I finally fixed the blog site. WordPress (my blogging software) was updated with some new features that broke some of the plugins I was using. As with any software that allows plugins, it’s up to the authors of those plugins to keep up to date, and sadly support for some of the plugins I was running isn’t there anymore. Very disappointing to follow a link to the plugin’s home page only to find a message saying “thanks for all the support, but I am not doing this anymore” (or worse yet, a “Page not found” error.) I run into this occasionally with World of Warcraft addons – you start to rely on it, then when a patch comes out the addon no longer works, and the author hasn’t updated it to work with the patch, so you have to scramble to find a replacement.
I still haven’t found a decent calendar applet (I’m using the one that’s built in) and so far none of the Weather applets work on this configuration (the best of them requires PHP 5, which isn’t installed on my web host.) WordPress also added support for “widgets,” which are the doohickies on the side bar – instead of hard-coding them into the sidebar every time I changed themes, they are now put in automagically when I configure the Presentation of the site. Unfortunately the last theme I was using was not “widget-aware” and the author of the theme hasn’t updated it, hence the new blue and silver theme you see here. Cool thing about this theme? You can drag and drop the widgets and they will stay where you put them next time you stop by. 🙂 Very cool, and kudos to N.Design Studio.
I did put in two new widgets – my XBOX Live gamertag is at the bottom (this one isn’t movable, for some reason) and a Now Playing widget so you can tell what I am listening to. I know, who gives a flying fish, but I thought it was kinda cool anyway. Brandon Fuller created a plugin for iTunes that sends the song data to my blog site, then a plugin for WordPress displays it on the blog. If I had (or even wanted) any traffic on my site, there’s an option for people to click on the song and be taken to iTunes or Amazon, and I would get money if they bought the song. However, I don’t need any additional traffic – this site was for family and friends, and I’d rather it stay that way. Nothing I say is of any interest to the general public (and I wonder sometimes how much of it is of any interest to the intended audience!)
Speaking of widgets, I noticed that the word is vastly overused in the software world. Mac OS X uses little mini-applets called widgets for its Dashboard application. Most of the time they don’t fall into the category of “productivity” (such as the Chuck Norris or Harry Potter quote generators) but some of them are useful (a quick FTP client, a calculator, a system temperature monitor, an SMS applet that sends text messages from my laptop to my cell phone, a weather applet (which I just noticed is still set to Montpelier, need to fix that) and widgets to tell me whether or not the servers are up for World of Warcraft. (This widget is more useful than one might think.) Oh, and the Peeps. Yeah, peeps. They’re everywhere. So yesterday when I searched Google for widgets for WordPress (yeah, WordPress had to use the same term) I ran into a TON of pages, but quickly found out that not only does the term “widget” apply to WordPress and Mac OS X, but Microsoft decided that the sidebar applets in Vista would also be called widgets. How nice. It’s always been Microsoft’s practice to steal someone else’s idea and flood the Internet with their own version so everyone believes that MS came up with it. Widgets are no different. Made it a lot harder to find what I was looking for. Several hours later, I settled on what you see here today.
Meh. It works.