What happened on this day in history? What happened on your birthday? Web-based CDay, an almanac for web servers, reports events, birthdays, and holidays. At least that’s the opening line on the CDay website. I have used the PHP version of CDay on my WordPress blog for some time now. I like to be able to look at a day in history and see historic events and what historic figures were born on that day. CDay did this for me. I’ve even had some readers mention on their blogs that they go to my blog to see who was born on a particular day or what happened in history. I decided to edit the CDay program to be a widgetized WordPress plugin. I made the decision for multiple reasons. I wanted to let others know just how cool the CDay program was. I also wanted others to be able to easily include CDay on their WordPress blog’s sidebar. I also wanted to continue to develop my PHP skills. Out of all these wants, CDay for WP was born.

After downloading the ZIP file, unzip the contents leaving the directory structure intact. Next FTP the “cday” folder and all of its contents to your WordPress plugins directory; well, you don’t HAVE to upload the CDay_README file. This is typically at “/wp-content/plugins” on your web server.

Next, in the Admin Panel of your WordPress installation, in the “Plugins” area, activate CDay for WP. Note: once you activate CDay, it is not yet ready to use! Next you will need to go to the “Options” area of the Admin Panel and then to the “CDay” entry. You should have the initial import screen. Click the “Begin Import” button to import the events packaged with the CDay for WP plugin. (There are over 7000 events of different kinds in the included events file.) Once completed, the screen should refresh and you should now see the same import screen with a message stating a successful import. Click the “Finish” button to then remove the events file from your webserver and display the standard CDay management interface.

CDay for WP can be used as a typical WordPress plugin, but it also is widget-aware. If you have WordPress Widgets installed, simply go to the “Presentation” area of the Admin Panel. If your current theme is widget-ready, click on the “Sidebar Widgets” item and you’ll see the “CDay 4 WP” item in the available widgets.

If you do not have the Sidebar Widgets plugin installed GO GET IT AND INSTALL IT!! Seriously, though, you can insert the following line of code where you want CDay to display in your sidebar:

cday4wp();

Note that when you do this, all settings are handled by the plugin. The Admin Panel is where you enter the sidebar title text; the rest of the plugin is done as an unordered list, which is the absolute best and easiest way to set up your sidebar.

You can download the CDay for WP plugin in ZIP format by clicking here

Yeah, I’ve got another new plugin. This one is called Content Show/Hide and I’ve been using it for some time now. Content Show/Hide grew out of my old Movable Type blogging days. I believe that I used this plugin when I used MT before switching to WordPress. To me, it seemed that there were a few things missing from the plugin; well at least from the “ease of use” standpoint. The first problem is that if you wanted a different message show you had to hack in to the code of that plugin. This plugin gives you an Admin Panel page that allows you to customize how the (more) tag works; whether to show more of the entry on the same page or to open the entire entry in a new page. It also allows you to easily set the message displayed by the (more) tag.

To install this plugin, simply drop it in the “wp-content/plugins/” directory. Then go to the “Plugins” area of your Admin Panel and activate the plugin. To configure the plugin, go to the “Options” area of your Admin Panel and select the “ShowHide” entry. There are three configurable elements.

• Show More – This is the message displayed when you want your readers to display the entire post on a new page. It replaces the [more] WordPress entry tag. If it is left blank, then no link to display the entire post on a new page will be available for the reader.
• Show More Right Here – This is the message displayed when you want your readers to display the entire post in the current position on the same page. It replaces the [more] WordPress entry tag. If it is left blank, then no link to display the entire post in the current position on the same page will be available for the reader.
• Hide – This is the message displayed when you want your readers to close up the entire post back to the original state on the same page. It is the mate to the “Show More Right Here” entry above and MUST be defined if the “Show More Right Here” tag is defined. If the “Show More Right Here” tag is defined and the “Hide” tag is not defined, the “Hide” tag will be replaced with a default value.
• NOTE: Both “Show More” and “Show More Right” Here cannot be left blank! If both are left blank, the Show More message will be used with a default message.
• NOTE: You can have entries in both the “Show More” and “Show More Right Here” tags. The entry will then give the option to the reader that they can view the entire post displayed on a new page or displayed at the current cursor position.

All the credit here for the original programming goes to scriptygoddess. I simply took what she did and expanded it a bit and wrote an Admin Panel interface. Thanks, scriptygoddess, for the excellent plugin.

