What better way to end this year and decade but with a hodgepodge post consisting of three completely unrelated topics?
WordPress Tidbits
It’s been a week since I converted this website to WordPress. I have continued to play around with the website, changing some minor details here and there. The most significant change in terms of the design since a week ago is the addition of random backgrounds. I only have three backgrounds thus far, but more will be added to list as I accumulate more photos and artwork. Once I have enough backgrounds, I’ll modify the script so that different months of the year will have a different set of backgrounds so that this blog will always match up with the seasons. Other than the backgrounds, the top menus have been made semi-transparent, but that’s just a tiny change.
Moving on to features of the sites, I have installed a quicktags and smilies bar plug-in to the comment form, so visitors will have an easier formatting comments to their hearts’ content. Hopefully that will encourage some comments, as this site hasn’t received a non-spam comment for a while. I did have to try out a few quicktag/smilies plug-in before I found one that worked out of the box, but once I found the one it was smooth sailing from there.
For the most part, WordPress and all of plug-ins I’ve installed are well-behaved with the notable exception of WP-Postviews, which is used to keep track of how many times a post has been viewed. For some odd reason, WP-Postviews would only count hits from logged-in users (ex me) and not guests even when I set the plug-in to track everyone. The plug-in wouldn’t count anything when I set it to count only guests. After experimenting with the code, I discovered that the $post global variable within the counting function did not return the correct post ID number when a guest loaded a post. The original first few lines of process_postviews() is shown below:
### Function: Calculate Post Views
add_action('wp_head', 'process_postviews');
function process_postviews() {
global $user_ID, $post;
if(!wp_is_post_revision($post)) {
if(is_single() || is_page()) {
$id = intval($post->ID);
$views_options = get_option('views_options');
$post_views = get_post_custom($id);
$post_views = intval($post_views['views'][0]);
In order to get the plug-in to count guest hits, I had to switch to use $wp_query and extract the post ID from there. The modified function is shown below:
### Function: Calculate Post Views
add_action('wp_head', 'process_postviews');
function process_postviews() {
global $user_ID, $wp_query;
if(!wp_is_post_revision($wp_query->post)) {
if(is_single() || is_page()) {
$id = intval($wp_query->post->ID);
$views_options = get_option('views_options');
$post_views = get_post_custom($id);
$post_views = intval($post_views['views'][0]);
I don’t know the reason why the original function didn’t work on my website. I’m guessing it has something to do with the templates of the theme, but now that I have the plug-in working I’m too lazy to investigate.
Artwork
Below is my newest Photoshop artwork. I liked how the grassy knoll and dandelions turned out, but the two kids look like cardboard cutouts. Time to work on my people-drawing skills.
Happy New Year!
Another year has gone by, and along with it another decade as well. 2009 went really quickly for me. I spent eight months working as an intern and four months in school, and time just flashed by. 2010 will be a really important year for me. It will be the year when I finally earn my bachelors degree and (hopefully) it’ll also be the year when I start graduate school. It’ll be a busy year that’s for sure, but I think I’m ready for it. I wish all of you (the 5 random people who read this blog) a Happy 2010 and good luck in the new year. I’ll definitely need some of that luck too :D