Delve Into Lunacy

Well, I’ve now finished adding all the "WP-XXXX" plugins that I was planning on adding. Both of these last two went in pretty easily. With WP-Print I had zero issues and besides making the image a hair smaller, there wasn’t anything else I needed to do to it. In a final version with a future theme I might want to add a link on the "printer friendly" page so they can get back to the site without having to use the browser’s Back button.

With WP-Email I had surprisingly few issues. I figured I’d have all sorts of trouble getting the actual emails themselves delivered properly but that worked straight out of the box. There were only two problems that I had and both were pretty easy to fix. The first was just needing to update the permalinks structure in the Options screen again after activating the plugin. For some reason, prior to doing that, when you clicked on the email link it would just bring up the "Page Not Found" page and not the email form.

The second problem was when the success, failure or error pages were displayed after sending an email, the sidebar and footer were all fucked up and over on the right side of the message. It ended up just being that in the "Email Options" page where you can modify the layout for those items there wasn’t a closing </div> for some reason. The value appears in the string that is set by default so I’m not real sure why it wasn’t there. Adding it fixed the problem though.

The only thing I might change with WP-Email in the future is adding a link to go back to the main page right below the success or failure message. There is one in the sidebar, but in this case I just think it might look better to include one in the content section as well. Also, if I someday use the pop-up version then I’ll need to modify the window size so that you don’t have to scroll at all.

Anyway, I’m getting close to having the basic setup of the site finished at this point. I finished making my changes to the Widgets plugin last week to show a different "Meta" section (it’s the Navigation section in the sidebar) and added the FallenBlossom logo link. I need to update the About and Contact pages which will include setting up the "Custom Contact" plugin which creates contact forms. After that I believe I’ll be done and ready to start working on my own original theme.

Well, since I started posting again I would say my posts have been fairly tame in comparison to my old ones. Of course, everything up to now has been geared toward the migration of hosts, getting the site up and running, etc. It seems technical posts just don’t allow for quite the same level of rancor that other topics do.

However, I’m at the point now where I just have to get some things off my chest. Due to there being so many things that get my panties in a bunch on a regular basis, I’ve decided to start a series of posts simply called Things That Piss Me Off (TTPMO for short).

My beef tonight is with open source projects. I fully understand the spirit and what not behind open source projects and there have been many apps created with the model that are absolutely wonderful in what they do or in what they provide to others at no cost. My complaint isn’t with those, but more with some aspects of the model itself.

The first is the complete lack of control over what appears out there. It seems like 99.9% of all projects started fall into one of the following categories: went no further than picking a name for the project, died halfway through development never to be touched again, or those that are coded so horribly that you would be better off hitting yourself in the head with a hammer rather than download them.

I realize that this problem is endemic to other things besides open source, but it’s easy to go back from something like a dead page on Geo-Cities or skip over a dead profile on a friend/dating site for example. With applications however you are investing more time and effort into getting them downloaded, installed, etc often to just realize you have wasted a few hours of your life that you’ll never get back. Is there a solution? Probably, but I don’t need to come up with one to justify my ranting.

The second thing that chaps my ass is the developers themselves. I know there are some great people out there working on open source projects, but unfortunately they never seem to be the ones I run across. It seems to be a model that really attracts the biggest, self-important jackass developers that exist. Then they all seem to end up working on things I get interested in.

For an example, go to a forum site for a project and enter something in the area that they set up so that people can provide suggestions. It doesn’t matter what your suggestion is, how well thought out your posting was, etc. You can just pretty much expect to get flamed by the developers, or one of their sycophantic followers, as either being: retarded, a n00b, or a dumbass for posting something that they already thought of but just haven’t documented anywhere.

Since I’m a helping type of guy and just in case you do decide to post on a forum somewhere, I’ve kindly provided a template that you can use to at least help lower the chances of being flamed.

