Just In Case You Didn’t Hear Me the First Four Times
Friday, April 25th, 2008
This one is for you KJ:
State Your Obsessive Compulsive Disorder For the Record
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
There is a fantastic conversation going on over at Molly.com about OCD. She’s highlighted a few of her obsessive compulsive tendencies and asked others to do the same. The responses are great. Oddly enough, toilet paper rolls seem to be a popular subject.
Now, I know I have many of these obsessive compulsive tendencies but unfortunately, any specifics are completely escaping me at the moment. I’ll have to think on that. My favorite response though is this one from thacker:
What? No obsessions about discovering someone else’s obsessions and then, occasionally and with discretion, re-arranging those things?
I used to do this to my mother all of the time with some magnets on her fridge. The magnets have a certain pattern or relation to each other. I would go and rearrange them when she wasn’t looking and then see how long it took her to notice.
The best was many years ago when my sister had a boyfriend who was equal parts OCD and mischievously evil. He discovered that this collection of gnomes that my mother had which resided on top of the television had a very particular order. Every time he came over he would rearrange the gnomes or move them. After many months of this, my mother got so feed up with it that she got a glass display case made for the gnomes. They been peacefully encased ever since.
Gallery of Doodles in Lightbox 2
Friday, April 4th, 2008
NerdStarGamer now has a new Gallery page that features my doodles:
All of the images have been set up as a list of thumbnails which use Lightbox 2 to display large versions.
I spent a little extra time to set up Lightbox on this blog without using a plugin. I’ve been on a steady crusade to get rid of most of my plugins for quite some time. Setting up Lightbox in WordPress was fairly straightforward.
After downloading the Lightbox 2 files, I created a new directory in my template directory called lightbox and dropped all of the lightbox files into it. I then put a function call into the header.php file right before the line that reads <?php wp_head(); ?>.
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
...some other tags...
<?php AKM_include_lightbox(); ?>
<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>
The AKM_includ_lightbox(); function is just a short little function that I wrote and put in the functions.php file of my template. Here is the function:
function AKM_include_lightbox() {
$lbDir = get_bloginfo('template_directory') . "/lightbox";
// Echo out some file path variables for images used lightbox JS
$output = '<script type="text/javascript">' . "\n";
$output .= "\t" . 'var tplDir = "' . $lbDir . '";' . "\n";
$output .= '</script>' . "\n";
// Echo links to js and css for lightbox
$output .= '<script type="text/javascript" src="' . $lbDir . '/js/prototype.js"></script>' . "\n";
$output .= '<script type="text/javascript" src="' . $lbDir . '/js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects,builder"></script>' . "\n";
$output .= '<script type="text/javascript" src="' . $lbDir . '/js/lightbox.js"></script>' . "\n";
$output .= '<link rel="stylesheet" href="' . $lbDir . '/css/lightbox.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />' . "\n";
echo $output;
}
This first line of the function sets up a variable that includes the path to the Lightbox files inside my template directory. This is necessary because the lightbox.js file needs to reference the images included in the Lightbox folder. Without this part, the previous, next and close images will not show up because the link will be going to your WordPress uploads directory.
That second chunk of text in the function echos out a small bit of JavaScript into your header that simply declares the variable tplDir and sets it to the path to your LightBox installation. The last chunk of text inserts all of the necessary Lightbox JavaScript and CSS links into your header. I could have written all of this directly into the header.php file, of course, however I felt that my file was getting a bit messy and that this approach was much more clear.
We also need to make a small edit to the lightbox.js file which is going to use that tplDir variable we set. Find the line in the beginning of the file like this (around line 49):
fileLoadingImage: 'images/loading.gif',
fileBottomNavCloseImage: 'images/closelabel.gif',
Simply change those two lines to this:
fileLoadingImage: tplDir+'/images/loading.gif',
fileBottomNavCloseImage: tplDir+'/images/closelabel.gif',
That completes the Lightbox 2 setup in WordPress without using a plugin. Now all you have to do is add the rel="lightbox" tag to any link you want to use Lightbox. For example, if you have a thumbnail image that links to a larger image like this:
<a href="images/full-size-image.jpg"><img src="images/thumbnail" /></a>
To add the Lightbox effect, just add in the attribute like this:
<a rel="lightbox" href="images/full-size-image.jpg"><img src="images/thumbnail" /></a>
Be sure to check out the Lightbox 2 page for more information on what you can do with it.
The Superest
Friday, April 4th, 2008
The Superest is a very funny running blog of illustrations of superest heros. Each superest hero plays off of the last in a very clever way:
The Superest is a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple: Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.
The design of the site itself is is quite elegant and simple. Most of the display type on the site is done in a very nice typeface:
Start from the beginning get the the feeling for the way the superest heros flow one after another.
Hitting the Google Jackpot
Friday, April 4th, 2008
I finally know what it feels like to hit the jackpot of a number one hit on Google. This blog is officially the number one hit for the search “huge horses“.
All of this is stems from this single post, almost two years ago. Odd indeed.
