Category Archives: Site News

Information from or about Cyberward.net.

Exzo WordPress Plugin

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Exzo is the Exif and Zoom Image plugin for wordpress. I thought I would try it out. It is supposed to display some exif info around your pictures. Not sure it will work for me. I already post my photos on flickr, and just link to them here, but it seems like an interresting idea. One issue is that there is no way to pop in the image using the library tool. You need to goto the library and find out the image name, then in the HTML tab of the blog editor, you can add a statement like this:

[exzo url="" title=""]dsc_0021[/exzo]

That will get you this image on my site:

Exzo EXIF

Most of the styling and which exif data that shows up is all customizeable. But I have a couple of issues. First, there seems to be an issue in the plugin where is doesn’t reference the zoom.css file. I had to modify exzo.php to point to it correctly. Second, the included lightbox effect isn’t so hot. The biggest issue is that the image pops up full size. Other versions I have seen try to scale the image for the viewport.

It does look like you could opt to just show the exif data though, like this :

[exif="dsc_0021.jpg"]

Exzo plugin example

What would be really neat is if instead of the formatting of the picture, and the need to use this tag, is if via javascript, it could just attach itself to the image and display on a hover, or a click or something. Hmmm… that would be interesting…

Added the Series Plugin

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I have now added the series plugin, and we have a page that acts as an index to the different series on the site. I have removed the previous pages that existed for the two java tutorials that I had up. They are now part of a series. That is why you see them posted again today. I had to convert them into a post, not a page to put them into the series.

I also have a new series going, on building a NAS. There are two posts there now, and it will be ongoing as I rebuild my NAS and show how to use Linux with RAID, LVM, and other tools.

New Header Images

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I couldn’t take it any longer and made the time. I finally got some new header images up. I no longer have that ugly blue bar that was showing up on the right side of the images. I took the opportunity to put up new images as well. I think that a couple of them were there before, but most of them are new, and there are more of them. I think I need a drink.

WordPress 2.7 Upgrade Complete

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Wordpress LogoI have finished the upgrade to WordPress 2.7. This took awile, as I wanted to make sure that my theme and the plugins I was using would work.

The theme is working fine now. There were a few things I needed to do. First was fix up the comments. The new wordpress supports threaded comments, but my theme did not. Now it does. Also, Pages didn’t allow comments, and didn’t show when the page was created which I wanted. Oh yea, I added gravitars, the little pictures beside the posters post.

I switched the download plugin as noted earlier, and that was a big pain. When I tried to get it running on the updated site, I couldn’t activate the plugin. In the end I found out that it must have been corrupted files in the file transfer. I reinstalled it from a new zip, and reapplied my changes, and now it works.

So… the only thing really missing is the images at the top of the page. I really need to get those updated. With the gap there, it kinda looks like crap.

Found new File Download Manager

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I found a new plugin that I will use when I move to WordPress 2.7, which should be soon. It is called Drain Hole. This is a pretty spiffy plugin. It allows you to create different “holes” or folders to contain downloads. These folders can have different permissions assigned to them. The individual files can be versioned, although the file name appears to need to be the same. You can then use tags on your page to reference the files. One of the really interesting things is that it makes use of templates for those tags. So you can create a template to display a file, or list of files. You use a different set of tags in these templates that reside inside your own theme folder. I like this idea. I am already trying to think of ways to use it ouside of this plugin.

While playing with this plugin I discovered a bug. I couldn’t update/save the attributes for a file. I was trying to assign a custom icon, and the display name, but nothing would stick. Hunting this down I found out why php debugging, especially ajax calls really sucks. Anyway, I finally discovered what the issue was; a variable that was not initialized. It must be the particular combination of WordPress (2.7), PHP(4.5), and MySql(5.0) that I was playing with, because I can’t belive that this doesn’t work for everyone that uses this plugin.

Turns out that the developer has a tracker, so I created a bug with my solution. I am going to be moving to this from the Download Manager plugin I was using.

Christopher Ward Photography

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Gerbera photo from new gallary

Gerbera photo from new gallary

I finally have my pictures up at Christopher Ward Photography. I was hoping to get them up before the end of the year, but a couple of days isn’t too bad. I had thought that I would go with a site at smugmug, and I may later, but I had an idea for some javascript-y-ness that I wanted to try first. The album’s on the left contain pictures that fly out into a collage. I will post more on the Javascript later. I tried something different with the albums too. Annie had the idea to group them by color, instead of landscape, people, etc. I think it worked pretty well. I have some images that I wasn’t able to get in because of it, but the individual collages look better and more cohesive this way.

Christopher Ward Photography

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Well, I finally did something with the domain ChristopherWardPhotography.com. This will be where my “portfolio” will be. It is a start. I only have one album out there right now, and really, it is just some images I have pulled from flickr. They are not really a cohesive album. I need to spend some time to get some images out of Aperture. I need to get some thumbnails too. The thumbnails you see are just browser scaled versions of the larger images.

WordPress 2.7

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So, no sooner do I have a bunch of new stuff added to the blog, than WordPress releases version 2.7. This is no small release. There are a bunch of things added that can break plugins and themes. Comments are upgraded, the admin interface is overhauled, and several new functions exist to support all this that need to go into the themes. There is a migration doc here. I will probably need to use it. The theme I am using is not yet on the compatability theme list, and I have customized it quite a bit. The The plugins I am using are not on the compatability plugin list either. I am a little nervous to upgrade at this time. I will probably need to install a “test” version of 2.7, and install my theme and plugins and see what I need to fix.

New Stuff Added

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I have updated the site a bit. The About page got updated, and I added a new page called Books. I wanted to have a page where I would keep track of the books I have read, and a place where I could link to any of the posts I have made about these books. I also will put together a list of the books that have been recommended to me that I plan to read.

You may also notice that there is a blue space in the top header. I have some images that I need to update. Might be a good time to swap in some new ones. The reason for the gap is that I have made the blog content area wider. As I had blogged about earlier, the medium images from flickr didn’t quite fit. Now they do.

The new F150 Tonka

I have also found a really cool plugin called the Flickr Photo Album for WordPress. It is very cool. It does three things. First, there is a widget on the right sidebar that shows the last 8 flickr images I have posted. Second, it allows me to select a flickr image to insert (I did this with the Tonka Truck) without needing to goto flickr and get the url for the image. Slick. The third thing brings us to the menu changes. I have changed what I have up there, and there is a new tab called flickr. Clicking on that brings you to a page, still in the blog template that shows pictures from flickr. You have access to all the albums there. You can even initiate the flickr slideshow, which is a nice touch.

I don’t think I broke anything, but you never know…