With the lack of posts lately, you’d wonder. I’ve been busy getting my church’s website up and running and putting content on the site. It looks OK. It’s a modified WordPress site. If you want, you can see it by clicking here. It’s not all that involved (yet) and I’m the only one putting any content there so far. Right now there’s a small amount of content out there. The Pastor and I both envision our ministry committee chairs and some of our youth driving the content of the site; well, at least that’s the plan. I don’t want to be the only one determining content… heck, I don’t want to be the only want determining the way the site looks!

At next month’s church board meeting I plan on giving a presentation on how to use the website to enter content – WordPress makes it pretty easy to enter text and media content if you are at least have a minimum of computer literacy. Here’s hoping that I get a few others fired up about putting content on the site. Also, I’ll have to give some WordPress lessons to our church secretary as she handles our monthly newsletter and creates all of the worship service programs as well.

I never would have thought it possible. Snorkeling in Iowa! I’ve even got the photo to prove it. The guy is on top of the water and checking out what’s below.

Global digital music sales up 25 percent, at least that’s what the Reuters headline spouts. The sales of legally downloaded music is up 25%. Great! 25% increase in sales means more in profits as there is very little overhead for businesses when using the internet as a distribution point for music. I mean, really…. once you have your site up it’s just a matter of placing the latest music there – very little effort needed.

What really gets me going is the fourth paragraph: “The report showed about 95 percent of the music downloaded in 2008, or more than 40 billion files, was illegal and not paid for.” (Yeah, I know that a paragraph has to be more than one sentence, but apparently the writers at Reuters don’t.) Why does this get me? Well, how did the author (or anyone, for that matter) come up with the “more than 40 billion” number? They can’t track P2P file transfers – no one can. It’s an estimate! A guess! Nothing more.

The IFPI is trying to drum up sympathy by claiming lost revenues. Well, you know what? That’s a load of “horse hockey” as Colonel Potter used to say. To whine about money they didn’t make in this fashion is completely asinine. Do they REALLY think all of the people (myself NOT included) would pay for the music? I know people who illegally download music and I know for a fact that nearly all of them (95% or more) would NOT download it if they had to pay. So how can the IFPI (or the RIAA for that matter) whine about lost revenues? I guess the answer is simple enough: because they can!

Perhaps if more of the money per download went to the artist instead of a bunch of suits who have NOTHING to do with the creation of the product they are selling I might have a more sympathetic view of the alleged loss of income. It’s the suits that have ruined the music industry. They don’t take chances on groups that do really great music because the groups don’t fit the suits’ ideas for success (that should read monetary success, not musical success). Why else would a show like American Idol work? Those people go through American Idol because they can’t get in through the suits.

I finally broke down this year… or is it I finally stepped up this year? Yesterday I had my preliminary eye exam to go down the lasik surgery road. I have allowed enough taken from each check for my medical flex spending account so that I won’t be paying one big lump sum. Plus, the place where I will actually be having the surgery, Eye Surgeons Associates, is running a special the first quarter of this year of 1/3 off the normal price.

The goofy thing is, that I had my eyes dilated for the initial exam and my eye doctor said that my eyes would remain dilated even into today. It makes all things kind of blurry, but it should be wearing off soon.

Hopefully, the end result in a couple of weeks I’ll have the surgery and be done with contacts and glasses (except reading glasses sometimes and sunglasses) for good!

While I’m no expert at all the nuances of WordPress, ESPECIALLY the newest version 2.7, I do know a little bit about it. As my dad used to say “You can put all I know in a thimble and still have room for your finger in there.” Anyway, back to the point. I have used popup comments for a long time. I guess it’s a carry over from when I used to use first Blogger and later Movable Type (no, I’m NOT going back). But I like them. It gives you the ability to look at the post in the original window of your browser and make your comment in a new, smaller window that “housed” all of the comments and the comment form. I like that and my themes have all used the popup comment form – all that I had to do was remove the commenting from one line of php in the head section and the popup comment form was used.

Why am I saying all this? Well, after much searching and checking of sources I have come to the conclusion that the new commenting features in WordPress 2.7 are NOT available when using the popup comment form. If there are any WordPress Jockeys reading this, please inform me if I’m wrong and point me to where an explanation is of how to use the new features (threading and replying to comments) on popup comments.

What that means is that when I update my themes to use WordPress 2.7, I’ll include legacy support which will use popup comments on WordPress versions older than 2.7 and on-page comments with WordPress 2.7 and newer. This is not a bad thing, but it is a change for me as a theme designer; and, it’s more than change for the sake of change.

Happy Birthday, Austin!

The new version of WordPress, 2.7, allows for what are called child themes. To use these child themes, one has to come up with a parent theme. Think of it this way: a parent theme is the layout of the page, the child theme is the coloring. In a way, I’ve been doing this kind of theme designing for WordPress since I’ve gotten “serious” about it. I start with a particular layout and change the coloring, the images used and a few other frilly things like fonts and spacing and such and voilà! – a new theme! What is possible now with WordPress 2.7 is to take the CSS and functions file out of the theme and then make it into a parent theme; then take that same parent and use it as a framework to make several similar themes that look different but use the same underlying code. Nice! So I can use my code base from Iowa Winter 2 and use it as a parent theme and then set up a number of child themes based on it.

Of course, first I want to figure out the new functions in WordPress 2.7 and add them to the theme group so they are all “up to snuff”. Still working on that one. I’ll probably release all themes with updates for WordPress 2.7 individually and then go back and rework them into parent/children groups. However, at the rate I seem to work on them now, it may take months!

Happy New Year!!