[quickcode:noclick]Dear developers,

You are gods among men and I wish I had a womb so I could bear your children. There are no programmers that have ever had the skill, wisdom and imagination that you show in every line of code that springs forth from your Cheetos and nicotine stained fingers. This is by far the best application ever created and henceforth I shall use nothing but this app even though it only does one particular thing.

Now keep in mind that I’m borderline-retarded, know absolutely nothing about anything and am already well aware that I don’t deserve to be in the same general cyber-vicinity as you, but I have a [question / suggestion].

[Enter question or suggestion here.]

Forever indebted to you,
[Enter your first name.] - aka Stupid Moron

P.S. - If you ever need a kidney, lung, chunk of liver or an eye you can have mine…even if I don’t match as a donor.[/quickcode]

Now in case the “Stupid Moron” moniker fits you, make sure you replace the things in brackets and don’t just copy-paste-submit. Moving on.

There is plenty of other stuff about open source that pisses me off but the final thing I’ll bitch about today is documentation. Jesus Christ on ice skates…how fucking difficult is it to: a) put comments in your code and b) write some basic documentation that is at least slightly helpful?

Standard documentation typically seems to consist of a readme file that just has the following things in it: the name of the app, the names of the developers and the name of the joker that wrote the readme file. If you’re lucky, you might also get a line making note of the current version of the app. If you’re incredibly lucky, you might get some half-assed installation instructions that will still require you randomly renaming files, moving things around, etc before you can get it working.

As for in-code comments, if there are any at all, then they typically consist of things like "Bad stuff happens" or "This does the work". What exactly possesses a person to even bother if they are just going to write crap like that?

Well, now that I’ve written a book on this topic I should wrap it up. Stay tuned for the next issue of TTPMO where I will most likely be bitching about over-hyped sites.

This is driving me insane. The WP-Polls plugin works well enough but there were just a few visual things I wanted changed on it. For starters, I needed to modify the text so it appeared halfway decent. Here is what the text looked like originally and then what it looked like afterward it was fixed (also notice the "Polls" section isn’t as tall in the current version).

I had to modify two aspects of the style sheet attributes to get the text to look right. The first was adding the "Color" line. Not sure why that would smooth the text, but it did so I won’t question it. The second part was commenting out the "Width" line. I have no idea why but for some reason having this in there even after adding the "Color" line would still cause everything to look like crap. Below are the style sheet attributes that it uses.

[quickcode:noclick]*** Original Version ***

.wp-polls-ans {
width:100%;
filter: alpha(opacity=100);
-moz-opacity: 1;
opacity: 1;
}

*** Current Version ***

.wp-polls-ans {
/*width:100%;*/
color: #E5E6C2;
filter: alpha(opacity=100);
-moz-opacity: 1;
opacity: 1;
}[/quickcode]

Okay, so that fixed the text issue. However, it also created two new problems that just baffle me. The first issue is that in the original version the entire poll form (title, answers, voting button, etc) would fade out and then the results form would fade back in. However, if the "Width" setting isn’t included in the style sheet (which it can’t unless I want crappy text) then the fade in/fade out no longer occurs. I haven’t modified anything else besides that one setting so I have no clue why that would keep the Javascript from doing its thing. The Javascript never throws an error either so I know that it’s not just simply breaking it.

The second issue is that if you vote or click on the "View Results" link then you’ll notice a little "Loading" image that shows up at the bottom of the section while it’s doing it’s thing. When the image is displayed it spreads out the distance between the "Vote" button and the "Polls Archive" link. In the original version once the "Loading" image goes away the distance between those two things shrinks back up again. Again, if the "Width" setting isn’t in the style sheet then it breaks and the extra distance that got added when the "Loading" image appeared never vanishes. The images below illustrate what I’m talking about in terms of the distance thing.

I’m sure both the gap and the broken fade feature are tied together but why having the "Width" setting there would make a difference is beyond me. Oh well, I’d rather have decent looking text so I’ll just live with those two problems. The last issue is another one that I just can’t seem to figure out. Why the hell is there a white box showing up around the radio buttons? In Firefox it doesn’t appear but it does in IE. I’ve done all types of searches on the internet and can’t seem to find anything referencing this issue. Below is the code which doesn’t seem to have anything abnormal in it as far as I can tell.

