pinkasphalt

Back in 2002 I wrote a quick post that had the words “sniper porn” in it. This was in reference to the media’s obsessive coverage at that time with the DC sniper, to the exclusion of all other news. Eight years later, one of the main Google searches that brings people to my blog is still for the term “sniper porn”. This always makes me giggle, but also wonder exactly what it is these people are looking for. So to all the sniper porn folks coming by who are likely disappointed once they get here, sorry.

I have combed all my server space and hard drive space and backup disks and have managed to pull together almost all the posts that were ever a part of pinkasphalt.com.  The very earliest things I wrote are gone forever, I think. All of 2006 is missing too, but who knows, it may still turn up. It’ll take me a bit of time to get everything in order so in the mean time, please excuse the mess.

Link: pinkasphalt.com, version 1.

It’s weird what you find sometimes. .Mac transitioned to MobileMe today and somehow dredged up some strange pervious version of my iDisk. In it I found some of the files from the first incarnation of my website, back in the old skool days of hand-coding. I was pretty sure I had archived this somewhere, but I can’t find it, so finding this was a nice end to an otherwise shitty week.

Well, it’s taken a bit of work, but I have almost gotten my WordPress 2.5 galleries functioning the way I want them to. The last step has been creating a custom category template that can show all my galleries on one page, with a short description for each one. Again, the inspiration for this was Matt’s site. A little bit of reading clarified how category templates worked, but I had no idea where to start on this. Thankfully, a kind person on the WordPress.org forums posted a basic gallery category template. I used this as my starting point, modifying the code to get it to look the way I wanted. Happily, this was easily done, and I only needed to make a few additions to my stylesheet to get it to look pretty. You can see the final result here. The category template is available here, and I have included the relevant styles inline.

I then created a new page and used the Links to Page plugin to get it to link to the gallery category page. You can see the link up on the top nav menu.

Things are now almost exactly as I want them. The only thing I haven’t been able to figure out is why the current page indication in the top menu is a bit wonky. I have posted the question on the WordPress forums. If anyone has any suggestions, thanks for going over there and letting me know.

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.

Yesterday I saw that a Release Candidate for Wordrpress 2.5 had come out. After months of not really keeping up with WordPress happenings, it just so happened that I had recently started working on my blog so the 2.5RC1 release was perfectly timed. I had decided to scrap everything that had been at this domain before and start fresh so I only had a couple of posts and one plugin installed. I figured I might as well try upgrading since I didn’t have much to lose. I was also excited to try 2.5 because I had seen Dean Robinson’t admin theme, Fluency, and I thought it looked really good, but it only runs on 2.5.

I took a couple precautions before starting my upgrade (did an export from the admin, downloaded my uploads directory, as well as my lightly modded version of Fauna and my single, lonely plugin). Once this was done I deleted all the old WordPress files off my server and uploaded the 2.5 files. I am not sure if this is how one is supposed carry out an update, but it worked pretty well for me.

After running the install script, I imported my backup file, and uploaded my theme, plugin and upload files. I set the WordPress, theme and plugin preferences to what they had been previously and went to take a look at my site. It looked….exactly the same. Success! Then I came back and took a look at the admin. Definitely much cleaner and clearer, but I am not a big fan of the 2 layered horizontal navigation, so my next step was to install the Fluency admin theme, which I also managed to do without any difficulties.

So now everything is working just the way I want it to. I haven’t used WP2.5 much yet, but so far, I like the new “Write Post” page, which is much cleaner and logical in its layout. I like that post drafts are auto-saved (I think that’s new?) and I like the image uploader and the ability to choose custom thumbnail sizes. I am sure I’ll find more things to like (and dislike) as I use it a bit more, but for now I am pretty satisfied.

As an aside, I used Dave Shea’s slick Simulacrum Photoshop effect on the pic in this post. It is easy to do (thanks to his clear instructions) and I think the results look really good.