The loading speed of this website was just horrible. Having a ton of plug-ins, heavy javascript and automated installed it is asking for trouble. I’m giving up on the looks, bells and whistles. It’s back to basic! Simple layout, no fuzz, lot’s of white space and some nice fonts. Mindplunge converted to the Modern Clix WordPress theme. Just what I was looking for. I simply don’t have the time to develop my own WP theme again so why not use a free theme!

Rodrigo Galindez is a talented designer and his  Modern Clix WP Theme is beautiful. Over the next few days I will trick it out a bit but the delivered framework is and will be the work of Rodrigo. Well done!

I’ve been working hard for the last two weeks to complete the new design for mindplunge. As you might have figured out I’m starting as a freelance web designer and needed to dust off my portfolio. What better way than working on my own domains!

Color scheme is slightly darker but overall the same kinda blue-ish. Sidebar has been stripped to an accordion-style navigation. Click the large buttons to reveal more content! I’m sure you can figure it out.

There are still some elements I need to work on (pagination, trackbacks and several plug-ins) but I couldn’t wait to put some stuff already live. More soon!

Update: Apperently the wp_head() function isn’t playing nice with accordion.js. Had to roll back to the old theme. Oops

Update: All good. The ‘lightview plus’ plug-in was interferring with the accordion. Lightview plus is now replaced with shadowbox.

I added some random quotes to the top right of this blog (go ahead and refresh!). Since I’m using WordPress I decided to go with a PHP version instead of javascript. In a nutshell the differences between PHP and JS:

Anyone can use the JavaScript version. It will run on any blog that allows the use of scripts. It will also run on static, non-blog websites. For any blogging system that does not use PHP, like Blogger, it’s the only choice.

If you’re using a system like WordPress, there are advantages to the PHP version. The biggest of these is that PHP is server-side and JavaScript is not. The JavaScript version will download everything and a visitor’s web browser runs the script to determine what to display. Because of this, your visitor’s browser must be able to run JavaScript for anything to happen. Some devices, like mobile phones and other small-screen browsers, don’t support JavaScript at all.

PHP works differently. The PHP script runs on the web server, so only the output is sent to the web browser. In addition to saving you a marginal amount of bandwidth, this guarantees that all viewers will see the content properly.

If you can use PHP, there’s not really any reason at all to use the JavaScript version.

Here is the code but just like with the JavaScript version, the script generates no HTML, so you’ll need to wrap the script in whatever tags are appropriate for your situation:

PHP Version:

<?php
$myRandomQuotes=array(
'quote 1 goes here.',
'quote 2 goes here.',
'quote 3 goes here.',
'quote 4 goes here.'
);
echo $myRandomQuotes[rand(0,sizeof($myRandomQuotes)-1)];
?>

note: To prevent the apostrophes in “You’re” and “Don’t” etc. from screwing up everything, I added in a backslash to tell the JavaScript interpreter to treat the next character as text rather than a command.

I’m considering releasing my design for Mindplunge for the public. I’ve been playing with this thought for a while and I’m curious if anyone is interested. If so leave a comment and we take it from there (I might release it anyway since the # of readers are not stellar ).

Besides ego-boosting I’m curious what the backlink effect will befor this blog. So leave me a comment if you would like this design to be a WordPress Theme.

… just look at your right.

The little twitter bird is rebellious. I bet a lot of people having the twitter tool installed on their wordpress blog will see this error:

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to twitter.com:80 (Connection timed out)

My site was just crawling. I’m talking about thick syrup… Disabling the twitter plugin brought everything back up to speed. Needless to say that this plugin will be disabled until twitter gets his act straight. You can try to follow me when cliccking on the bird to your right. I love their service but the down time is just killing me…

Jaiku anyone?

All is up and running. A few more things need to be added but the major parts are working. One of the main reasons to switch to a new layout was a conflict with certain WordPress plugins. The all-in-one-seo-pack was conflicting with the Kimili Flash Embed plugin. Irony of it all is that the two plugins mentioned are conflicting with this template as well. Since I’m to lazy to figure out a work around I decided to move my flash based pages to a static page.

For now only my Santa Rosa Bench Project page is moved to a new url. Next will be my ‘photography’ page. Probably this afternoon.

