buttonmashing

Mashing buttons since 1984

WordPress

Wednesday night musings

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Since there aren’t any sporting events going on this evening (no college football games of note, the Indians have a day off, and who wants to watch pre-season NBA?) I’m working on some blog items, mostly updating plug-ins and playing around with their settings. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t totally *heart* WordPress.

I also have a couple other items to get to: For the time being, we won’t be hearing much from my newest co-blogger, Dark Reyule. He’s taking a break from gaming and blogging isn’t an option at the moment. I told him he’s still very much welcome around these parts, so hopefully he’ll still drop by once and a while. So the blogging will be coming primarily from me and Nat for the foreseeable future.

I’m also going through a bunch of drafts and stubs of posts I have sitting in various degrees of completion, so there may be the occasional post with some “older” content. Hopefully it will still be relevant in some way. The blogging will continue, even if morale doesn’t improve.

As for the musings: Anyone here listen to Major Nelson’s podcast? If so, is it just me, or has the podcast’s quality declined lately? When Major and his co-host “e” are talking about things like their latest travels or other minutia, I lose all interest. Their conversations also have an “inside joke” feel, but not everyone is in on it. This was something that turned me off of the Evil Avatar Radio podcast. I want to hear about games! Not how exciting your company retreat was! I don’t care who you saw at the Halo 3 launch. Tell me about the actual game. I do love when he interviews people in the “industry,” however. The interview with Marty O’Donnell was top-shelf. I love the music from the Halo Trilogy and hearing Marty talk about it was a treat. Get back to the games, Major.

I would also like to mention that the Halo 3 theater rocks. That is (not) all. More on that later.

Comments cleanup

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I was trying to reply to some of the recent comments on the site during lunch time, and I must have been doing them a little too fast, because I was greeted with this:

comments.jpg

Sorry about that, WordPress. I thought you could keep up.

k2 0.9

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I’m finally making the transition to K2 0.9, which was released last week. Things will look hairy during the transition.

This message will self-destruct in 24 18 hours (I hope)

Update: So far things have gone pretty swimmingly. The two coolest additions that I’ve made (so far) are the Sidebar Modules (which will be mostly transparent to the reader) and the Subscribe to Comments.

The SBM plug-in makes adding, editing, and removing content on the sidebar much easier, including the ability to choose which modules show up on the main page and what modules show up on individual post pages (like this one) and static pages (like the Carnival HQ).

The Subscribe to Comments plug-in is quite nifty. After commenting on a post, you can check the little “notify me” box and you’ll get an email anytime someone else comments on a post you’ve commented on. Very cool and very handy.

I should wrap up the rest of the tweaks, time permitting, before the weekend.

Playing with WordPress

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I’ve been meaning to play with some new WordPress Toys, I just haven’t gotten around to it until now. They’re pretty slick.

For starters, I’ve just installed the most excellent WordPress Widgets. The k2 theme will support them shortly, but here’s the quick and dirty changes you can make yourself. I haven’t completely moved all my sidebar content over, but that’s on my to-do list.

Next are two excellent Flickr plug-ins I’m dying to try out. The first is a WordPress Flickr Album which uses your Flickr Sets and presents them in a gallery on your site. I’m more interested in this plug-in for my family blog, but I’m using BM as a guinea pig. It also implements the writer’s Flickr Post Bar which makes inserting Flickr images into blog posts a cinch.

While I have Google Ads on the site, I don’t really push them too much and wonder how much good they do anyway. I saw this little snippet of code from Michael that will hide the ads from regular readers (read: commenters). I guess that makes me feel better about having them. I’ll be adding it shortly.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, I can’t say it enough — WordPress is awesome.

Update: Whoops. I broke something and a bunch of my posts were updated and picked up by the RSS feed. Sorry about that.

WordPress 2.0 on its way

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Things may look wonky here for a bit, currently upgrading to WordPress 2.0 and messing with some plug-ins. Things should calm down in a bit.