Like I said earlier, I’ve been going hog-wild. I’ve been coding a lot lately. The latest is my Iowa Winter 1 theme. Here’s the screen shot:

This theme started as my own theme from scratch for WordPress 1.2. It worked in WordPress 1.5, but it was kinda lame there – not all things worked as they should have. I completely reworked the style sheet, reworked all the sidebar items (especially with the sidebar items that I like to use) and reworked a whole lot of the code. I modified it to be more like the Kubrick theme that is released as the default theme for WordPress 2.0.4. Kubrick is a great basis for theme development.

Also, I’ve made the theme widget-aware. Widgets are an easy way to format your sidebar in WordPress. By writing your functions in a certain way and by adding code in a certain way to your WordPress theme, you can use the WordPress Widgets plugin by Automattic to easily set up and modify your sidebar. To use this to its full extent, your theme has to be aware that the WW plugin is installed. The Iowa Winter 1 theme is widgetized and takes full advantage of widgets. I’ve thrown in a few widgets of my own but they are dependent upon other plugins; I’ve taken that into consideration and only the usable widgets are offered for the user.

You can download the theme by clicking here. Or you can go to the My Mods page and download any of my themes or plugins.

I’ve been going hog-wild on plugins and themes lately. This new plugin is called “Akismet Spam Count Display”, but I call it ASCD for short. Yeah, I’m original like that.

Akismet is a spam filter specifically for blogs and even more specifically for WordPress blogs. It’s free to sign up for and then there’s a central repository that filters all the incoming comments. Looking at my Akismet log, I’ve got a whole lot of spam. Since yesterday, I’ve probably got about 300 or so. Akismet blocks nearly all of them. It then displays the ones it suspects of being spam so I can delete them. It doesn’t mess with user comments unless they have been marked by some service as spam.

The ASCD plugin started as Akismet Spam Count, a very good plugin by Ronald Heft, Jr. It grew out of some things that I had seen on the internet. One site had a graphical display for the Akismet Spam Count plugin. With Spam Karma 2, another excellent spam blocking plugin, there were messages that could be displayed that were kind of “in your face” but funny. I wanted to make the message configurable, but I also wanted the option of the graphical display that I saw on another blog.

Enter Akismet Spam Count Display (ASCD). It allows the WordPress user to easily choose which type of message (graphical or text-based) to display on the sidebar. If the WordPress user chooses a text-based message, they can type in the text that will be displayed, along with some special characters to allow for display of special items.

The plugin is also widget-aware. If you use the excellent Sidebar Widgets plugin, this plugin plays well. It has a mini-admin interface in the widget as well as the full-blown admin interface.

To install ASCD, simply drop the two files (“akismet_count_display.php” and “akismet.gif”) into the existing Akismet directory in your WordPress plugins directory. (wp-content/plugins/akismet/) If you have removed that folder, just drop the two files into the WordPress plugins directory. (wp-content/plugins/) Then go to the “Plugins” area of your Admin Panel and activate the plugin. To configure the plugin, go to the “Options” area of the Admin Panel and click on “ASCD”. There are three items you can customize here:

• Sidebar Title Text – This is the title to the section in the sidebar where the Akismet stats will be displayed. Remember that if this is too long it will wrap on your sidebar and that some themes can’t handle sidebar titles wrapping. If you leave this blank, it will default to “Got Spam?”.
• Sidebar Display Type – You can select between a graphical message and a text-based message. The graphical message is not configurable. The text of the text-based message is configurable.
• Sidebar Display Text – This is only displayed if you have selected a text-based message. You can type in pretty much anything you want for your text message. There are some special things to type so that the display can be personalized:
  • {Akismet} = Display the word “Akismet” with a link to the Akismet website
  • {blog} = Display your blog name in bold type
  • {count} = Display the number of spams Akismet has blocked
  • ' = Apostrophe ( ‘ )
  • " = Quotation Mark ( ” )

Other than these special characters, pretty much any character you type will be displayed as it is shown on the text line. For example, if you want an “in your face” message, try this:

Don't even think about spamming {blog}! It's protected by {Akismet} which has eaten {count} spams so far… but it's STILL HUNGRY!

I hope you find this plugin useful. You can download it by clicking here, or you can go to my WP Mods page and download it there.

So I’m playing with this old laptop with Suse 10.1 Linux loaded on it. Ive been browsing the internet for a while and Firefox seems pretty much like its Windows counterpart (except that I can’t quite figure out how to right click on an existing tab to close it). I’ve edited a couple of PHP files on the web server using KDevelop, the IDE built in with the development tools loaded. It’s a lot like PS Pad which is what I use in Windows. I’ve printed a page or two. Of course, I had to set up my printer on this, but it was no harder than setting up the same printer on KC’s computer (it’s a Windows shared printer on my tower). Choose “Windows Shared Printer”, enter in the printer name and the computer name doing the sharing and it prints.

