nuzzaci - an online journal

Background, similar to wikipedia.org, I have a small icon next to all links that will take you away from this site. Up until now I’ve been using a javascript function that I wrote and posted back in December 2006 to find all external links and add the icon. It’s quite a flaky and… ugly script, so I though it would be a good idea to revisit the issue and give it another go.

Thoughts, first I though I would just use the brilliant jQuery javascript library and turn my 10+ lines into 4. This might be a method many would recommend and suggest, but similar to when I approached the “Flickr images are a bit to wide” issue with the nuzzaci Width Watchers plugin, I thought — why not do it server side?

Solution, So, let me present the nuzzaci External Links wordpress plugin. It fairly straight forward.

This plugin will look through your posts before they get displayed and either modify the existing class attribute or create a class attribute with the value external to all links that don’t link within the current domain name. It will ignore all links without http:// and all links where the node is an image. This plugin doesn’t touch the database.

View the script here, and download it here
(the 4 line javascript solution using jQuery can be found here).

Instructions, Download the file, upload it to your plugin folder, log on to your admin section and activate it. Before you see any visual difference on the external links you’ll need to define how you want the class ‘external’ to look like. Here’s an example how you get all external links to look like wikipedia’s external links.

I’m using wordpress 2.0.5, but don’t see why this plugin shouldn’t work on all versions.

Background, Mr Cookie at made-in-england.org asked me if I knew of a way to change the size of the images published to his blog via Flickr. It’s not a case of Mr Cookie being lazy or not capable of resizing images — he’s on holiday and are sending photos directly from his phone to his Flickr account, that then in return post the photo to his blog.

When setting up your blog on Flickr you can select from three sizes; 500, 240 and 100 pixel wide. Most people, like Mr Cookie, find that 500 pixels is a bit to wide. A 500 pixel wide post area forces the lines to run long and extends the recommended 66 characters / 10 words per line (unless, of cause, if you set a really large font-size). 240 pixels and 100 pixels are normally a bit too small if it is a main post image.

Thoughts, The quick fix on Mr Cookie’s blog was a CSS workaround; added a max-width to all the images within the a post — .postclass img{max-width:460px}. But IE 6 and older browsers don’t support max-width.

My next thought was to write a javascript function. But I’m no big fan of the onload flickering behaviour. A webpage need to be fully loaded before any javascript kicks in, so everything done with javascript that changes the look of the site will be noticeable for the trained eye. An example on this is my external link script. Even if there may be ways around the flickering onload behavior, it didn’t feel like the right job for Mr javascript.

Solution, So, let me present the nuzzaci Width Watcher wordpress plugin. It fairly straight forward.

This plugin will look through your posts before they get displayed and make sure that no images are wider than a desired maximum width (specify desired width in the nuzzaciWidthWatcher.php file). If an image is too wide, the plugin will add a height and width attribute to the image so that it will be displayed with the desired width while still keeping the correct ratio. It will ignore all images that already have a width or height attribute and/or if the size is less than the set maximum width. This plugin doesn’t touch the original image or the database.

View the script here, and download it here.

Instructions, Download the file, edit the max width variable, upload it to your plugin folder, log on to your admin section and activate it.

I’m using wordpress 2.0.5 and I have tried it on v2.2, but don’t see why this one shouldn’t work on all versions.

If you are using Wordpress, I suggest you download the WP Tiger Administration by Steve Smith. It’s a plugin that makes the boring and butt ugly admin system of Wordpress look nice. Just like the free clipart used in this post.

• BBC NEWS | World | Americas | ‘War on terror’ loses clear direction
  “…many governments and peoples do not see Iraq as part of the answer to terror. They see it as part of the cause. They therefore want to distance themselves from American policy.”
• “If you’re feeling charitable, you can call it Pop Art. If you’re not, you can call it repeatedly reaching for High Culture and falling woefully short.”
  This quote is taken from a review on one of Madonna’s Confession shows at Wembly in London. The review is very hard on Madonna. But on the same time it’s a very very fun read, and I would not questioned wether Mr Steve Price is right or wrong.
• SVERIGES SEXIGA GEOGRAFI
  For my Swedish audience.
• Pornography drives the development of technology.
• Cambrian House > How it Works > Development Community
  “We all have great ideas. What we lack is a vehicle to realize them. That’s why we created Cambrian House. “We can help you build your Web-based and desktop product ideas that can be sold over the Internet.”
• YouTube - jesus camp trailer
  ‘Holy shit’ isn’t the right word, but the first word that comes to mind.
• Widon’t // ShaunInman.com
  One of those things I have had planed to do, but then someone go’s of and does it before me. Thanks. Simple. Brilliant. And… it’s probably a better solution then what I would have created.
• Subtraction: Meetings in Progress, Lots of Them
• pictures of the family of the person who stole my cell phone posted to my flickr account
  Interesting post, but also the follow up link on the attention it got, practicalist: glare of attention is extremely interesting.
• September 11th 2001 | America’s longest war | Economist.com
  “A nation once joined together in shock and vulnerability is now riven by failure and recrimination”
• Star Wars: The Official Site
  What have changed.
• BBC NEWS | Special Reports | 629 | 629 | How 9/11 changed America: In statistics
  It coming up to 5 years.
• The Discovery Channel Killed Steve Irwin - The Jason Calacanis Weblog
  Another link from airbagindustries ‘Longboard’
• Dubai 1990 vs 2003
  Found this, and many other great links that i post, at airbagindustries ‘Longboard’ rss (link feed).
• Accessible JavaScript Newsticker by Bartelme
  Does what it says on the box.
• cabel.name: Multiplayer Game Of The Year
• YouTube - George Galloway Savages SKY NEWS!
  Very very refreshing.
• starbucks makes podcasts
• Guitar Tapping » SpikedHumor.com
  Truly amazing! and it makes me wonder if he ever learned to play the guitar the… right way.
• BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Irwin killed
  ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Irwin killed.
• Ravers seize £10 million house | News | This is London
  “Hundreds of screaming teenagers are turning up in droves and heavy metal and rock music has been blasting out day and night.” Wow. Didn’t know that the rave scene liked heavy metal and rock!
• web2logo.com
  Feels like I have posted this already. But just in case I haven’t, and you are looking for a lot of web 2 trendy logos - your welcome.
• CTV.ca | ‘Unfortunate’ photo wasn’t tampered with: IKEA
  An IKEA catalogue with a photo that appears to show a dog with a larger-than-normal, human-like appendage has not been tampered with, according to the furniture giant’s Canadian office. The dog, which appears to be a greyhound or whippet, seems to have one.
• glumbert.com | media | Say this tongue twister, or else…
  For willow and her tongue twisters.
• The Identity Archives Project | Keyword-searchable database of logos and brand identity designs
  “The Identity Archives Project website is a free resource, built on the contributions of graphic designers and brand identity specialists.”
• Local Weather - CBS News
  “George Bush spends 58% of US Budget on Whiskey and some Bling for his hommies” Nice little hack ;)
• Optimus keyboard
  Very old. Still very nice.
• TOPSHOP: VIDEO PODCAST
• BBC NEWS | Business | Google chief joins Apple’s board
  Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt has been appointed as a board member of Apple Computers.
• Teen data on Myspace compromised | The Register
  “Many myspacers use CSS [cascading style sheets] to hide their comments, friends list and blog links,” wrote AtariBoy. “These elements are not deleted tho [sic] and are still available publicly to anyone. You can view them by one of two methods below.”
• Musicast
• Pageviews are Obsolete
  “Remember when web site traffic was talked about in terms of “hits”?”

