Did I mention the Legos?

The other day, I learned (somewhat the hard way) about PHP handlers within .htaccess. Essentially, your server can be running a very old version of PHP, and you can override this by adding a line in your .htaccess file (where, among other things, you can also require a username/password for access to your site):

AddHandler php5-script .php

This line forces any .php files in that directory to be executed as PHP5 code. If you’re looking to remove the user/pass from your site, it’s probably a good idea to check out your .htaccess file first, to be sure it’s not including something like the above. If it is, chances are the server is running an old version of PHP, and if you remove/rename .htaccess, your site will most likely throw a PHP error. Fun!

After figuring this out, I did a bit of research into the things you can do with .htaccess. The mod_rewrite plugin lets you redirect URLs without the user knowing. Some servers have this by default, so all you have to put in .htaccess is -

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old\.html$ new.html

If you WANT your users to know they’re being redirected, you’d add an [R] at the end of your RewriteRule line.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing more digging into .htaccess tomorrow.

About a year ago I was playing softball and slid headfirst into home plate. The result was a separated and dislocated shoulder, for which I did not seek medical treatment until the next day. After seeing the doc everything seemed fine I’m sure mostly because of the vicodins, but generally things were fine. I stopped using the sling after a few weeks, and slowly but surely it felt better. My shoulder still hurt, but I figured it was still healing.

A month or two later, it still hurt. Primarily the back of it, near the shoulder blade. It felt like someone was sticking a hot poker into the back of my shoulder, burning whatever muscles it could, followed by random yet sharp, sharp pains. It’s hard for me to remember the precise order of everything that happened in the months after the initial injury, but it felt something like this: doctor, doctor, mri, physical therapy (x2 per week for 8 weeks), doctor, x-ray, mri, doctor, needles, doctor, more needles, more physical therapy, doctor, occupational therapy. And I find myself sitting here, over a year later, in pain.

The initial theory was that I had pinched a nerve in my back or neck. Often, when nerves are pinched in the neck, it can cause symptoms of pain in the neck, shoulder, or even elbow or fingers. Another theory was that I had torn a disc in my neck – this one turned out to be true. I saw a spine specialist who told me the MRI on my neck had indeed shown a torn disc, only slightly, and that some injections would help it heal. It had been unable to heal due to the swelling around it. So, we did the injections. But these are no run of the mill injections. It’s not a cortisone shot. It’s this: Cervical Facet Joint Injection. Fun!

At first I was pretty hopeful and optimistic that we had found the solution (well, that my doctor had found the solution). It did feel better for a while, maybe about a week. It was a lovely week. And then it was back to what I now know as normal. I did a second set of injections for kicks, and after no positive results, was referred to another doctor who basically recommended I do Physical Therapy (again) as well as Occupational Therapy. The theory there was, I spend much of the day in front of a computer, and my posture most likely is just awful. So, I did 12 weeks of PT and OT, twice a week.

I sit here today, still in pain. It’s definitely not as bad as it was a year ago. I know that for sure, and I’m grateful of that because it was really, really bad. But on occasion it’s still too painful for me to even sit still.

I’m writing this mostly because I feel like I have nothing else to write about, but also because there’s a small part of me that hopes a doctor is reading this somewhere and thinking “I know EXACTLY what she needs to fix her shoulder forever.”

Please?

On Saturday I wrote about the admin menu I found for WordPress called Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu. When I emailed the tech team at work, I got a response from Jenn:

Viper’s admin bar embeds in the front end… it works well w/ admin trim interface (remove footer links and ‘howdy’, etc) + cms dashboard (adds big publishing buttons to the dashboard).

The first, Viper’s admin bar, is essentially the same thing as the other admin bar, except it is themed like the same bar on WordPress.com. Very clean, pretty, useful, and you can pick and choose which items you want or don’t want in the bar (the other plugin does not have this option). It also has the option to show on the homepage when you’re logged in, which is pretty much the only thing the other plugin was lacking.

Perhaps most importantly, it lets you set the items for the menu bar per account (per user). I would hope that this is one step closer to settings in plugins having role definitions, i.e. having the admin set the menu bar for admins as a whole, authors, contributors, etc.

What I wish you could do with Viper’s plugin is get rid of the other menu on the left sidebar that is standard for WordPress (though I suppose I could do this manually). This way, we could customize the admin menu for clients more easily, showing them only the pieces they would need to use. The especially important advantage to this is, you would be able to hide the theme editor from those who may inadvertently edit .css or page templates, and thus totally bork the theme. Tip: The settings for this plugin live under Tools, not Settings.

The Admin Trim Interface plugin is also pretty great. This lives under Appearance, and lets you pick and choose which pieces of the admin theme you’d like to have disappear. I think it’s a relatively easy thing to do in the .css, but again, nice to have in a plugin to make the admin section of your site more client friendly.

One thing I haven’t tried yet (also recommended by Jenn) is the WordPress Option Tree (also here). If you’ve ever worked with a Wootheme (this theme is one), they all generally come with built-in theme options. These options are normally something you’d have to know a bit of code, or html, in order to change. The WooThemes menus let you select from a variety of stylesheets (if the theme has them, of course), exclude pages from the navigation, display full content or the excerpt on the homepage, etc.

If you installed all of these plugins, I’m pretty positive you’d have a fully customized, client/kid/adult/internet-dummy/developer friendly admin section of your site.

Once you enable ShareThis, and set the links to show up for each post, it automatically grabs the information for that post when you share it. So, if you just copy the code for ShareThis to another place on your site, it won’t work, because it’s no longer pulling the actual post info: Title, URL, etc.

