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I’ve picked out a new design for my site. I ended up going with the beautiful Illacrimo, but there were several other possibilities. I also liked DIY Theme, Bloomingday, Oceanwide, Pink Sunset, Fresh, Zen, and Beauty Bling.
Sorry folks, I just upgraded to WP 2.3 and it’s giving me nasty SQL errors on every post. Hope you can stand to read through that and find the entries. I did get all the UTW tags to convert to the new native tag system though. Woo hoo on that! Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to show the tags when you’re composing a post now…that kinda sucks.
Edit: Fixed! It was the upgraded Running Time plugin, of all things. I don’t need that, it was just a frivolous thing, so it’s gone.
Whew! Thanks to Dan getting my debugging juices flowing, I got the design issues on my webpage resolved. I had a lot of time to do that today; Thursdays are normally my busiest day but half of my clients weren’t there! I am really looking forward to the switch to VRS though. I’ve notified my company, and the supervisor of the four deaf guys I work with (who forwarded it to her supervisors!), and the liaison between the agency I work at and the company I work for. This is really seeming like a positive change.
Oh dear. Dan said that upgrading to WordPress 2.2 was a snap, so I didn’t bother to make any backups of the site files or the database before I upgraded. It turns out that the King Text widget is not compatible with WP 2.2, and without it my entire site design is hosed. So I’ve rolled back to the default WordPress theme, and I’ve got multiple leads on a fix but nothing concrete yet. What I really want is for the King Text authors to update the plugin - that would solve everything - but people have been commenting on the site for a couple of weeks now with no response, so I’m not too optimistic in that arena. Hopefully I can get everything resolved quickly, but I’m nervous.
I’ve unveiled the Valentine’s theme on my site; you can click here to see it. (If you don’t like it, click here to go back to the old one.) It was created 100% by me using an image I bought off iStockPhoto; the fancy post titles are from the Fancy Headlines plugin and the fancy section titles are a direct implementation of the ALA Dynamic Text Replacement tutorial.
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Pop-up windows, spam, viruses… annoying ploys to part you from your money. But the it doesn’t have to be that way. You can enjoy trouble free browsing of adult sites if you follow a few simple rules…
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Welcome to the home for lesbians and all wimmin affirming wimmin in midlife and beyond.
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Elisa tells us about the hidden dangers of cochlear implants - like not being able to ride in a hybrid car, or not being able to ride a roller coaster that has magnetic brakes.
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Deaf-friendly video of the only thing in the WORLD that’s as cute as baby meerkats.
I changed the layout on my LiveJournal to one created by 
cartonage
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Yet another alumni reunion network!
This is a totally frivolous post. I was looking through the WordPress Theme Browser, and I made a list of themes I liked, so I’m posting that list here. They’re all free to download, so if you like them, go for it.
I’m up to $232 with PayPerPost, and I’m slowing down a bit. A lot of the opportunities just aren’t interesting me at the moment, or they’re not paying as much as I’d want for what they’re asking, so I’m just not doing them. I’m also more conscious of how my paid posts look to my readers - thanks to input from a few of them, I’m being more choosy about what I write about because I want to have a reason to make the post.
I think I know what I am going to spend the money on (my first payment is in three days). Xmas gifts are an obvious option, but I’d rather pay for those out of my own pocket. Paying myself back for the $200 voice-nav GPS system is another option, but I’m not sure. Currently tops on the list is a “let the punishment fit the crime” scenario - I made the money by blogging, and I think I’ll use it for a related cost. I really want a custom design for my blog - I’m happy with the one I have for my personal site, since I’ve worked so hard on it, but I’m thinking of buying a custom design for CyDyBlog. I wanted to go with Moxie, because I’ve been a BlogMoxie fan for years, but it turns out they start at $2000! They kindly referred me to some other designers who will better fit my budget, and I’m inquiring around to see who will do semi-adult work.
By the way, I do want to address one issue relating to PayPerPost, and I’m not getting paid to say this. I think Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is making a real fool of himself regarding PPP. The $3 million in venture capital hit PPP right around the same time that ReviewMe launched, a competitor to PPP that just happens to be run by Text Link Ads - a major TechCrunch sponsor. Since then, Arrington has been vilifying PPP left and right. He’ll deny this all the way, but I think if ReviewMe were not owned by TLA, Arrington wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about PPP. Just my opinion, unpaid for. (By the way, I have nothing against TLA - they placed the ads I have in the sidebar. I’m just talking about Arrington here.)
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.