I’ve also set up one of my email accounts on Evolution. Evolution is a Linux program that works kind of like Outlook. In fact, you can purchase a special Exchange extension for Evolution and use it with an Exchange server; for those of you who don’t know, Exchange is the server Outlook uses (no, not Outlook Express…. Outlook). I’ve sent a test email to another of my email accounts and it was delivered flawlessly. Haven’t done anything with the calendar yet, but I’ll be playing with that in the days and weeks to come.

I’ve even gone in and customized some of the KDE windowing settings. I’m using the Thin Keramic theme in blue. It’s pretty easy on the eyes. They do some things that you can’t do in Windows that are pretty nice visually.

If things keep going this well with Linux, I might actually switch over to it. With Vista and it’s DRM and registration nightmares (at least what I’ve read about from people who actually LIKE Microsoft’s latest OS) as they are, when I’m told I’ll have to do away with XP I think I’ll be ready to go to Linux. I’ll just have to get a different scanner… or maybe a new HP all-in-one unit!!

Happy Anniversary, Geoff and Roberta!

One of the things I like about WordPress is the fact that there’s a blogroll built in. For those of you who are non-bloggers, a blogroll is a list of blogs that you frequently visit or enjoy the content that are displayed on the sidebar of your blog. WordPress used to have a function built in that automatically checked a few services that are specifically for blog updates so that you could display the recently updated blogs using some kind of mechanism — either changing color or making the entry italics or putting a character or graphic before or after the recently updated blogs to make them stand out a bit. I say that WordPress used to have that because “back in the day” when I was using WordPress 1.2, it was built in. When WordPress updated to 1.5 and later to 2.0, the ability to set off the recently updated blogs was a whole lot tougher to do. You had to go into your WordPress database using a MySQL database admin tool and then add fields in a table and then add values to those fields… no typos, please, or possibly the entire database would be unusable! Also, with 1.5 and 2.0, your only choice for update services was WordPress’s own Pingomatic; very few other blog software systems use or even acknowledge Pingomatic. Another quirk with 1.5 and 2.0 was that to get the meager update service to work you had to run a cron job – a server side script set off at certain times. Well, my web space provider did not offer cron jobs at that time; now that they do they limit you to one every 12 hours.

I started using Matt Kingston’s excellent plugin called, astonishingly, Blogroll Update. It allowed you to check for updates every 10 minutes or so. It allowed you to check Weblogs.com as well as Pingomatic. Also, if you could hack the code you could change certain facets of what the plugin did and how it did them. However, you still had to hack the code of the plugin to do this. For some of my non-tech friends, this was near impossible.

Enter Blogroll Update Plus. I started with Matt’s code and added a few things:

• Ping any or all of three update services: Pingomatic, Weblogs and Blogrolling
• Change the format of the tool-tip popup on recently updated links
• Change the prepend on recently updated links
• Change the append on recently updated links
• Change the interval to check for recently updated links

The prepend and append to the recently updated links allows you to set off the recently updated links on your blogroll by making them italics or bold-faced, or even writing a special CSS entry. The three services I chose to check for updates are three of the most popular ping services for all blog softwares. You can download Blogroll Update Plus in ZIP format here. It is also available for download on my WP Mods page. Go ahead – download it and try it out!

Yeah, it’s been a while. There are extenuating circumstances, though.

Saturday KC and I helped friends move in to their new home. It looks to be a great move for them. They were in a small home of about 1500 square feet (small? what the heck am I saying? Small? MY house is only about 1650 square feet!!!) and no garage into a brand new home that they had built. The new home has about 2000 square feet on the main floor, an unfinished basement of about the same size, a nice deck (looks to be about 12×16 or so) and 3 stalls in the attached garage. They both have good jobs and work hard; they have been saving for a while and now get to begin enjoying the fruits of their labors. Of course, they still have MANY boxes to unpack and put away.

In the middle of all the moving and such, my left knee decided to stiffen up. I had problems with it since Wednesay when I played ball and it just didn’t get better. I had a deuce of a time going up and down the stairs. It’s still bothering me, but getting better.

Sunday, KC and I went to church where we helped serve communion as a part of our diaconate duties. Then, I pretty much went home and went down for the count. I wasn’t feeling well and felt worse as the day went on. I ended up calling in sick on Monday as I couldn’t keep my head up for more than about 5 minutes before it felt like a water balloon waiting to pop. Thank God I’m getting over that. Ugh!

