fatvegan

I was looking about for a jQuery slideshow sort of plugin for the Justice Tracks Collective site. There seems to be the very popular Cycle Plugin. It's quite posh but a bit basic and only deals with <img> tags. There seem to be a lot of home-made hacks around the place, none of which looked that tremendous to me. I was going to try and write my own hack, but I wasn't really looking forward to it.

Luckily, I found InnerFade, which is posh and simple and works with any sort of nodes. It works great in Firefox. Time will tell if the reason everyone else isn't using it is because it doesn't work in other browsers. Based on my extensive testing with one browser, it's cross-browser support is probably better than the rest of the site.

On another note, I'm enjoying using WordPress for the first time. Still not heaps, but building my own template from very scratch was the best thing I could have done.

I had to upgrade lousy WordPress today because it got a bit hacked. I gave up upgrading because it felt like I was spending every second day in the shell wgetting, untarring and relinking stuff. I also didn't like the new interface, which annoyed me even more than the one I was using. However, that obviously wasn't a great strategy, so now I've moved everything permanent outside the WordPress directory and written an upgrade script to download the install file and link the stuff into the write places. Hopefully, it will be better. I'll just have to get used to relearning a new UI every time the WordPress fellas get bored and release another one.

Having spent quite a bit of time with both Drupal in WordPress in the last 12 months, I really have to say that Drupal is totally pants and WordPress is spectacular shit. I have trouble thinking of anything at all kind to say about WordPress. The sad thing is that it seems to be getting worse with age.

Since moving this blog to SliceHost the page load time has dropped from over a second to 100-200ms. Sweet. I don't even have the cache turned on anymore.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function graceful_fail() in 
/home/ryan/sites/blogs.footboot.net/public/wp-content/blogs.php on line 77

It was probably funnier when it came up in the page.

The new WordPress is good. Faster I reckon.

I've installed WordPress MU on my happy little server. So if any of those footboot.net folks languishing on Movable Type want to move their blogs you should let me know. If you want some theme it's easy to throw it in there too. There are heaps of good themes for WordPress.

I've found an easier way to rewrite WordPress URLs than attempt to recreate all of the crazy combinations.

url.rewrite-once = ( "^([^.]+)$" => "index.php$1" )

It basically rewrites anything that doesn't have a full-stop in it. So if you use it, make sure all your images and stylesheets have file extensions.

This is a complete ripoff of tijs's plugin, but I've replaced the CURL library with the fopen URL wrapper. So it should work with pretty much any PHP install. Of course, it is now marginally less good.

lastfm.zip

Now I'm really going to go study. Or maybe have breakfast. But after that I'll definitely go study.

Update: I installed CURL and now I'm using Tijs's original. fsockopen() and the HTTP wrappers in PHP suck too bad.

Update 2: Now I'm using Yahoo Pipes to get it as plain RSS.