Web Development/Design

I’ve been building a custom WordPress theme this week for a web development client, so I haven’t been able to make it over to the shop to work on shoes.

Actually the project is more about using WordPress as a CMS than simply building a theme. After days of research this week, I’ve learned the two following things:

The Archive page can be passed a date with a specific category and it will only display posts from that category for that date. Try if for yourself. The Archive Widget though can’t be made to pass a category, and unfortunately there aren’t really any good flexible widgets for doing this either. I had hoped to find a snippet of code that would do this somewhere and put it place of the get_sidebar() call, but no luck (and it would take too long to code it myself / I’m too lazy to try). wp_get_archives can’t be passed a category either. This is all very strange because otherwise WordPress is surprisingly flexible.

WP_Query is the best friend that someone could have when trying to do some non-standard wordpress templating, such as creating a page to display posts belonging to only one category.

Ok, so all of this is really boring. There’s a reason that I don’t post about my web development work. I’m thinking though that a custom template for this blog might come out of all this research at some point. That’s sort of fun, right?

fad lib : Those of you who are my friends on facebook have already experienced the majesty that is fad lib, but for any of you that are not, it’s a phrasal template word game that updates my facebook status. Here is a quick explanation of how it works.

A message is posted at a random time to my facebook page requesting that someone click on a link to update my status.

The link takes you to a form with some fields to fill out.

When the form is submitted, those form fields are used to complete a message, which is then posted to my facebook page.

The concept is fairly simple. Creating the application though required some research and a fair bit of trial and error. More on this later.

Last week I had a night were I just wasn’t sleeping very well. One of those nights where it’s 3 am and you find yourself lying in bed trying to go back fully to sleep but just not being able to make it happen. And while I was trying to not let my mind start racing, I had a thought, actually I’d say it was somewhere between a thought and a dream. It was about a facebook application. A truly pointless application that to my half asleep brain didn’t seem very difficult to build and that might entertain my friends for a day or so. I thought about it for a few minutes and finally fell back asleep.

When I woke up in the morning I actually remembered the idea and started to think about it again with a more clear mind. Part of the application would require some PHP and was very straightforward. But integrating it into facebook? I had no idea what that required, so I started doing a little research. It turns out that facebook has a huge amount of documentation on how to do this, but the documentation is confusing. Perhaps it’s because I don’t come from a computer science background, but sometimes documentation for these things seems to be lacking fundamental information. I always feel like I’ve come in on a conversation five minutes too late and am just trying to catch up on what the hell is going on. Fortunately there are a few websites with some tutorials that helped to clarify things.

So, this morning I’ve started in on Fad Lib, a little exercise into building a truly pointless facebook application. No idea when I’ll be done with it, and I’ve already hit a few snags, but have managed to figure out a few things… such as you can’t create a message asking a user to extend permissions for an application unless you use FBML (facebook mark-up language). I’ll stop there today before this becomes even more boring… More later!

My “day job” has been taking precedence of my time lately and while learning some new things, I combined together a few of them and made this piece of completely pointless JavaScript controlled CSS.