The wurster, the better

I’ve been reading the Vanilla forum discussions to see where I can help. The “tagging or keywords” discussion continues. It really means different things to different people. So, I got to think and wanted to re-look at the WP plugins that could help.

I found a couple of meta tag plugins which I hadn’t seen before. I looked at the 2 I foudn and then decided to give Kaf’s a try. I activated it and expected to see the keywords I had added to my posts. But I didn’t see them. What did I do wrong? Or was I misinterpreting something? It took me a while before I understood what the plugin did. It adds meta tags to the html page that is generated on your blog. This information is primarily used by Search Engines. To see if it was working, I looked at the source generated by my pages and found the meta information. Great! This was cool!

Then I decided to take another look at Jerome’s Keywords plugin. This uses a field you add to each post called keywords with the keywords added in the values field. This is also what the meta head plugin uses. After I looked at the plugin description again, I activated it and added the correct function to display the keywords at the bottom of each post. And it worked! Another success!

I’ve also been playing around with Vanilla extensions to try and do what people want. I was successful in modifying the CommentAuthorInfo extension to display the user’s full name.

Before this, I had modified the Categories List extension to make it “category cloud” like. This seems to work and I contacted the extension author to see if he wanted to add it to his extension.

I also took a WP Christmas theme and made it into a Vanilla style/theme. During this process, I was able to get the lightbox js to work. I added the old Christmas book we had made for Alicia back in 1993 into kind-of a lightbox2 slideshow. I got some help from another js person who has made a lightbox counterpart called highslide. I hope to get tis to work, too, as it has different image display features than lightbox or thickbox.

I also modified the Page Management extension to contain an option to make the Page tab visible or not. Then I modified my Panel Links extension to create links for those Pages set to invisible. I contacted the extension author to see if he thought it worth adding to his extension.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve posted anything. It’s not that I didn’t have anything to write. I just lost track of time. So, what have I been doing lately.

I’ve been volunteering for a couple of good causes both related to the upcoming election: Joe Sestak and environmental issues. I volunteer for the Sierra Club and have participated in several community walks to help inform infrequent voters about what the current administration has been doing in Pennsylvania. We can’t tell people who to vote for because of recent voter rules changes. We can just give them information to help them make a good decision.

Joe Sestak is running for congress against the incumbent Curt Weldon. I have volunteered making phone calls to help inform the public.

I have written letters to the editors of several local newspapers on both of these causes. The letter on Joe Sestak will be published in the Philadelphia Inquirer but I don’t know when. And I will have a letter published in the Delaware County Daily Times on the environemntal issues and support of the current administration probably in a week to ten days. Pretty cool! It will be fun to see my name in print. I think I will make a couple of posts and put the letters in them.

I was on a business trip last week for 3 days to Tempe AZ. Maybe I’ll add a Google map showing where I went. It was a very productive trip as I was helping one of our clients with some issues he was having with our software and tools. It was good to finally meet someone in person who I have been talking to on the phone and conversing via email. Communications is so much more than email and phone calls. We learned a lot about each other. It was great. However, the time change really killed me. I am still recovering.

Today is my wife’s birthday. Happy Birthday Maria!

I’ve also helped someone from Egypt in developing a style for the Vanilla forum software we both use. That was enjoyable and now I have a new friend. I’ll have to make sure that I add him to my friends around the world map.

I thought I would write now since I just uploaded my second extension for the Vanilla forum software. Both extensions were ported from WP plugins: wp_dash-flash-clocks and weighted words. I ported the weighted words plugin back in July creating the WeightedWords extension. I just completed the flashclocks extension tonight. Having contacted both plugin authors for permission to do this, I found that both had used others scripts or flash objects in the making of their plugins.

I also ported the Prolific plugin as a Vanilla extension recently in my experimentation for increasing performance of the WeightedWords extension, but have not distributed this yet to the Vanilla community. It counts the number of words used in posts and display the number. Now, in the Vanilla world, it counts the number of words in the comments and discussion items. What I liked about this plugin was that it only updated a text file with the count when a new post was added. It took me a little while to figure out how to do this in Vanilla, but finally did. I hope to use this technique when I create the next version of WeightedWords to alleviate any performance issues there are with the keyword list now being generated any time the page is refreshed.