Tinkering

:computer: When I took my first computer science class in high school I had no idea how it would affect the rest of my life. I just didn’t want to take keyboarding and it was the only computer class that didn’t require it. Fifteen years later I’m still thinking about code when I’m supposed to be working on other things and staying up “just five more minutes” to fix the bug I’ve almost cornered.

Back then it was with Pascal programs. Now it’s with the blogs. And while I notice the changes and think they’re great, I really doubt most people even notice them. So now I’m going to tell you about my latest tinkerings and you can go “oooh” and “aaaah” even if you have no idea what I’m talking about. Humor me.

Last week I decided I wanted to do some major tinkering with some aspects of our blogs. I started with our family one. There were a few things I wanted it to be able to do that, for me at least, would make it better.

The first thing I did was figure out how to add the avatar of the writer to the post so that you can see at a glance if it is one of those rare posts that Brett writes (there have only been 4), or if it’s just another one of mine. The code I used to do that also allows registered users to upload their own avatar that will go with their comments if they don’t want a Gravatar or would rather have something different on our blog. And you have to admit, that’s pretty cool. So while I don’t need to put my avatar with the posts here, I added the local upload of avatars to Random Giggles as well. Yea tiny pictures!

That took a few days tinkering before I decided I liked how it was positioned and formatted. I came home one day and told Brett I’d been doing more tinkering and he replied matter-of-factly, “I know.” I asked if he’d been watching and had seen the changes. He hadn’t. :straight: But he understands tinkering and knew I wouldn’t let it alone for a while. The advantages of being married to another “just five more minutes for this bug” kind of person. This weekend he did a lot of tinkering on his personal code project too.

That tinkering done (for now), I moved on to the next. We had some photo pages related to our wedding on Ooh Shemo that were part of the site but not part of the blog. I decided to make them part of the blog. Moving the basic code wasn’t hard. Finding the right video file to convert for the videos was annoying because I kept grabbing the slightly wrong one. But eventually I got them all. And then I needed to figure out something to do with the large (120) photo album of wedding photos we had. When I read the comics on-line, one site lets you enlarge the image right there on the page. I figured I could figure that out. And that was my Sunday afternoon.

I’d also read it was possible to have different themes/headers for different categories and posts with WordPress. And I wanted to figure that out. I wanted to keep the banner image at the top of those pages about our wedding to be a picture from our wedding. An if/else statement, an array of page names, and some frustrating punctuation later and ta-da! The pages related to our wedding will always have a picture from our wedding at the top regardless of what image we have on the rest of the pages.

And since that tinkering worked so well, I’m going to be expanding it over here too. Then posts about Christmas or in December will automatically have the December feel to it. Posts about BYU football will have the stadium at the top. July will always have a flag on it. … The possibilities are endless!!! (And so is my tinkering.)