pinkasphalt

Link: Cuckoo for Switzerland — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

One of the features I really love in WordPress 2.5 is the built-in gallery function. I was pretty disappointed though, that my first attempts at using this function did not look half as good as the ones on Matt’s site. Specifically, my individual image pages didn’t have the thumbnail navigation to get the to the next and previous images and the photos on the individual pages were tiny.

A bit of sleuthing revealed the solutions. I found out that the individual image gallery pages look for an image.php template.  Also, these pages use the medium size image created when you upload images into the WordPress media library. Therfore, my first step in getting my galleries looking they way I wanted them was to go to Settings>Miscellaneous in my WordPress admin to change the size of my medium images.  I used 730 pixels as the maximum for both width and height.

After changing these settings, I turned to creating my new image.php template. I use the fabulous Fauna theme and decided to take a stab at making the necessary modifications to that theme, as I wanted to continue using it. I used single.php as my starting point, and following instructions I found on the Fauna support group, I created a single column Fauna image template. I added the code from template-post.php to my file and then copied the navigation code from the default theme’s image.php file. I also tried to strip away the code that was not necessary. After some trial and error, I ended up with an image.php Fauna file. I am sure that there was certainly a more elegant way of doing this, but given that my main PHP skill is copying and pasting, I was pretty pleased to have gotten this far. A couple small changes to my stylesheet ensured that everything looked as it should.

My last hurdle came when I upgraded WordPress from RC1 to the final version. All of a sudden the thumbnails on the main post page started to have spacing issues. What had formerly been tidy rows of three thumbnails were now strangely spaced alternating rows of two and then one thumbnail. I am not sure what changed between RC1 and the final version, but I found that commenting out the rules for the dl, dt and dd tags fixed this problem. I am sure this will break something in some other part of the site, but I guess I will deal with that when I come to it. For now, I am just happy to have my Fauna galleries working. You can see an example here. I have a few more things I would like to add to the gallery templates, but those will have to wait until another day.

My son, who is 3 months old, had a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep when he was a newborn; my husband and I, first time parents, had a hard time figuring out how to help him. We would spend sleepless nights walking back and forth trying to console him, convinced that we would be evicted from our apartment for excessive noise and that the neighbors would certainly call child services on us.

And then we stumbled across the miracle solution: the kitchen fan. Its humming noise seemed to be exactly what Ben needed to fall asleep and stay asleep. We were so relieved to have found this cure to our problems that we used the fan with reckless abandon and its whirring was sweet music to our ears.

Now, it is driving me crazy. The fan has to be on for Ben to fall asleep. The fan has to be on for Ben to stay asleep. That is a lot of on time for the fan. And it is driving me crazy. Its always on and it seems to have permeated my entire life. When I am on the phone, people ask me if I am in a wind tunnel.

Go to another room, you say. I wish I could, but our apartment is not very big and the kitchen is where I work and, obviously, where we cook and eat. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen.

So today, 30 seconds ago, I took a big step. I turned off the fan. Ben is in his swinging chair sleeping we’ll see if he can stay asleep without the humming. I for one am breathing easier and can finally hear myself think. It is true what they say: silence is golden.

UPDATE: It’s 30 minutes later and the fan is back on. Silence is golden, but humming is better than crying.

Link: There is a moment…

K.D. Lang sings Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah