July 23, 2008
July 21, 2008
Essential WordPress plugins
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 very new, but already indispensable. It adds inline editing to the post/page management screens — you double-click a row in the table, and you can edit just about everything but the content.
- Dashboard Widget Manager lets you turn off dashboard widgets you don’t want and add new ones. (Did you know the Dashboard is wigetized as of 2.5? There just isn’t a built-in manager for it yet.) There aren’t many dashboard-specific widgets available, unfortunately. I’ve learned how to write them, though!
- Database Backup because things will always go wrong.
- Search and Replace is very handy when you’re moving a blog from one domain to another. Since WordPress inserts full URLs when you upload media to a post, you end up with a lot of URLs to change.
- Ozh’s Admin Drop-Down Menus let you move around the admin screens SO much faster.
- My Page Order gives you a drag-and-drop interface for rearranging pages.
- No Self Pings prevents WP from pinging itself when you refer to one of your own posts.
- Clean Notifications sends out uncluttered, HTML-formatted notification emails for things like comment approvals and so forth. These message are much easier to scan than the default plain-text messages WP sends out.
- Subscribe to Comments because really, how often do you remember to check that thread you posted to last week?
- (Added later) Category Selector Back to the Sidebar fixes the most egregious usability problem introduced in the WP 2.5 interface, and puts the category checkboxes back above the fold.
For clients’ sites that use a page as the home page (rather than blog posts), I throw in No Place Like Home. In fact, I wrote that for a client whose home page had to have the same name as another page on her site; we both kept forgetting which was which!
What else do you suggest?
July 18, 2008
Gah.
It’s 1am. I’ve spent the last seven hours migrating my sites from the old-and-busted server to the new-hotness server. A few things broke, and my email was bouncing for a while there, but everything seems to have stabilized now. Except me. Me, I go fall over.
July 17, 2008
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
Short version: Joss Whedon has a musical web serial; go watch it.
Longer version: this is the video blog of Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris), a hapless evil genius who’s trying to perfect a freeze ray that will stop time long enough for him to figure out what to say to the pretty girl at the laundromat (Felicia Day). He’s also awaiting the results of his application to a league of evildoers. His escapades are mostly thwarted by Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion), a beefy guy in a tight T-shirt and improbable gloves. This is a musical, so occasionally everyone just breaks into song… as you do when lamenting the imperfections of your freeze ray.
It goes without saying that it’s hilarious, but the music is surprisingly good.
The last act will be posted tomorrow. The whole thing will be available until midnight (not sure what time zone) Sunday, after which you’ll have to get all three parts on iTunes or wait for the DVD. Go forth and watch!
July 16, 2008
Revision update
The out-of-order problem is way worse in the second half, which I knew. I still love my subplot, and I think it’s less flawed than I thought it was. The main plot is more so, but… I think I can fix this.
July 13, 2008
Overheard
We were in the mood for hamburgers tonight, so we went to a little joint where they have half a dozen booths ranged around a long bar. It’s built-in entertainment: you, the sit-down diner, get to listen to the conversations of the beer-and-wings diners.
Our bar guys tonight were most excellent entertainment, being loud, ignorant, and drunk. (The trifecta!) They were overweight, unshaven, trucker-cap-wearing white guys holding forth on politics: the Iraq war, affirmative action, the presidential candidates. Their logic was torturous, their conclusions baffling, their remarks punctuated with fists pounded on the bar. We spent the better part of our dinner either chuckling into our plates or making “OH NO HE DIDN’T” faces at one another.
We were almost done by the time they worked their way around to Obama, who is “willing to do anything to the black man if it lets him keep his power.” Having assured each other of this, they decided that Obama is thus a white man and uttered this triumphant declaration as we scurried out the door: “Obama and [Jesse] Jackson are slave traders!”
Ladies and gentlemen, America’s voting public.
July 12, 2008
Revision progress
I’ve been working on web stuff more often than not, so I’m going slowly through this, and I’m still on the first pass. Took the big pile o’ paper to the coffee shop writing group this morning, and I’m now up to page 250. I’m crossing out lots of stuff — scenelets that never went anywhere, notes to myself that no longer apply. Writing new notes: “pp. 80-100 are almost a total loss.” “Marianne came to visit 20 pages ago. Why is she now back at home and talking on the phone?” “Emily turns up here knowing everyone. Where did her first scene go?” [40 pages later:] “Here’s Emily’s first scene.”
Yeah, my nonlinear writing process is making this a little more difficult than it might otherwise be. Most of the scenes will be easy to move around. Some I’ll have to split up, since they need to be where they are, but the characters are commenting on other things that haven’t happened yet. The bad thing is that I thought I’d already taken care of all the out-of-order stuff. Argh.
On the bright side, my own manuscript made me laugh out loud in the coffee shop, so I guess that’s good.
July 6, 2008
On the (nick)naming of characters
Halfway-plus through Sherwood Smith’s delightful Inda, I must pause and bitch: DAW, why O why did you not include the character list in the published book? Because, Christ on a crutch! In addition to the usual firstname-lastname thing, each school-age character gets two more names at the academy: an official name formed from the family name and a word meaning “one” or “two” depending whether they’re the older or younger sibling (e.g. Landred Marlo-Vayir becomes Marlo-Vayir Tvei), as well as a nickname used to the exclusion of the others (Cherry-Stripe). The -Vayir suffix on the family names has its own meaning. Adults are referred to, interchangeably, by their full names and by a title having to do with their place in succession and military role. And? Some of the titles change when the country goes to war.
My head hurts. Memo to publishers: sometimes we don’t get the luxury of consuming a 600-page paperback in one sitting. Sometimes, you know, we have to put the book down for a couple of days at a time. And when the number of characters with three to four names apiece climbs north of, say, twenty… it helps to provide an index. I’m just sayin’.
It has occurred to me, reading some of the Shadow Unit extras this weekend, that newcomers to that world must have the same problem. In the LiveJournals, the characters refer to each other using nicknames that seldom make it into the episodes proper. Fortunately the wiki lists them all. (At least, I think that’s all of them.)