Happy Birthday, Howie!

I think I’m changing my voting research this year. It’s 27 days until the election and I’m already sick (and tired) of getting messages left on our answering machine. I mean REALLY! I’ve got the TeleZapper that is supposed to get rid of all the unwanted computer generated phone solicitations. I don’t think it’s working. So far we’ve had about a dozen “This is Joe Blow and I’m asking for your vote so I can get elected” messages. And I’m sick of them. Yes, I’m going to vote. No, I don’t need every Tom, Dick and Harry who’s running for office to call me and remind me to vote for them. I know that the mid-term elections are held on November 7 this year. Heck, I’ve even got it marked on my calendar at work in Outlook. (Is that taking it too far?)

Anyway, this year I’m changing how I’ll decide who gets my vote. For each eligible office in my district I’ll keep a tally. The candidate who calls me the most loses my vote. QUIT CALLING ME YOU JERKS!

A big thank you to all who donated to the Susan G Komen Foundation via the Annual Boobie-Thon website. Together we raised a total of $9260.50 in the fight against breast cancer. If my site prompted you be one of those to donate, then my entry and sidebar button did the job.

Another HUGE thank you goes out to the volunteers who donated their time, web space and web design talents to put up the web site and keep track of donations and other tasks to pull off the entire event. Being involved in other volunteer events myself I know it can be a minor miracle to have something like this occur as smoothly as these folks make this happen. Thank you to the volunteers listed: Robyn (event founder), Lisa (event coordinator), Lisa (volunteer wrangler), Skits (donations coordinator), gc (photo coordinator), Luka (photo coordinator), Amanda (photo editor), DaGoddess (photo editor), Janet (photo editor), Kat (photo editor), Leandra (photo editor), M@ (photo editor), Melissa (photo editor), Michele (photo editor), Samantha Alice (photo editor), Tara (photo editor), Undercover Mutha (photos), Heather (links manager), Amanda (donations editor), Jeanette (donations editor), Susie (donations editor), Y (donations editor), Jennifer (photos/donations), Véronique M (photos/donations), wendy (photos/donations).

Anyone who has an MP3 player knows what an iPod is. The Apple iPod holds over 75% of the DAP market, mainly because of the ease of use that Apple’s iTunes music management software, and allows you to purchase songs as well, integrates and makes it very easy to transfer songs between your computer and the iPod.

For years, there have been companies that have introduced “iPod killers”; DAPs that will unseat the iPod from its number one rating in the DAP market. For a variety of reasons, all have failed in the past. Either the player wasn’t as easy to use as an iPod or the transfer of music was unreliable or the songs were really difficult to obtain or the songs didn’t play when transferred to the DAP or… well, the reasons are many. Apple is king of the hill in this market for a reason. Creative, Lyra, Rio and a host of other companies have tried and failed.

Now, Microsoft steps in to the ring with it’s Toshiba-made DAP which they call Zune. At first glance, the Zune really could be an iPod killer. It sells for about the same amount, it can play audio and video files, it seems to be easy to use, and the song transfer/purchasing software is easy to use. It’s even wireless and you can transfer songs between two Zune players (the receiving Zune will only be able to play the received song 3 times because it wasn’t purchased). All this looks good until you look at three things:

1. Battery Life. Did I say battery life? It’s actually battery death. An iPod can play for up to 16 hours or so on one charge. The Zune can barely get six and that’s without wireless. Oops! Both players discharge their batteries when not connected to the charger. The Zune won’t last a work day; the iPod could possibly last two.

2. Size. Size really does matter in the DAP market… well, actually lack of size does. The new iPods are all smaller than their earlier models. The Zune is nearly twice the size. While that’s still not very big, it’s HUGE when it comes to making the unit portable. The smaller and lighter the unit, the easier it is to slip into your shirt pocket. You might as well slip two iPods in your pocket for the size taken up by a Zune.

3. This one is the “kicker” IMHO: foreign language translation. The iPod is a new word, thus in foreign languages is still an iPod. Zune, when pronounced phonetically (zoon) in Hebrew means a word that will definitely make it an undesired object in the household. Check out this article for a better understanding of the word. This is bigger than the Chevy gaffe of calling their sports car in the ’70’s “Nova” which in Spanish means “No Go” (would you buy a car that was called “No Go”?).

Ahhh, Microsoft. Three strikes and you’re out. I believe that the iPod is secure for at least this generation of the Zune.