[quickcode:noclick]

[/quickcode]

The things enclosed in %’s are variables that the plugin later replaces when the page is loaded. The remainder of the code remains unchanged. I’m clueless on how to fix it since the "Radio" input type doesn’t accept style settings by what I can tell.

I give up. The basic functionality at least works. So unless someone knows of a way to resolve these three issues I’ll just consider this particular plugin integration finished. I was really hoping to get it set up like with the post ratings plugin so that it could automatically switch it’s setup based on the theme name. It’s so heavily modifiable from within the WP Admin area (which is a plus) that I just don’t think it would be worth the effort.

Well, I finally got the WP-PostRatings plugin (the little star ratings above this text) working the way I wanted it to. Who would have thought simply wanting to get it to show up in the location where it is now would turn into a major pain in the ass. I guess it would probably help if I wasn’t learning PHP and WordPress tags and functions at the same time.

I made the following modifications to the plugin:

     ** Change the layout of the ratings image and text from the default.

     ** Modify the various tooltips to show different information.

     ** Add new styles to the style sheet to match the current theme.

     ** Modify the default star image files so they are a hair smaller. I stumbled across a nice feature when doing this one. I didn’t want to get rid of the default images so I placed the modified image files in a new folder in the "images" directory. At this point I was about to start writing a bunch of If-Then statements to have it switch which images it was using based on the theme name. For some reason I went to the Ratings Options page beforehand (no real need to since I already had it set up the way I wanted it) and what do you know…it picked up the new folder and made it another option to select. So no coding on that one like I figured I’d have to do.

     ** Add in code so that it will always check to see what the name of the current theme is and if it’s not a specific one then it reverts back to the original code. This will be handy so that when I create my own theme later on I just have to add a couple new items to the style sheet and throw in a new section for the If-Then statements that are checking the theme name. Since I tend to bounce between a couple themes for a while until I settle on a final one this will save me from having to constantly comment / uncomment things in the plugin files.

     ** I wanted to modify the tooltips on items where you had already voted to say "You gave this post a rating of X". After getting the code working though I realized that the cookies (which is where I was pulling it from) only get a "1" passed to them no matter what the actual rating value was. I was already ready to be done with editing this thing so I decided to pass on modifying what gets written to the cookies. Might go back someday and make this change, but I doubt it.

Note On Compatibility: I’ve done testing and it does appear to work fine on IE6, IE7 and Firefox. For some reason though, Opera always shows the "Loading" image from the moment the page is displayed. Oh well. I don’t use or even like Opera, so I’m not going to bother with trying to fix it for the one jackass that feels the need to be different by using that browser.

Well, my last post was in October 2005 so obviously I took the whole “no more episodic updates” thing to a whole different level than originally intended. Anyway, I’m finally back and hopefully I’ll stick around for a while this time, but don’t hold your breath.

I’m in the process of migrating from HostMySite.com (great hosting but didn’t need all the features I was paying for) to DreamHost.com (holding my review for later as I joined during the power outage issues and it’s currently a mess). In the process I’ve gone ahead and gotten the blog it’s own domain because it was a good kid and deserved a treat. So on the off chance that you were so pathetic as to have bookmarked the old blog.fallenblossom.com address then you should switch it to point to the new address…www.delveintolunacy.com. The old site will still be up for a while while I’m getting things configured on the DreamHost side, but once I migrate the FallenBlossom domain it will vanish.

Anyway, I could post tons of stuff regarding what has occurred since the last time I wrote, but I’ll spare you the boredom. If something that previously occurred ends up getting me up in arms again I’ll write something about it then. So for now I’m just working on getting the site setup like I want it. I’m currently using the Thirteen theme which I really like but not sure I’m not sure that I’ll stick with it. Even if I do, there are still a lot of things I want to change/add. If you can think of anything you would like to see added to the site or changed leave a comment and I’ll take it into consideration.