I just came across jsfiddle.net. What a great resource.
An easy place to try out code ideas involving html, css and any number of javascript frameworks.
I’ve been using it to design a css table, and it makes design a breeze as the code and the rendered view are on the same screen.
Displaying New Album Releases ; wordpress plugin
The album release data is stored in a database that is populated daily (the part that populates the database already works). With each daily update, older releases need to have cover art verified (that a non-zero file exists) and that a link to amazon.com MP3 or CD store exists. If not, update that information.
The data display will happen in parts. One will be a widget, and the other will be a page.
- Widget simply displays chronological list of latest albums.
– List of albums to be scrollable (small scrollable area in CSS) and display latest 10-20 releases (with date delimitation)
– Table view of albums. Cover photo, with 2 rows of info to the left. Further to the left, audio preview of album from Amazon.
- The page content (which will be driven by a shortcode) will be a scrollable, paginated list (AJAX driven?) of the albums released in chronological order. Larger album cover view then the widget.
– Have multiple shortcodes to display several things? Like list of albums, Featured album?
– Sortable list option. Sort by Genre?
– Preview link to Amazon player (if album is available on amazon)
Used this great color picker to convert a site from one color scheme to another. Needed to keep the same luminance value for the colors, but go from green to orange.
Had 2 windows opened, and matched the luminance between the two colors. Worked like a charm.
I have coded the final automation part of the Podcast digest and the Discogs Album release plugins. Will have to wait till tomorrow to see if they get triggered and update automatically.
The scheduling was coded with the help from this post on Site Point.
Just came across an amazing theme for photographers. Geared to featuring your images in a big way.
If I had a use for it, I’d buy it in a second at $9.99.
http://autochrome.brajeshwar.com/
The site layout needs to change.
For home-page: (the blog page will be another page)
On top: Site title section: site title on left with advertising space on right.
Below title section is the top navigation menu.
Large ‘top’ widget area. Divide the area (screen width) in 2 sections. One section will list an up-to-date list of podcasts (with link to the blog entry that featured it) and the other section will list the latest album releases in a chronological format (sorted by day posted).**
Widget area can be grown down for as many rows I need -> album reviews? photography?
Below the large widget area, is the main site content area. This space is divided 4/5 left area (for content) and 1/5 on right for widgets.
Top of the right widgets bar has a sponsors area.
** Re: podcast widget area. The widget displays a limited number (6 or 7 of “featured/recommended” podcasts. The featured podcasts are choosen by me (have to work on a mechanism to allow for this). All podcasts will be tracked. And they can be followed in the blog area/rss feed, with the “featured/recommended” podcasts being in the header of each blog.
All the podcasts will have a rating system implemented where users will be able to rate the podcast. This rating (average of last months’s worth of votes) in turn determines the sort order of the listings for both the featured and regular podcasts.
For the podcasts, categorize the podcasts. Ones that are purely music, and ones that provide some other content.
Create a widget to display a list of the tracked podcasts with a link to their respective latest podcast. If a podcast has not had an update in xx number of days/weeks, take it off the widget list (but still track it/query the RSS feed internally).
New Layout- Across the top will be the title. Beneath the title, there will be a grid, 2 boxes wide and x number of rows. Each box will contain a widget. Each box will have an defined height, and scroll bar. One widget would be the podcasts list. Another would be the latest album releases. Another would be latest photos. Another would be album reviews.
I love it when things are simple.
To install IonCube loading in cPanel, run the following as root:
# /scripts/phpextensionmgr install IonCubeLoader
You can then check if ionCube was installed by running:
# php -v
I’ve updated my photo.onsendesigns.com site a few times, but I’m still not happy with the way it’s setup. Initially I had a wordpress blog and ZPgallery as the gallery. I didn’t like that setup because while I made two themes to maintain the look between the blog and gallery, I didn’t want to be creating themes every time I wanted to change themes.
So I changed entirely to ZPgallery (which now has rudimentary blogging features thanx to ZPage) in order to maintain only one theme, but I’m not happy with the the theme selection for ZPGallery.
So I’m thinking of changing things up again. Reinstall wordpress and ZP gallery. Showcase all the work in wordpress (there’s some nice photo-blog themes out there) and keep zpgallery as the backend which is not used to show anything, just serve up images.
Will setup this arrangement on a test server to see how it look.
The need to innovate and improve is certainly consistent with my personality 
Two pieces of software I’m not 100% happy with, but have no alternatives: except to write my own. (actually there’s probably more, but only these two I’ve given serious thought about pursuing)
One is a free/open source NAS solution that is OS independent. I know of FreeNAS and OpenFiler but both are plagued by the same disease. Extremely slow support and very infrequent updates.
I’d like to put together an OS independent linux file server front-end. Building on what webmin has done (maybe just a webmin plugin that consolidates all the file-sharing tools in one location). Building on webmin would be easy as it’s already making use of all the tools that are required to manage a file server (though the webmin interface is not particularly oriented to file server management).
The other tool I am not happy with is ZenPhoto. I’m not happy with it due to its very limited selection of themes. WordPress has endless theme selection but (compared to ZenPhoto) poor photo mamagement tools. I love the photo management tools in ZenPhoto. If somehow WordPress and ZenPhoto could be merged in a seamless manner I’d be thrilled; unfortunately I haven’t found such a solution yet. There are some plugins out there for wordpress to bring in photos from ZenPhoto, but it’s cumbersome.
I really like that (in ZepPress) all I need to do is FTP some photos in a folder and they get posted on the ZenPhoto site. No extra messing with front end interface to import or set up albums. The file/folder structure is reflected in the structure of the image folders/sub-folders. I like that.
Part of what I want is a web-gallery and blog to have the same theme allow for seamless navigation from blog to gallery and back. Also having to manage two separate systems (zen photo for photos and wordpress for blog) is more time consuming. I have used the ZepPage features of ZenPhoto, (to integrate the blog in ZenPhoto) but there are only 1/2 dozen themes available for zenpage enables sites.
I know I could just write a theme to my liking for ZenPhoto/ZenPage, but if I’m going to do some coding, I’d prefer to do some higher level stuff, where ANY theme could be used, hence using wordpress as the frontend, and work on integrating zenphoto photo management into wordpress.