have the energy to play with it (nowadays — or currently).

Hope you like it.

22 minutes into the new WP version and I’ve got it installed. Yay.

Only one thing:

That’s the plugin list and green shows which are activated. I mean, GAG! Look at that green! And blue links! I don’t like blue, but if it’s gotta be blue (I KNOW there are a few admin “themes”) then it can’t have green — at least not that kind of green.

*goes to tweak the admin stylesheet*

Ah, a bit better. I thought about leaving all the rows as plain grey (or white) but figured maybe distinguishing activated plugins comes in handy when I’m in a real hurry or suddenly can’t read……….

Now, where was the other green ghastly thing I caught a glimpse of…

Note to self: The next time you upgrade, remember to save a copy of admin quicktag hacking… AND remember to check which plugin files are in wp-admin

After complaining about not updating my other sites, I finally found something new to add to TGWLSK: 3 new books I bought today; Green Mile, IT, and Firestarter. I’m going back tomorrow with a list of books I have, because I don’t have Desperation yet, for instance, and I saw it there (I’m desperate to get it, har har).

It was quite a lucky find today because Firestarter is a paiiin to find in the libraries (read: it doesn’t exist) and IT’s been quite difficult too. Now I have them! And I only have to wrap them in book plastic and finish the Cook I’m reading and I get to read them too!

I also placed an order on the Bachman Books.

I installed the brand new Per Post Comment text plugin. Now I can have any kind of text for the comment link instead of the “boring” Comment?. Very nice.

Oh, dammit. Of course, cause the information is stored in the Custom fields, they will show before the post because I have other kinds of custom fields that need to show…

Thinking if I should make a category for WP… I think I should.

[edit: Nov 11] Had to remove the nice comment links because I wanted to try Alex King’s Since Last Visit plugin (indicates new posts and comments with a tiny image) — couldn’t get this to work. [/edit]
[edit: Nov 18] Installed Get Custom Field Values from Coffee2Code, so now I can choose which custom fields to show and which can be used as actual meta data. So, Per Post Comment text is activated again. [/edit]

I installed ScriptyGoddess’s Next/Previous link for archive pages. Also put a little PHP logo in the bottom right corner of the Php code bits I have. If I ever have anything else (I’ve been meaning to put a CSS thing), I’ll do logos for them too. Also, the red bits are the ones you (definitely) have to change.

Bah, this article got me excited that YES it’s possible to assign two classes to an element. Well, in the comments it said that IE doesn’t handle it well. Have to test that out though.

[edit @ 23:18] Now I’m going to install Service Pack 2 (Durand’s recommendation, I’m holding you responsible if something happens!!! ). Wish me luck. Good bye cruel world!! *dramatic exit* [/edit]
[edit] I didn’t [/edit]

I added the Nicer Archives code snippet from WP Wiki. I tried to use the “upgraded” versions of it (from Weblog Tools Collection) but they borked — big time.

When you enter the page, it shows the posts of the current year. Then you can sort the posts by date, title, or category; ascending or descending; and from all years or one year at a time (there is only one year, for now). The original script had a possibility sort by author but because there’s only me, I commented it out.

Time format is date.month.year.

On to the archives »

The calendar showed as January 2004 so I started to look for a way to remove it. Easier said than done. Well, not really, but I didn’t think of echoing the variable in my if-test to see what it’s out put was. This is what I wrote (first):

<?php $thispage = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$PHP_SELF;
    if ($thispage != “www.mypage.xxx/blog-folder/pagename.php“) { ?>
     <!-- CALENDAR -->
     <li id=”calendar”>
        <?php get_calendar(); ?>
     </li>
<?php } ?>

http_host + php_self return the url of a php page a without the http (as that’d be the protocol)

Then I tried what $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] does and it echoed the path without the host. Nifty. Thus, I changed the code to

<?php $thispage = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
    if ($thispage != “/blog-folder/pagename.php“) { ?>
     <!-- CALENDAR -->
     <li id=”calendar”>
        <?php get_calendar(); ?>
     </li>
<?php } ?>

[edit: Nov 22/Dec 15, '04/Jan 5, '05] I had an oddly titled post which messed up the archive. Well, not exactly *mess* but because it had an less-than sign at the beginning it was archived under L, but first alphabetically. After some testing, I figured out how to prevent this. From the WP Wiki I found a function sanitize_title_with_dashes which I used in the archive code, this is in the function archive_header: This worked when my odd titles included only one starting with A. But when there was one with D, I noticed the code didn’t work. Why? Because it compares the first letter if the current title to the previous one and the query sorts the odd titles at first. Well, I took another approach to this. All odd titles will be categorized under # (I know it means ‘number’ but here it’s just some non-alphabetic character). A new try, a * I had in one of the titles wouldn’t be recognized, probably because the line starting with preg_match matches only letters and numbers, so I changed that to match any one character (at the beginning). Hopefully this will prove working with my strange titles…

elseif ('title' == $orderby) {
preg_match('/.{1}/i', $post->post_title, $match);
$thisletter = ucfirst($match[0]);
if (!ctype_alpha($thisletter)) { $thisletter = '#'; }
if ($thisletter != $previous) {
$output .= "<br/>".$thisletter;
}
$previous = $thisletter;

The highlighted part checks if the first letter of the title is NOT an alphabetic character, if it’s true that it’s NOT one, the letter will be a ‘#’. Now all the odd titles will be grouped at the beginning of the list of titles (or end if the order’s descending) . [/edit]

Firstly, Happy Birthday, Mariela!

How many times can I mess up one single thing: bachelor’s thesis. I sent my professor a message way back in June saying “Here’s the final version of my thesis, I’ll come by to bring the paper version too when it finishes printing.” Well, I never did — go by to bring the paper version — because it printed mess (symbols). Well, now I’d gotten an email from my professor asking if there was supposed to be an attachment with the email because he needed the final version for binding (binding!!). Oi oi oi. I had also forgotten to update the files on my homepage!

I’m always forgetting to attach things, especially when it comes to very important university courses…

Oh yeah, and now it won’t make a pdf from the tex file. I don’t know what I did back in… May. Luckily I had converted it already.

Updates At TGWLSK — a few new book titles in Russian, Albanian, Persian, Estonian, Spanish, Croatian, and Turkish (what I could find in the library system of the capital city area)

Yesterday I heard that a friend of mine from high school is having a baby in November (awwwww). Another friend of mine has been together with her boyfriend for over six years (they’re really cute). Another is living with her boyfriend. I could go on and on. All are the same age as myself (younger, to be exact, but same year). I’m trying to smile through it all, but sometimes it gets really really difficult. (Not too often, though.)
(Luckily there are “single power” (cf. girl power) programs like S&C. )

Yesterday I bought Dolores Claiborne (the book by Stephen King) and saw Shrek II (original version of course! Kiddies’ version is dubbed). It was a wonderful movie and it had lots of allusions to other movies etc. (as movies of that genre tend to do). I won’t list them here openly (someone *could* blame me for spoiling the film), but read the rest of this post if you want. Of course I don’t remember many of them, but maybe I’ll find some reminders some place else.

Updates: University stuff converted to new static page form.
Note to self Posts showing changed from “7 posts” to “7 days” (because of the static pages there are only a few actual posts on the index page)