Maddie’s Birthday Banner

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A few weeks ago was a friend’s birthday. We decorated her locker and made a huge banner and put it up in the hallway at school. I took some pictures of it and stitched them together with a little Photoshop and some of my own hardwork. Since I didn’t take very smart pictures for a panorama Photoshop didn’t do a very good job, so I ended up putting them together by myself, it turned out alright.

I had to document this because of how big this banner was. Here it is:

Maddie's Birthday Banner
Maddie's Birthday Banner

Update: Make sure you actually go to the single post page for this post and don’t just stop and look on the homepage, it get’s cutoff by the sidebar.

WordPress Feature Request: Gallery Improvements

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I’ve been pretty happy with the new-ish WordPress gallery. I haven’t used it a whole lot, but for the Photos that I’ve taken it has worked decently. When they first released the new gallery, it seemed like a huge thing with tons of features, but it really isn’t. Sure the new image uploader is nice, and the gallery pages are cool, but if you want more than that, you’ll have to hack your way to what you want.

I made my gallery page display a thumbnail from the gallery next to the info. This looks great, but it only works when there is a photo in the first spot. If for some reason the photo that you tried to upload didn’t go, or you decided that you didn’t like it and deleted it then there’s nothing.

I would also like a simple feature that returns a random image from the gallery. There’s nothing that can do this. It would be great to be able to display a random image in my sidebar, or on gallery pages, but right now that’s impossible.

What I really want

The random image thing is simple, just the simplest template tag for a random gallery image. Maybe you could even specify posts that you don’t want included, but easy stuff.

The default gallery thumbnail is a little more complex, but not much. I want something that lets you choose an image from your post to be the ‘default gallery thumbnail’. Then a template tag that returns the default gallery thumbnails. Then you could even have it setup so that if you change your mind on a particular gallery, you can go back and change the default thumbnail.

I’ve been looking for a solution to this for awhile, maybe I’ll try to throw something together that accomplishes this.

Added Seesmic

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Well, I added the Seesmic plugin for WordPress so people can record comments with Seesmic. We’ll see how that goes. I think we’re all going to be using video in the future, so why not get started right now? I tried to record a video for this post, but I guess you need to pay for Jing Pro to be able to save a screencast in mp4. The only option with the free version is .swf and I don’t know how to convert .swf to anything else, so I guess I’m stuck. I tried to find visualhub, but I didn’t have a Mac when they decided to cancel it 6 months ago. I was going to use my camera on a tripod, but the batteries were dead. I got the first part recorded in PhotoBooth, but it wont make very much sense if I just put that up.

If anybody knows of any free screen capture software that will let me use some kind of real movie format let me know. I’m going to remove Jing right away. What a waste of my time.

Essential Windows Programs

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Well, it’s time for a reformat of the Windows Machine. Nothing like starting fresh, so I’ll put a list of Windows programs that I couldn’t live without.

  • 7 – Zip – Who pays for winzip these days? Just download 7 – Zip. It’s free, open-source software that handles more than just .zip files.
  • Adobe CS – I’m still on CS3 web premium because I payed way to much for it and I can’t afford CS4 yet. Maybe next year when I can get the insane student discounts I’ll pick up CS4.
  • AVG Free Anti-Virus – As long as you know what you’re doing AVG Free is all you need. If you need some more protection, they also have a cheap pay-for Anti-Virus program. In my experience AVG Free has worked great.
  • Dropbox – Just great for sharing files.
  • DVD43 – Goes with the next one…
  • DVD Shrink – When you’re archiving those DVDs, just incase they get scratched.
  • FileZilla – A free, open-source FTP client that works great.
  • iTunes – For syncing the iPod and getting podcasts.
  • Last.fm – I love being able to see the stats on the music I’m listening to.
  • Microsoft Office 2007
  • Mozilla Firefox – Still the best PC browser available.
  • Nero – For burning anything from photo backups to Linux ISOs.
  • Notepad++ – A great editor for any kind of code. I use it when I just have a quick change or two that I need to make and I don’t want to wait for Dreamweaver to startup.
  • Prime95 – Testing that overclock that you just setup.
  • RealVNC
  • Simplify Meida – Great for streaming music to the iPod touch or any other computer over the internet from my PC.
  • Skype
  • TuneUp Companion
  • WinDirStat – Find out what’s eating up your harddrive.
  • Audacity
  • Pandora – Best internet radio, plus they have an iPhone app.

Twitter RSS and WordPress

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Recently I’ve been having problems finding a solution to getting my Twitter updates displayed in the sidebar of my blog. I was using a plugin that did this for me, but when it stopped working I went looking for a new solution. I thought of the RSS that is built into WordPress, as that is what I am using to feed some of the other content in the sidebar.

When I first set it up everything worked perfectly. It was even better than the plugin I was using. It gave a link to the RSS feed, my twitter profile, and a link to each of the tweets, along with the date that everything was posted on. This was great. I loved seeing links to each tweet, and the date was nice too.

Within the last week this stopped working though. WordPress was still seeing the RSS feed, but wasn’t getting updates, and there was an error message that looked kind of like this:

Warning: Attempt to assign property of non-object in/wp-root/wp-includes/rss.php on line 449

It turns out that somewhere along the line there were too many updates trying to go through. I think it was on Twitter’s end because on some of the other feeds I have more updates in the feed than are actually being displayed. For example, my delicious feed includes 15 items in the actual feed. If you were to click on the feed link you would see all 15 items, but there are only 10 items being shown on the blog. WordPress is setting a limit of 10, which is one of the options when you setup the feed for the RSS widget.

The Fix

Since WordPress wasn’t actually getting the updates, it was displaying there error message shown above. What I decided to to was to check out the api, and sure enough you can set a limit. Since I was only showing 5 updates on the blog, I decided to set a limit to 5 updates with the count parameter. The URL will end up looking something like this:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/10673592.rss?count=5

The count parameter sets how many updates are in the feed. You will obviously switch the 10673592 number for your own account id on Twitter. You can get that by clicking the RSS feed link on the bottom of your Twitter home page. You can also use your Twitter username instead of that number.