gbazz

Ok, along with the new wonders that came with Wordpress 2.3.1, the changes that the developers made to the Wordpress database have boggled my poor theme, and since the original author doesn’t update it anymore, it falls onto the poor users like me to fix it if they want their sites staying up and looking pretty.

Here’s a list of things that need fixing:

1. The search function (problem with post2cat)
2. Previous/Next page navigation at the bottom

Ok, so it’s not that big a list, but still it’s 8am and I need sleep. There are probably a few more broken thingies that I haven’t stumbled across yet, but those will be taken care of in good time.

Things to do when I wake up:

1. Make the header image prettier
2. Play World of Warcraft

• Optional: Start packing all my stuff to move out

written by Brian \\ tags: broken, layout, tired, Wordpress

Ok, so I have to admit that clinicals aren’t as bad as I thought they would be.

After six months of placements in community nursing, mental health, aged care and ICU, today was my first day back in a hospital ward. Needless to say, I was terrified inside, because it’s easy to forget how things work on the ward after a semester of not being on there.

Thankfully it was an afternoon shift, which is never as busy as the morning shift since showers and towel baths have already been taken care of. If you asked a nurse to write down a list of activities that they did each day, and to rank them in descending order according to how much they liked them, I’m pretty sure that giving showers will rank pretty low in the list.

Anyway, enough about showers, I’m just glad I didn’t have to do any.

I think I’m falling back into the bad habit of changing layouts every couple of weeks. I know it’s bad practice, because constantly changing layouts can drive away readers who like consistency, but I want my blog to look pretty!

Another motivating factor is that I don’t really like using the layouts that other people design, pretty though they may be, because I personally feel like I’m stealing it. (I dunno, it’s probably just another weird Brian thing)

Assuming things go ok time-wise, the basic layout should be up by the weekend, with small changes being made over the next few weeks.

OK, enough about me, how have you been?

Longfall: Click

Sanity saving laughter: Click

written by Brian \\ tags: clinical, layout, long fall, Wordpress

So. Hot. Cannot. Sleep.

Ernie just came into my room and told me that the temperature forecast for tomorrow was 32 degrees Celsius. Earghh.

I took advantage of my non-sleeping-ness to try out the Windows Live Writer modification that Rob over at STUFFLEUFAGUS wrote about. This mod makes it possible to designate tags to a post before publishing, something that I used to do by sending the draft of the post to the site and manually entering the tags there. Hallelujah for smart people!

Another plugin I’m trying to use is the one by Adam Hill, edited by Limi, but it seems to be having some issues with Wordpress 2.3. Oh well, it’ll get fixed when it gets fixed. Looks like centralisation of my web presence will happen another day.

edit: It works!

written by Brian \\ tags: facebook, plugin, stuffleufagus, windows live writer, Wordpress

Ah the sweet sound of an update. I know, I know, its a joyous occasion, but I can hear you asking, “Why do you look so weird Brian?” Is it because I still have eye snot stuck to my eyelids? My messy hair?

It is neither of the above. The reason I look so weird is because I am tired and phlegmy, (not a real word, but let’s roll with it). I seem to have gotten sick over the weekend, and just in time for study week too!

I think another thing that’s making me tired are the dreams I’ve been having. For example, last night I dreamt that my sister and I were packing our bags frantically to catch a flight to Papua New Guinea. It was 12:30pm Dreamtime, and the flight was at 1pm, so why we even bothered trying to pack and get to the airport in time, I don’t know. Then Dream-Brian received a phone call from my mother, telling him that the flight wasn’t until next week. Meh.

An here’s the weird part, I dreamt that I woke up, decided to go for a walk and found a pair of rollerblades in the hospital parking lot. It’s been years since I’ve rollerbladed, but it’s one of the only sporty things I can do, so I decided to put them on and blade around the hospital parking lots.While rollerblading I met several people and the most notable was a guy who was a combination of Tony from West Side Story and Desiprince786 (who I don’t really like). I also met one of my classmates whose Dreamtime alternate appears to have a prosthetic leg. And not an aesthetic prosthetic leg, I’m afraid that the leg was more along the lines of Tee Hee’s claw (Live and Let Die, James Bond, 1973). Poor girl. I also ran into three of my friends who were members of a marching band, four other friends who had gone grocery shopping at 6:30 in the morning and a strange man who was following everyone else.

Imagine coming home after a good hour of exercise, only to wake up and find out it was only a dream? All that effort for nothing, and you end up aching because of a stupid dream.

Anyway, I’ve got to go make sure Abel hasn’t been paralysed by a brain infection while he was sleeping overnight.

Really, he might have.

Makes me feel: Hilarious, Thoughtful and OMGBBQWTF, I need to update!

written by Brian \\ tags: dream, Everyday, weird, Wordpress

One of the things that makes Wordpress so cool is the fact that you can customise it so much with all the plugins and widgets that other very special people develop. =]

Over the last 4 hours I’ve been looking for plugins and widgets and I’ve found a few that I really like.

Lightbox 2.0

This is one awesome plugin. To see what it does, click on one of the thumbnails below.

Lightbox provides your visitors a convenient way to view the images you want them to see without navigating away from your site. It works by preloading the images and overlaying them on the current page, so your visitors don’t get bored with waiting for an image to load and leave your site.

Jerome’s Keywords 2.0b

I know there are a fair number of tag plugins around, but I particularly like this one because it updates the tags that show up on your Technorati page. This plugin is a great one, but there seems to be some kind of SQL error when you search for all posts relating to a particular tag. This error has been much discussed on the plugin’s download page, but the author hasn’t up dated it yet.

Chip has released a modified version of Jerome’s Keywords, that’s meant to fix it, but for some reason I still get the error. I’m going to take a look at it later when I have more time, but for now I’m just hiding any links that lead to the tag search pages. (It’s been fixed^^.)

Chip’s Tag Cloud Widget 2.1

This one places a tag cloud on your sidebar, similar to the Technorati tag cloud shown here. The font size of the most commonly used tags is bigger, to indicate the amount of times that particular topic has been the subject of a particular post.

The widget works perfectly, but due to the problems with Jerome’s Keywords I’m currently hiding the tag cloud to prevent the page with the error from coming up. (Again, it’s been fixed.)

Brandon’s ZScreen 1.0

This last addition to the list is a handy little utility for taking screenshots. The reason this program is so awesome is the fact that it can take fullscreen, window and region captures, and the images are immediately placed on your clipboard. It was the region captures that got me, since I like screenshotting sections of sites to put on my blog.

Another cool feature was the ability of the program to immediately upload the capture to your site via FTP, which can be a major convenience. You can also set ZScreen up to automatically open up your preferred image editing program for a few touchups before you put it up on your site.

written by Brian \\ tags: "jerome's keywords", chipstips, huddletogether, lightbox, plugin, screenshot, widget, Wordpress, zscreen