shawn rider dot com

I decided to re-skin the site for the new year. I’m about 85% finished, but I am so excited I couldn’t resist making it active on the site. So to celebrate the new skin, here’s a video from Jamie T.

YouTube - Jamie T - Calm Down Dearest

This is just a quick post to give a shout-out to some cool plugins / widgets I have recently included in the site. I’ll be writing more about some of these later. As I move into the Wordpress world, I’m continually impressed with how easy it is to contribute. But so far, everything I’ve thought of to contribute has been created already. Which is wonderful. It means that there is such a lively community that the basic needs are easily met, even with a recent major update and everyone porting plugins to widgets. That allows people to get more and more creative with the plugins and widgets they create, which should mean cool things to come…

For now, I will explain the headline here: This is how Google translates the title of my site– my name is Shawn Rider, yet French Google thinks “rider” should be translated. I love it. Thanks to Trevor Creech, who created the Translate widget for Wordpress. You can click the flags in the sidebar and get this site in your preferred language (well, of the few that are readily translated online, but that’s not Mr. Creech’s fault).

I also incorporated a box that features my Xbox 360’s blog. Yeah. I’m working on an article for GF! about this, but the short story is: My Xbox 360 has its own blog. It’s fun to read. Thanks to the fine folks at 360voice for creating this service.

Other things new to the site are tags (thanks to the widely used and powerful UTW) and SparkStats, that little graph thing in the sidebar. Sparklines are small graphs meant to fit in-line with text. SparkStats renders my posting and your commenting activity as a graphic. The height of the line represents number of posts, and the opacity represents number of comments. The graph shows 30 days worth of info, so we’ll have to wait until June or so to really get an idea of what’s up.

Aside from a bunch of graphic/style tweaking, that’s all I’ve been up to here.

Development on the new site proceeds. I am very close to making this active on the main page. I just have to settle down to do the style, which will be no small feat, I’m sure. I have a couple ideas beginning to rumble around, so I’ll try a few things out and see what happens.

Today I managed to get some comments spam protection (the little Math quiz), although I think there are better ways to handle that. I’d like to try some new things I’ve seen out there, such as asking people to recognize certain images. It seems like it should be easy enough to implement. Then again, it’s not much of a problem for me now, so I think I’ll content myself with the math questions and see how things go.

Not much new on the site, but I’m pretty much done converting the old work pages into the new site. For future projects I’ll blog more about them in-progress, so they’ll have accompanying postings, but the main pages will remain pretty lean listings of my major projects. Although I can already feel rising issues of genre and formal classifications…

I did add in a Gravatar feature that will automatically link in people’s Gravatar’s based on their email addresses. I think it’s a cool idea, although I once again blanked on what to make for my Gravatar. And as I was implementing it, I realized that Wordpress is not using the comments.php file in my theme directory, but rather the comments.php file in the default theme dir. Weird, eh? I found the line in wp-includes/comment-functions.php (line 36 if I remember correctly) that defines the template to be used for comments, and, assuming that code works OK, I imagine it must be something with my environmental variables? Or maybe a setting the theme would have set? I am stumped, but it’s not such a big deal for me now.

I have downloaded the Cloudy Plugin for WordPress, which does a little dynamic analysis to generate a keyword cloud. I have been excited by these clouds since I saw it first on Tim O’Reilly’s Radar. So I had to modify it a little bit to get it to work with my modified WP table names, but then I started looking at it, and I have done a good amount to optimize the layout for my site. I can now style the whole cloud as well as each word. I think I will re-work the plugin to add two things: First, to add a time-based fading to the words I will modify the formatting to utilize a set scale of size and opacity. Second, I will implement time-based fading, which will cause the words to fade as they are not used (i.e. if I don’t write about Google for two weeks, then the Google keyword in the cloud fades out and eventually disappears). I think this will help with optimization of the analysis, too; it seems like it will slow things down as the site gets larger and larger unless there’s some kind of date-limit.

Like the headline says. I’m in-progress on a new version of ShawnRider.com which will unite my blogging habits with the stuff that’s already available. It should be amazingly wonderful. I’ve finally settled on WordPress for the site, which is so far working out very nicely. I am digging the PHP base of WordPress, and it’s amazing I haven’t heard more raves about it from friends. I can see already that the themes setup and whatnot is a bit wild — I’ve seen people doing things in a couple different ways already — but I like that it’s all so transparent and very easy to hack-in different elements.

I’ve already managed to accomplish a lot by just perusing existing plugins, and I’m well on my way to having this theme completely customized. I’ve already got the bulk of my construction working. I am very happy with things so far.