I have received some comments on not having comments enabled on my blog. The reason is that I have read that a lot of people suffer from a high maintenance due to spam. I actually managed to get spam comments on here before the blog was even launched… they do find there way around.

I’m doing an update on the blog soon (version 2)… but I do listen to my audience so I have now turned comments on. Let’s see how it all works out.

Have fun ;)

Im getting a bit… confused and a bit disappointed at myself. As it turns out most of the posts I do here are just ‘link list’ from my daily catch (of surfing), and posted through my little tool that gets them from del.icio.us. A very easy process. If I didn’t have these tools (del.icio.us and my posting tool), I would most probably not post as many links, and more post would be “non-link-related” (actually not more “normal” post, but less posts will be just link nonsense).

So, should I separate the links from the “main” journal entries? Are the links more interesting then my normal posts? For you? For me? What’s her name?

Sure a “side note” or “link roll” feature would be one solution, but then everything just gets cluttered and distracted, and probably more “issues” would arise from this.

For now I will let it be. But maybe in a near future I will either separate the links from the main content or just stop posting them here (or offer three different views (with links, just links, everything))… damn… start to sound like my brother (sorry bro, had to ;) (but thank god though that I don’t like or want to connect my blog with all my bluetooth devices and simultaneously sync them with all my computers that then trough an online application check every hour if I have coffee in the fridge, and then send a text message to my phone)(sorry again (wow bracket nest( . )( . ))(just had to)

anyway, for those who cares:

• subscribe to my ‘for links’ RSS feed
• filter out my ‘normal post’ for my ‘for links’ only
• del.icio.us

Just letting everyone know that I just moved my journal to the root of the server. So we now live directly under www.nuzzaci.co.uk instead of www.nuzzaci.co.uk/journal/

I know it’s a bad thing changing the permanent links etc, but until now the journal haven’t been official. Now it is and here it’s gonna stay.

update
The permanent links might change again. This is since wordpress seem to be very sensitive when it determents if the post is a single post or not (this is so that the comments get displayed, and this is why the comments aren’t displayed at the moment).

At the moment my permanent links structure is:
/year/month/day/hour:minute:second

I wouldn’t mind take the seconds out, since I unlikely will post two post’s the same minute. But if I don’t have the second’s the comments will not work.

My decision on not having the post-title in the permanent link, and only having the time, also seem to have fuck up when you ‘url’ surf (like go directly to /year/month/ to have a look at all post posted that month) and have a archive page.
If you have an archive page, and people ‘url’ surf - they get redirected to the archive page and to what they requested.

It’s been a month since I started this journal. One month and this is my 34′th post. That’s not to bad, I have an average over one post per day (yeah, most of them are just link list’s, I know. But it still something)!

So how have it been?
Good and bad.

Well, the blog tool I’m using is Wordpress. Saved as draft on the admin tool is a post titled ‘wordpress frustration’…

Wordpress is a good blogging tool. It’s easy but… everything feels like a hack or patch. Everything feels and is more complicated then it has to be (and least for me). And it’s slow! Before I have reached where I want with it I have probably put down more time tuning it then it would take building my own system.

A tips, from me to you:

If you are about to give wordpress a go, and have a bit of web techy knowledge - don’t try to change the default theme to do what you want it to do - just delete everything and create your know.

Before I installed wordpress I actually was in the making of my own blog platform/system. But I reach a point when I thought: Let’s start writing instead of building - so I did.

Question:

Then why did I go with wordpress then? There are other tools out there!

Answer:

Well most of them aren’t better (for my needs. at least.).

I have installed textpattern, not played with it yet though. Have heard a lot of good things about it and people who have the same feelings as me towards wordpress have found textpattern spot on. Seems brilliant. So it might just be the cure.

Related links

• Wordpress
• Textpattern