Yesterday I spent many hours installing NextGen here to very little effect. Fortunately I discovered Awsom Pixgallery this morning, which worked perfectly within about thirty minutes.

A couple of weeks ago, in one of my periodic trawls through the lists of available plug-ins, I came across a mention of SRG Clean Archives which had recently been taken over by the Geek With Laptop. I looked at it and it seemed to answer some of the problems I was trying to think through.

I spent two or three hours this morning turning my comments into pop-ups. This is not the first time I have tried. It is the first time that I have succeeded.

BoingBoing have published a link to a WP theme that Cory Doctorow has called “endlessly fascinating and deliciously pointless”.

It is almost impossible to design web pages properly without an understanding of the basis of CSS. Here are a collection of useful links, including a link to the box model; a link to a list of al the css keywords; and a list of 53 key techniques with examples and explanations.

I have got the feeds to work at last, and have placed them in the sidebar where they should logically be. Here is a brief description of what I did, and a few code snippets to help remind me later.

has had a talk with Pluti that may lead to interesting new developments
wishes that Second Life scripting worked as advertised because setting up 9 time controllers is absurd!
has multiple sidebars working. Now to fine tune them

I am looking for the tools that I need to make the next upgrade to this site.

I just finished my first working WP plug-in, as a result of thinking through a bunch of problems while helping Sean, the Geek With Laptop, with a very minor issue concerning the Clean Archives plug-in, that I have discussed here. I am calling the plug-in Front Page News, because that describes its intended purpose.

Try as you might at the beginning of a project, you are bound to get some detail wrong. Often this doesn’t matter, but sometimes it does. I got the permalink structure on this site wrong at the beginning, and the longer I left it the harder it became to fix. Today I finally fixed it.

Automattic, the people who make WP, have introduced an extraordinarily interesting new theme that is available both on Wordpress.com’s free hosting services, and as a downloadable file for people who want to use it on their own sites.

I have just added the structured blogging plug-in to this site. It is available from StructuredBlogging and I am in two minds about it, even before I have used it. The idea is impeccable and important, but it feels as though the crew may be preparing to abandon ship.

On Sunday evening I got my first chance to look inside the Structured Blogging plug-in, and so I started to poke around. In this kind of situation my technique is usually task-based. In this case the process was made easy because there were at least three features that I really did want to change from the moment I installed the plug-in.

Having spent some time evaluating the Structured Blogging plug-in, and discussing it at length with students, I have become less and less certain that what it offers is worth the price. At first sight the ideas behind it, and its implementation, are impressive and thought-provoking. The fact, however, is that in fifteen months the plug-in has signally failed to set the world on fire.

The course begins with a period of self-study. During this you will consider two complementary aspects: the theoretical and the technical. You will work out a schema for structuring the information that you will put into your Wordpress site, and you will explore the documentation for Wordpress to make an initial plan for how this can be done.

has done 17 unrelated tasks so far today, and may go to TAIK soon
is doing a major plug-in upgrade before moving to WP 2.5
listened to Bob Dylan and had lunch at TAIK – but not in that order
marvels at a meeting that keeps receding into the distance and wonders if he will eventually manage to sneak up on it
sees the sun has crept out while he has been locked indoors

is trying to plan the future with the frustrated Ms Törnqvist
wonders what the Facebook RSS deal is: its down again now after being up all morning…
is moving from Task A to Task B and back again, while thinking that maybe Task C is more urgent after all
notices that HostMonster are now offering WP 2.5, and plans to upgrade on Monday
declares the weekend open and ready for business

has finally upgraded this site to WP 2.5.1 – and now it all works again

just looked at the WP Newspaper Style posts plug-in at http://hellotxt.com/l/RaGQ
is waiting with increasing interest for the next version of AIrset that is due in August

is wrestling with a "multiple forums from one installation" problem that he thought he had solved ten days ago
is confused and dazed, having abandoned Zimbra Desktop, and restarted Level 7. One more time then…
aaaagh, the "fun" of Scheduleworld & syncEvolution. Holds head and funs into wall.

I think that the new version of the memi theme is now complete. The look and feel of the site is now almost completely as I intended it. The layout has a consistency that is based on the concept of doubling doubles that I may have mentioned earlier, and will certainly write up in a few days. I am ahead of my self-imposed schedule.

This week I have added two services to this site and one to Firefox. What they have in common is an alleged ability to make my life simpler by linking things together and saving me work.

Today the students in the Managing Information course told me that this site was completely invisible to Internet Explorer 7.

I have been trying to develop the structure of this site into a robust version that is complete enough to no longer require my explanations about its purpose to begin with an apology. I am now close to ready to bring out the sparkling wine. My current deadline for a version that will need no more designing and programming is Wednesday May 21 2008.

• Linden Labs re billing fiasco (31 Mar 08 at 2:29PM, Arcada) •••
• Breadcrumb navigation for single pages (31 Mar 08 at 12:40PM, Memi) •••
• Pay Visa bill (31 Mar 08 at 12:39PM, Personal)

…

Stefan mentioned the ideas behind wikimap this afternoon, and I had to confess that I had never heard of it.

Today I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1. I was planning to delay this for some time but I needed to try out the new features for a project we are completing.

There is a problem with WordPress 2.1, in that it refuses to allow div tags in the body of the post. It replaces them with paragraph tags.

I upgraded about fifteen minutes ago, and all seems to be well. The upgrade is primarily concerned with bugfixes, and it seems to have fixed the bugs I had noted previously.

I saw an article about turning WP into a contact manager last Friday. This is interesting and is in some ways a parallel effort to the Prologue theme in that it seeks to extend the WP engine into another area.

The pupose of an online portfolio is to enable you to point future employers or clients to one single site on the web where they can make a preliminary assessment of you.

You will need to find (or create) a Wordpress theme that allows you to display yourself as clearly and stylishly as possible. The look and feel of the site will be as important as the actual content in determining the first impression that users get. If the site looks messy, or is difficult to naviagte, potential clients or employers may not even bother to dig into the site to find the content that you know is fantastic.

What follows is the opening of an article in Smashing Magazine that is extremely useful, whether you already know the information it contains or not.

I spent the morning up to my knees in php, because I had realised that the navigation inside this site was nowhere near flexible enough to demonstrate what I am talking about…