Sillybean

Post and Page Excerpt Widgets let you display excerpts from posts or pages in the sidebar. For some reason, page excerpts were taken out of WordPress somewhere along the way, so the widget requires the Page Excerpt plugin to handle those. If The Excerpt Reloaded is installed, the widget will use that function; otherwise it’ll [...]

I’ve set up a lot of new WordPress sites lately, and I’ve come up with my own homebrew installation package. All but one of these are admin tools; I don’t have a standard list of theme additions because every site is so different.

Akismet is the only spam blocker I’ve ever needed with WordPress. Manageable is [...]

For the last few versions, WordPress has allowed you to specify a page as the site’s home page, rather than the usual list of recent posts. However, in the list of pages, it doesn’t indicate which one is the home page. This annoys me.

So I wrote a plugin. Since it relies on CSS trickery, [...]

If you don’t want your thumbnails to get distorted, you need to change WordPress 2.5’s default setting before you upload your photos into the media manager. Go to Settings > Miscellaneous and UNcheck the “Crop thumbnail to exact dimensions (normally thumbnails are proportional)” box.

I really can’t believe they have that box checked by default. It [...]

If you hate the new Write area in WordPress 2.5, check out this mod. It works beautifully with Fluency, which itself fixes a lot of things I didn’t like.

As soon as Fluency supports drop-down menus, my world will be a happy, happy place.

I’ve written a WordPress plugin for my critique group. It gives you a new template tag, <?php show_comment_author_checklist() ?>, that generates a list of registered users with the names of those who have commented on the post (as well as the post’s author) crossed off. See the plugin page for more details1.

This is useful for [...]

Went to Refresh B/CS tonight. ‘Twas good. Among other things, Erica handed me a slightly different way of thinking about the political/class aspects of the novel, which will come in handy during revisions — and maybe marketing, if I decide to allow the damn thing out of the house without supervision.

It’s the kind of thing [...]

While I was gallivanting around the country, my mom was patiently posting the photos from her recent trip to Turkey. In fact, I noticed that she had gotten started while I was in Rochester, and I was able to use her blog in my WordPress presentation: “So, how easy is it to set up WordPress? [...]

I had such plans for today. I was going to run lots of errands, call a multitude of people who had birthdays last week and wish them well, get the grocery shopping done, etc., etc.

Instead, a five-minute WordPress upgrade ended up eating my day. Thanks OH SO FRACKING MUCH, FatCow.

Back in the day, FatCow was [...]

This is only a test.

UPDATE: woot!

I think I’ve found the missing plot piece that’ll let me get a draft done. Cross your fingers.

I’ve been working through First Draft in 30 Days, a not-bad book with a misleading title (outline, not draft) and an execrable website. The book is full of silly little worksheets that make me feel like I’m in [...]

I upgraded to the WordPress 2.0 beta, which is very nice… but it’s broken the archives for the moment. Apologies.

If you need industrial-strength web traffic analysis… Urchin is now Google Analytics and it’s free.

I’ve talked to several people lately who are having trouble keeping up with stuff — email, mainly, and they wonder how on earth I have time to read all these fabulous websites that let me stay on top of developments in web design.

In talking to one perpetually-behind person in particular, I discovered that what seems [...]

All right. I have finally seen Battlestar Galactica reviewed favorably in terms of both Farscape and Space: Above and Beyond. You win. I watch. But not till Christmas, because I have a book to write.