Still on my things-to-do list is an update on the footer, blogroll and sidebar. The comment section needs some work too. It doesn’t display that your comment is being held for review. Instead it throws you in a loop making you think you didn’t comment. Very frustrating…

I’m changing the templates again. Bear with me since only the front page is kinda done. Click on any other link and you’ll be horrified. I dare you. So please be patient as I try to solve all of this the next couple of days.

The reason I’m changing things is that my previous theme had a few flaws. I’m aiming for flawlessness this time! Keep tuned and hang in there with me. It’s gonna be really nice…

Update: for the time being I reverted back to the previous version. You might see a lot of back and forth going on. I’m too lazy to pull this site off-line and relaunch it when it’s finished. I don’t mind if you can see the mess…

There are several WordPress Plugins available to add a “Digg It” button to your WordPress blog, but I still prefer to add code in my WordPress theme to accomplish the functionality without having to bother searching for, downloading and installing a WordPress Plugin. So this is for people who are not afraid to play with the php code. Here’s a quick way to add a “Digg It” button into your blog posts. It takes 5 minutes to complete. This example will add a Digg button like the one’s on this blog, in the upper left hand corner of every post. This will make it easier for your readers to Digg articles they like. It is advisable to place the “Digg It” button someplace easy for your readers to see so that they don’t have to do much searching to digg or review your articles.

Step 1: Open the file /wp-content/themes/*theme-name*/index.php and look for the following code:

Sometimes it looks like this:

Both code is the same and you are looking at the beginning of the post content. If you want the Digg button appear in the top left corner of you post include this piece of code right above the above mentioned code:

note: If you want the button to appear on the right of your post simply replace ‘float:left;’ to ‘float:right;’. It’s that easy.

I’m using a template (Hemmingway)that has only a few lines of a post on the homepage. The complete post can be read when clicking on the ‘read on’ button. I choose not to clutter up my homepage with buttons but I do want a ‘Digg It’ button to my posts. In my case I opened up /wp-content/themes/*theme-name*/single.php

This file is designed for a single post. Just follow the above instructions and you’re all set! Happy digging!

Over the years I’ve been playing around with various blogging platforms and blogging tools. I started off in 2001 with Radio Userland, moved on to Typepad, had a little thing with Blogger but ended up with Movable Type. After all these flirts it’s WordPress now. I’m extremely happy with WordPress and its community. The plugins are a joy to work with. Same as their use of templates. So easy to incorporate. Besides using this awesome platform I want to discuss a few blogging tools that I use extensively.

Textmate (Mac only)
If you use a Mac this is a must have app. Promoted as the missing editor for Mac it all does what Textmate promises you:

TextMate brings Apple’s approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

It is so easy to use and the possibilities are almost endless. You can even post to your blog straight from Textmate! Most posts on Mindplunge came from Textmate but I stepped it up a bit. This brings me to my second app.

MarsEdit (again, Mac only)
MarsEdit was developed by Ranchero Software (same company who developed NetNewsWire. More about this later). Last year it was acquired by Red Sweater Software and they just released the 2.0 version. MarsEdit is a blog publishing tool that lives on your desktop. No need to login to your blog account and use a sluggish online editor.

Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online to use them. While your blog’s web interface struggles to perform the simplest of tasks, MarsEdit uses the power of your Mac to provide an amazing blog editing experience. MarsEdit is a desktop blog editor, so you can write a blog without giving up the comforts of your Mac.

MarsEdit has a intuitive interface, it’s widely compatible (WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal and Vox), it’s Flickr enabled and the best thing in my opinion: if you decide to do so it lets you use an external editor (Textmate!). Awesome tool.

Last thing I want to talked about are RSS readers. A lot of people already know what I’m talking about but the majority of people surfing the web (yes, mainstream) are clueless. Let me quote Wikipedia about RSS:

RSS (formally “RDF Site Summary”, known colloquially as “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator”. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

There are several ways to read your RSS feeds. NetNewsWire is pretty popular but in my case a go with an online version: Newsgator.com. It just saves me a bunch of time just going through my feeds and click on the articles I really want to read instead of navigating to a web page and see if they updated their site.

There you have it. Some tools in a nut shell. I could go on and on about this subject but for now you have a starting point.

What tools are you using and am I missing some major ones? Let me know!