The wurster, the better

I just found a draft post I started a week ago and never finished. So, I finished it today so I can move on.

Time goes by whether you are busy or not or whether you don’t feel well or feel great or whether you are in a funk or not. I find I have a lot of things to say but can’t get motivated to write. So, now I’ll try to remember what’s happened this past week.

I like to be busy, but not as much as I would like at work. I could be extremely busy at home with all the things our daughter needs but I do other things instead. I work at my computer a lot, probably too much. This past week, I updated my zip2mail Vanilla add-on to archive the extensions and themes. I also started on a CategoryGroups add-on, but am stuck at trying to filter the Groups.

I tried to print an expense report from my work computer but then realized it only has usb ports. So, I needed a parallel-to-usb cable. I tried to buy one online but messed something up when I modified my PayPal account. I haven’t gone back to try again.

We made a big monetary commitment to continue biofeedback/neurofeedback therapy at home. We purchased the equipment that is being used for our daughter now at a cost of about $2000. At $100 a session, the payback will be quick and the benefit will be immeasurable. I’ll be trained and hope to get this going at home in a couple of weeks. Once I feel comfortable doing this with our daughter, I could provide the service to others who could take advantage of this therapy — but that is to be determined as to who can???

I’ll need to add memory to whatever computer this will be installed on (probably Alicia’s). It has 512MB now but I’ll increase it to 2GB. I’d also like to get the family computer updated with more memory. Maybe I’ll do it at this time, too. It will be about $100 to do this per computer, I think. Gotta check this.

We completed a autism support grant application (or should I say my wife did). This could help subsidize some things we would like to do with Alicia through the summer.

We had a scare with my Mom the other day because her phone was busy and we couldn’t get in touch with her. It was probably off the hook, but we didn’t know. So, my sister-in-law Sheryl went over after work and found it was off the hook. Thanks, Sheryl.

The webcams I ordered arrived and I hooked one up to my computer. It worked fine to capture video of me sitting at my desk. I need to find someone with whom I can have a video conversation.

I need to pick up my sister-in-law’s computer. I also need to return the solar energy system rental agreement so that we can be scheduled for installation. I just have to re-read the agreement and the online agreements before committing to the 25-year agreement.

Well, another year has gone by and not only is my daughter older, but so am I. Go figure!

Happy Birthday, Alicia

It seems to me that I am not finding the time to post except on weekends. This was not my original idea for a blog. I need to force myself to make posts on things I am currently thinking about. So, now some wordspew.

I have poison ivy again. This seems to be a yearly occurrence when I trim the bushes in our yard for the first time in the spring or when I first mow the lawn. I say now as I have said before “I need to find the poison ivy and get rid of it”. It is really a pain. I have bubbles of stuff on my arms. Yuck!

I used a tool this past week called ABC Amber Outlook Express Converter for exporting email into PDF files. We need to get some information to an education consultant and this seemed to be a better solution than to print each email. The pdf files are easy to navigate and you can print when you want to. I will have to check back with the consultant to see how useful this was.

Tabitha went to Johns Hopkins University for an interview for grad school. I hope she got in. Can’t wait until she gets home tomorrow.

For some reason, ideas present themselves to me in practically everything I do. Since I am online a lot and get a lot of email, I see a lot in my small whole.

• dreamlines
• minishowcase – another way to view photographs – and it is pretty cool
• kromofons – I saw in a daily email I get from ZDNet (Ziff-Davis), a blurb about this.

  I have been playing around with moods on a blog or forum. I have a list of mood words that I can search through blog posts. It would be cool if I could create an animated color picture of these mood words. So, how would I do this with that software?

  There is a way to change blog post titles in WordPress using a plugin to apply a font via a javascript to create an image of the title. It would be cool to change a title to your colors (with the letters in side the color sphere).

• 35mmv – another way to view photographs (haven’t played with this yet)
• help someone in England with Vanilla – Experimented with installing LAMPS on a flash stick. I actually did that a week or so ago but didn’t set up WP or Vanilla. WP installed and setup the easiest. Had a little difficulty with Vanilla, but finally got it last night. Problems with user name and password. But now I have a place to experiment on this project and others.

