New theme and new functionality

As you can see (unless, of course, you’re an RSS reader) I am working on a new theme for the site. The new theme is wider and utilizes screen space better. It also looks better and more consistent across different browsers.

But the new look is not the only thing that I am working on. There are some navigation changes and design simplifications (hopefuly). Long lists of categories and monthly archives are gone from the sidebar of the front page. They’ve been moved to the dedicated Archives page (more on it in a second), which is linked to from the top of all pages.

The top of the page also includes the link to the photo albums marked as Gallery. Many people were requesting this and I don’t know why I didn’t do it earlier.

I have also installed and configured Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin which allows to integrate tagging deep into the site. The integration process hasn’t finished yet, so I’ll have to update you on the functionality later on.

One bit that I will notice now though is the tag cloud that is available in the Archives page. The tag cloud represents most used tags and allows quick navigation to posts marked with those tags. The bigger the tag name more often it was used.

Anyway, as you can understand, the site undergoes some changes now and might not be very stable. If you encounter an empty page, broken link or an ugly message with debug dump, please don’t shoot me just yet. Everything will be back to normal very soon. Also note that none of the old functionality should be lost. If I forgot to enable something that you used before and thus can’t anymor, please drop me a line.

Bits and pieces

New WordPress plugins appear every day or so it seems. Old ones are improving at a constant rate too. Once in a while I revisit plugin directories to see if anything worth installing or upgrading had appeared. Today I discovered a couple of new plugins that I decided to install.

  • Rate My Stuff is one of straight forward plugins that add a nice touch to the website. It allows to show those small stars when posting a rating of something. I thought since I have so many movie reviews, it would be a good idea to have the stars added to them. So I installed the plugin, resized the original images to smaller versions (15×15 pixels) and wrote a small perl script (wp-rate.pl; make sure that you have a fresh backup of the databases) to update all movie posts o’mine.
  • pluginsUsedPlugin does a very simple, but useful job. It tells everyone what plugins are installed and activated for the current WordPress installation. I have added the list of currently active plugins to the About page. The list is dynamic and thus always up to date. All plugins in the list are linked to the appropriate websites where they could be downloaded.

I’ve also found a couple of other plugins that I am planning to install, but they require some work on my behalf and so I left them for after I’ve slept.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

A huge list of blogging services was bookmarked today. Some of these are very well known, others are not.

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Request for an application

I’ve got an idea for an application. If you have nothing to do or looking for an idea to practice your mad programming skills, feel free to use this one.

Flickr is an excellent source of images. Better even, all images are tagged and most are available in different sizes. It would be very nice to have a tool that could use Flickr images as desktop backgrounds (wallpapers). Ideally, I would just specify the tags that I am interested in, such as sports, nature, or landscape, and this tool would get the list of images from Flickr that are available in the resolution that I am using. Images could be random or sorted by some criteria, such as posted date or number of comments. If there would be a preview and an easy way to change to the next image (maybe even automatically based on time period) I’d be totally happy.

I don’t see myself programming this anytime soon as I don’t care much for desktop candy. But if one was available there is a chance that I would use it. I also know of a few people who would simply love something like this.

Recursively renaming files in Linux

One thing I liked about Linux is it’s hidden simplicity. When in a hurry, I usually go for the first working solution of a given problem. If the same problem appears often, I can get used to the first solution so much that I don’t even think about simplifying it.

Continue reading Recursively renaming files in Linux