I fixed this by adding in a few WordPress functions that call for the title and URL of the post. For example, instead of doing this:

<span class=’st_facebook’ st_title=’{TITLE}’ st_url=’{URL}’ ></span>

I called for the actual permalink and title of the post. Like so:

<span class=’st_facebook’ st_title=’<?php the_title()?>’ st_url=’<?php the_permalink()?>’ ></span>

Seems to me this is a pretty awesome tweak to ShareThis if you don’t want it at the end of each post.

For one, I needed a page that would display posts from my EchoDitto blog and EchoDitto labs blog. I probably over-engineered this (in fact, I know I did), but rather than keep it simple… I downloaded and installed FeedWordpress. This plugin reminds me of Feeds (and Feed Aggregator) for Drupal – it basically does the same thing. I can pull a feed in from anywhere, and it creates posts from that feed as posts on my site. You can see this in action here. I set it up to automatically categorize posts in a certain category, and then created a page template to have it display posts of that category using <?php query_posts(‘category_name=echoditto’); ?>. This is the part I’m sure I over-engineered. There must be an easier way.

In any case…

The second plugin I am using is called Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu. Another comparison: this one is quite like Administration Menu for Drupal. It provides a nice admin menu. It removes the standard sidebar admin menu and instead gives you a horizontal one at the top with dropdowns. You can customize colors, remove the WordPress admin header (as I have done here).

Other than that, the plugins I have installed are relatively standard. I’ve made some theme tweaks (this one is from WooThemes), including adding a “Post a Comment” link in the left sidebar for each post and changing the link colors to NOT be a hideous red (sorry theme developer, I do love the theme though). I still need to fix instances of text running out of appropriate areas (twitter links in the sidebar) and figure out how to actually blog on this thing regularly.

- I’ve become really interested and fully invested in upping my technical skills, particularly w/ php, mysql, Drupal, etc. More to come on that subject.

- Despite my recent struggles with WordPress I’ve decided to keep this blog on WordPress for the time being. I don’t love WordPress for many reasons, but I don’t hate it either. It makes blogging pretty easy, and as long as that’s all you want to do it definitely works. Redesign forthcoming. I have a ‘real’ website in development elsewhere. I started development on it in WordPress and am slowly moving over to Drupal.

- I also have a pretty fun php project in the works. Launches in early September. Stay tuned.

- Check out centerfieldgate.com, a Washington Nationals blog customized and maintained by yours truly. You may remember a post from last year in which I mentioned my work on river-dogz. I’m happy to say that my skillz are a bit better than back then. Granted I’m using a stock theme but all of it just generally looks better. It’s also a recent addition to the NL East Chatter community. Hawt.

- I helped out a bunch on masspoetry.org and attended the festival last October. I’m not helping as much with it this year given other commitments but it’s still a really awesome event so you should probably go to masspoetry.org. Masspoetry.org. Oh also, you’re only cool if you actually attend the festival!

- I developed and was tech support for vetsforobama.org during most of his campaign until the campaign actually took the site over. That’s probably the site I am most proud of on my resume, given tons of custom design work and functionality, trying to manage a massive petition, and pretty much always being on call for any site issues despite my objections (“I have a job!”). They had to take the site down for legal reasons after the campaign ended, but maybe I’ll find a screenshot and post it later. He won, too, so that doesn’t hurt.

- I also did The Truth About Palin and The Truth About McCain. Tumblr is fun.

- I moved to Boston from DC successfully, with my 2 cats. I’m in the same crappy apartment but moving to a better one soon (September 1).

- Oh, I signed up for Twitter. If you came here from me posting a link to Twitter, that’s awesome. If not, email me if you want my twitter name or just want to stalk me.

- that reminds me, I need to set up a penfall.com email address

- I’m getting a new iPhone, suckas.

- I may start to write those Musings again soon. Maybe musings from Cambridge? Ideas are welcome.

I think that’s it. I’m on the Acela to DC at the moment, it’s 7am, I’ve been awake for 3 hours and only got 3.5hrs of sleep. I have a long day ahead, a long week ahead, and I’ve officially exhausted my want or ability to write (or say?) anything creative at least for the next 24 hours. Time to go check Google Analytics and see if Tweeting about this made any difference in site traffic.

You’ll notice that my website-building skills are pretty minimal (the header could use some work), but all in all I’m quite proud of myself! I even figured out how to get an image to show up in a text widget – for me, that’s a huge accomplishment. Also, changing the fonts or text size was initially a challenge but now I find myself talking about font families and scrolling through stylesheets. It’s crazy! (for me it’s crazy.)

As for changing colors, well, I’m just not there yet. I mean, can someone please tell me what this means? As I began working with code and trying to figure it all out, the colors seemed pretty self explanatory. Find the ’333′ in the stylesheet for the header color, change it to ’033′ and you’ll get a new color (dark blue), right? Wrong.

Now I find myself working even harder on my own site (I’d link to it, but it’s currently password protected), trying new things, working with code and challenging myself more and more to try to make a website not only look good, but go past the original theme and make it my own. Once I take the password protection off it’s going to be great – not just visually, but it is and will be a full collection of my writing, research, and some photos.

A final note about river-dogz - I think it would be pretty awesome to have an embedded calendar (or something similar) to show the Nats season schedule. Any suggestions for how to go about that?

Since being at South by Southwest and doing my best to blog about all of the amazing panels I have attended (or at least take detailed notes for future posts), I’ve come to the realization that I have deprived my loyal readers (all four of you) of my daily rantings, ravings, thoughts, insights, poems, and everything else.

Well, that’s going to change, starting now. I’m committing myself to at least 5 posts per week, if not more. Welcome back Penfall lovers – I have returned!