Now that I have got Postie working for e-mail postings, and my theme widget-ready thanks to King Text, I am focusing my full attention on tagging with Ultimate Tag Warrior. I’ve already eliminated categories from my theme, replacing them with tags.

Folksonomy is really moving forward in the direction of tags, rather than categories. I’ve been using a list of just a couple dozen categories for a long time, and I often found myself slapping generic categories onto posts rather than creating a new category for what I was actually writing about. I’d like to be able to use a tag cloud to see what I write about most, and to identify what posts are really about - “PayPal,” for example, rather than “internet,” and “assholes” rather than “people.”

Tagging 3500 posts is going to be a monumental task, because I have to read, or at least skim, every single post. So far I’ve worked backwards up to April 2006…but I’ve been blogging for more than five years. So this is going to take a while.

I did it! Almost entirely by myself, with just a bit of help from Mark of Weblog Tools Collection, I widgetized my design. I now have 13 instances of the King Text plugin running, each containing the code from my original sidebar. I was not able to find a way around the problem of the title falling inside the widget, so I had to stick with modifying the plugin code, but the King Text plugin accepts both PHP and HTML so I can put whatever I like in there. If I want to add additional widget plugins, I will have to edit those too, but for now I got everything running how I want it.

I did have to make one sacrifice: the sidebars are now fixed-width rather than liquid. This is because the percent sign I was using for the liquid layout was getting tossed out by the PHP running on the plugin. It’s not a huge deal, I can always adjust the width if necessary, but it isn’t quite perfect.

But damn, I did what I want, how cool is that?!

This will probably not be of interest to anyone who isn’t into PHP, WordPress, and/or Sidebar Widgets.

I am having bizarre results trying to widgetize my design. The biggest concern I have is that I need the widget title to be outside the $before_widget code. I figured out how to do this by altering widgets.php and rearranging the order to be $before_title, $title, $after_title, $before_widget - but this is not an ideal solution, for a few reasons. First of all, it means I’m messing with stuff that wasn’t designed to be messed with by the likes of me! It means I’m slightly changing the code of the widget authors, and I don’t want to to do that. I would be just fine with only using text-input widgets that run PHP, because then I could just copy the code directly from the existing sidebar rather than fussing with various types of widgets.

I want to widgetize my design (which is originally an open-source design by Christopher Ditto, but I have modified it a lot, so I’m calling it my design) for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t like having the second sidebar’s code buried in the footer. Second, there are great big chunks of tables and whatnot that come before and after each section, to make the pretty little boxes with the funky corners, and I’d like to not have to look at that every time I want to edit my code. I suppose I could do it by using includes…I’ll have to give that a try, it will at least get things more tidy if I can’t actually use the widget functions.

I got the sidebars installed and working - I figured out how to have two of them, etc. - but in addition to not placing the title where I want it, the boxes are just coming out wrong. I don’t know if this is a result of the default code on each widget, or what - but I’m getting repeated top corners, lines extending too far, and other weird stuff that shouldn’t be happening, since I’ve pulled the before/after code straight from the existing sidebar, which works fine.

And this is totally weird. While I was messing around with widgets.php, a little “www” appeared in the upper left corner of both my design and the WordPress admin screens. I have no idea where it came from or why it was there. When I went back to a clean, unedited copy of widgets.php, it went away. I was also experiencing failures in functions.php whenever the Sidebar Widgets plugin was deactivated - I had to rename functions.php to something else just so I could use the admin side. Additionally, there were gaps between the section titles and the boxes - I don’t know where those came from, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was related to whatever was making the boxes come out funny.

I seem to remember seeing someone who offered to widgetize any theme, for a fee. Part of me wants to do it myself, but part of me is so clueless about how to fix these errors that I’m considering passing it off to someone. I can’t figure out what site offered it, though, so for now I’m stuck doing it myself.

Just a quickie post here. After years of hosting journal.amanita.net at /home/me/amanita.net/journal I have switched it to /home/me/journal.amanita.net. If anything looks broken, please let me know, as there are surely hard-coded absolute paths somewhere that I’ve forgotten about.

I did it! I really did it. I made my ultimate blog design. It’s three columns, it has spiffy shapes for content blocks, it’s readable, it has a header I can change seasonally (or whatever), it’s easy to update, and in general it is snazzy. It’s the same as it was before except for now being three columns, but the fact that I was able to make the original open-source two-column design (by Chris Ditto) into three columns all by myself has me feeling pretty good. I admit that Chris made it easy - it was just a matter of expanding the container box, putting a duplicate column on the left, and adjusting the CSS slightly. Voilà, instant three-column goodness! I’m going to go drool over my fabulous design some more now. (If you’re reading at LiveJournal or in your RSS reader, click here for the design.)

I did it! I redesigned my website. I got rid of the skins and everything. I pulled a design from OWD.org and ported it to WordPress. It took a lot of tweaking to get everything the way I wanted it; instead of one big content box I wante one box per post, and I wanted comments and the reply section to have their own boxes as well. I did a bit of tweaking to the CSS for blockquotes and list items, although I wasn’t able to come up with a way to use the fancy quote graphics from the original design in a manner that would be backwards-compatible with old posts on my site. But I got my fancy corners, it’s somewhat shiny, my wife said it was very easy to read, and in general I’m just very proud of myself.

The only thing I don’t like is that it’s only two columns. I realized there is a lot of content I’d like to cram into sidebars. So I might wind up switching to something three-column eventually…but for now I get happy just looking at the new design, so I’ll be using it for a little while. Oh, and I managed to get my Twitter status in there too! So whatever you see in the “right now” block really is from the date/time it claims to be.

(LiveJournal users and RSS readers, click here to view the design.)

I’m thinking of changing my website design. A lot. I’ve had a skinned website for about four years…and it’s time for a change. I want standards compliance, 508 compliance, WordPress compatibility, a personal touch, shiny-ness, colors I like, ease of maintenance and plugin integration, etc. I’ve got a list of custom blog designers but I don’t think I can afford that. (Uh…holiday present anyone?) I had a beautiful custom design made for me by Kristine a couple of years ago, but it’s very pink! and I want something a little less intense. So we’ll see where things go. I adore templates, I have a collection of template designers, I like the templates I have on my site, including the seasonal nature I have…but I want simplicity and compliance. Oh, and I like rounded corners. So a change is in the works…again, we’ll see.

Now my LiveJournal matches my Vox, more or less. I switched from S1 to S2 on LiveJournal, which means my readers there will be seeing the change immediately because now individual entry pages also match the main design. (Previously, with S1, the individual entry pages were the LiveJournal default look rather than customized.) I did a little tweaking to the new style, which is called “Expressive” on LiveJournal - I removed the profile, tag cloud, and page summary widgets, and I made the poster names a little bigger for ease of friends-page-reading. Here’s the code for that if anyone’s interested; this goes in the big box at Options > Custom CSS.

.about-me-widget { display: none; }
.categories-widget { display: none; }
.archive-widget { display: none; }
.user-icon { font-size: 12px; }