I’d also be much obliged if you left a comment, once everything is working I’ll be deleting this post, but for now, it’d be a big help. Thanks!

Okay, it looks like everything but the Archives and the Tag Cloud seem to be working. I’m putting that on the back burner for now but I’m leaving this post up until tomorrow in case someone notices something amiss.

buttonmashing.com 2.0 -> new and improved!

The new look

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After poring through hundreds of themes, I ended up going with K2. It’s just got too many features to pass up. Right now I haven’t done much in the way of customizing it, but it seems pretty easy to do, so I will hopefully have some time in the near future to work on that. Also, having the “asides” feature is worth the price of admission alone (even though I can’t get them working currently). So K2 it is for the foreseeable future.

Also, I changed the feeds to contain the full text of the posts. I know a handful of people access buttonMashing with varioud feed readers, so I thought that would make it a little easier to read. I know I love feeds with full text.

Anyway, it’s late so that’s the extent of this update. More later.

Update: Got the asides working with some help from Foton. Thanks, man!

Tinkering under the hood

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Things might look wonky for a bit as I tweak my theme. I am growing tired of the current look. I’m looking to spruce things up. I’ll also be installing some new plug-ins over the next couple of days (WordPress is teh truth!). Hopefully I don’t break anything expensive.

“I break, I cry. You break, you buy.”

(For now I’ll be leaving the old theme up. I’ll still be tinkering with it later)

Extreme Makeover

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Buttonmashing is going through plastic surgery (a little nip here, tuck there) so things may look wonky as I make changes. With a new theme (that obviously isn’t in English) there’s a lot to do here, but things are starting to come together.

Update – Since the anesthetic hasn’t worn off, we’re going in for a second pass. I really like the way the dimension 2k theme looks but it doesn’t completely work and I’m too lazy to translate German so I’m hunting for a new theme. Hopefully it won’t be too hard to get everything looking the way I want it.

Update 2 – I think I’m sticking with my current theme, I like the way it looks and while I’ll be making a few changes, I think I’m pleased with the looks. At least for now.

Update 3 (4/13/2005) – I’ve finally added my blogroll to the sidebar along with some Google Ads. I don’t have to pay for hosting just yet but my free hosting will be ending soon, so any clicks on the Google Ads would be appreciated. I would still like to replace the header graphic, but I don’t have time right now, time to go play some Halo 2 online.

Oops

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I seem to have deleted my last post about blogging from AFKGamer. I was setting up a friend with WordPress for his blog and accidentally deleted one post to many. Oh well, no biggie there. You should be reading AFK anyway.

In blogging news, WordPress has hit 50k downloads of their new version. Good for them. I whole-heartedly recommend WordPress to any blogger looking for robust, solid, and FREE software.

Wow.

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Amazing. I am so thoroughly impressed with WordPress right now, I’m at a loss for words to adequately praise it. I just imported nine months of Blogger posts without a hitch. Setting up WordPress has been simple thus far. Now that I’ve got my posts imported, I’m gonna make sure everything looks okay before I move on. We’ll move on from there.

Update 1: Man, it just keeps getting better. Using Bloglines export feature (export to OPML file) I have now imported all my links from Bloglines. I still need to organize them and there doesn’t seem to be an immediately easy way to use Bloglines to update my links, but I’m sure someone out there has solved that problem, too. This is good stuff!

Update 2: Well, the links are organized. Next it categorizing all my old posts. I may put that off until later. Perhaps I’ll try a plug-in or two.

Update 3 (2/24): The process of converting my old Blogger posts continues tonight, I will make sure all of them are all categorized and edited for grammatical errors. Then it’s on to themes and plugins!

Update 3 (2/26): Posts have all be categorized and I’ve been looking at various plugins and themes. This is seriously great stuff, I can’t believe how seamless and easy it’s all been. Kudos to the guys and WordPress.