Then someone on the Vanilla forum asked about sorting the discussions alphabetically for a book site. I figured out how to do this in the DiscussionFilters add-on as an option. But then I created my own add-on to do this automatically. And then I went further thinking now that they are sorted, how can you access just those books with titles beginning with “M”, for example. I would like to display an alphabet which when you clicked on a letter, would take you to a page with just books beginning with that letter. So, another distraction. Partially working now.

And one more thing, someone on the Vanilla forum asked about Windows screen-capture utility. I think I had looked before but this time my search cam up with MWSnap. I downloaded and set it up. Painless. Although from 2002, it works just great. I’ll keep it around for the next time I want to do a scree-capture and email to someone. Right now I use the Windows hot key screen print and paste into Paint.NET a free paint program with a lot of capabilities.

I’ve had some good things happen this week on my experiences with Vanilla. I figured out how to get the Whisper comments to show in different colors in the Vaneablack style. I took a suggestion I got from bj at the Refresh DelVal meeting last Saturday. I had to explicitly put the css in to refer to the appropriate Whisper class. Thanks bj for the idea.

I found out that SirNot added my hidden Pages idea to his PageManagement extension. Thank you SirNot.

I helped fix the RandomQuotes extension when it stumbled on a blank line in the file.

I finally saw the way to fix my WeightedWords extension to display all the tags on a page. I asked Mr. houseblogs to look at it since I took the idea on his site to integrate into my extension. He thought it looked great. It’s still not using tags that are tagged to each comment, but that will come in someone else’s extension they are developing. I will update the Vanilla add-on repository with the new version soon.

I changed my local PageBanner extension to use the AddList control to make it fit better in the side panel. It works fine. I may package this for Vanilla, too. I gave this same suggestion to the Latest Topic extension author so that it would fit better. It looks fine on my site.

It’s seems that whatever I do, I put myself further behind in many other things. I seem to have been somewhat preoccupied with helping others on the support forums that I have ignored what I need to do. This is a common occurrence for all of us. There just isn’t enough time to do everything. You really have to set your priorities.

I’ve tried to help someone recently integrate the Vanilla forum into WP. It was (and is) quite a learning experience. There have been instructions by others which I tried to follow, but didn’t work. As it turned out, the person I was trying to help actually figured it out. That sometimes happens to me, too. I ask a support question and when I don’t get any help or get help that doesn’t work (for me), it makes me think harder and in different ways. I have solved problems many times and I’m happy that others have done this, too. I hope to try these new steps and see what happens.

As an aside, I have noticed that there are very knowledgeable people who manage the support forums. They could easily (in a lot of cases) answer the users questions. But if they did, the user wouldn’t learn. Managing a support forum appears to be an art and not a science. In some cases, you have to give someone explicit instructions. In other cases, simple clues will help them solve the problem. And in other cases, no response will help the user think harder to look for the solution. Managing a support forum is like teaching. You have to learn who your students are in order to adapt your teaching to their learning styles.

There are 2 solutions as I see it: complete integration with the two and just a look theme-wise for Vanilla to match the WordPress theme. I was trying to go for the theme look and did succeed by doing an iframe in a WP page and create a page template. That really seems to work for me and my type of blog. The other person wanted complete integration with users and passwords and stuff. He wanted the forum to also display in the WP content area. For their scenario, that was the proper solution. I just want to learn so that I can possibly help another at another time. Here is their site, if you want to chek it out.

Over the past couple of days, I upgraded both my local forum install and my live forum to the newest version 1.0.1. I didn’t have any problems, but then again, my forum is not used yet. Here is what I did:

1. backup software and data (just in case you need to restore everything)
2. unzipped the 1.0.1 zip file on my computer
3. deleted the extensions and conf folders (this is where your extensions and configuration settings are – you don’t want to loose what you have set up)
4. ftp’d all the files in each folder separately
5. since I use a customvanilla theme and several different styles, I ftp’d the theme files first into the themes folder
6. then I ftp’d the default style files into my default styles folder in my 2 themes

Then I went to my forum site and all was well, showing me that I had upgraded to 1.0.1.