SonicChicken blog

Several months ago, Barb signed us up to host a French foreign exchange student. We were hoping to have our remodeling project finished before that time came, but unfortunately we were still living in a house under construction when Claire arrived. The poor girl spent three weeks living with us in less-than-ideal conditions. We took a few weeks off from remodeling and Continue reading ‘Claire’s visit’

We went looking for a source for Nutella here in Sacramento last week. Neither Barb nor I had seen it in “regular” grocery stores, so we checked all the specialty (read “expensive”) stores: Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, etc. Barb finally found it at Corti Bros., but of course it was a bit pricey–about $4 for a 13 oz jar.

I did a web search for “nutella sacramento” and stumbled across a post on BeckyJSacto’s blog. (She’s got a lot of good suggestions in that article as well as others on her blog–check her out!) She told us to check the peanut butter section at Raley’s: lo and behold, there it was, and about $.30 cheaper than Corti’s.

But I found the ultimate deal last night. CostCo is selling a 2-pack of monster jars (750 g, just over twice the size of the regular jars) for about $8. That works out to less than $2 per (13 oz.) jar. w00t!

Took a bit of work, but tags are back up! I was originally (2005) using Felix Wong’s plugin, but it hasn’t been updated yet. So I installed the latest (and final, sob!) version of Ultimate Tag Warrior by Christine Davis. UTW looks awesome from what I’ve seen so far.

So now I’ve got several hundred old posts with obsolete tags, and a fancy new tag engine. I took a look at some of Felix’s tag code, had a look at the database table(s) he was using, and figured out how he was storing tags. UTW has a slick little import/export feature for tags, but it only writes/saves tags in custom fields. (Edit one of your posts and look down near the bottom of the page for the “Custom Fields” section.) After figuring out how WordPress stores these custom fields in the database, I was ready to try and copy my old tags into “custom fields”, from which I would be able to import them into UTW.

The only difficulty I had was gathering multiple tags into a single custom field–Felix’s system created a separate row in the database for each tag on each post, whereas UTW’s import process wants all tags for one post in a single custom field. A little digging in the MySQL 4.1 manual gave me the answer: the GROUP_CONCAT aggregating function. I wrote the following query to gather all the old tags (from table ’sc_tags_items’) and place them as a comma-separated list into a ‘UTW_tags’ custom field for each post:

insert into sc_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value) 
    select post_id
            , 'UTW_tags'
            , group_concat(tag_name separator ',') 
        from sc_tags_items 
        group by post_id;

After that, all I needed to do was tell UTW (on the admin interface go to Manage / Tags) the name of the custom field and what the separator was, then click the “Import from Custom Field” button. I got a few errors, probably from odd characters in some of my old tags, but it looks like all (or nearly all) of my tags are back. I fiddled around trying to find what might have caused the errors, but after an hour or so I’ve given that up as a bad job. So as soon as I finish this post, I’ll restore my “/remodel” link to redirect as it was intended to.

My old theme, Journalized Blue, didn’t quite survive yesterday’s WordPress upgrade. I’ve downloaded Journalized v2 (beta), but while I was at it I decided to go “theme shopping”. I was looking for a 2- or 3-column fluid layout–<rant>I hate it when web pages don’t display properly merely because my browser window’s geometry isn’t what the author expects!</rant> Anyway…

I found Srini G’s Fluid Blue theme. Nearly a perfect fit, it’s a two-column theme that’s truly fluid! (Lots of the “fluid width” themes on the WordPress Theme Viewer are merely fixed-width themes that center themselves in wider-than-expected browser windows and pop up horizontal scroll bars in “narrow” windows. Oops! Ranting again…) It also supports sidebar widgets, which I’d like to fiddle with. Added bonus: version 1.1 is ultra-fresh, having been released a mere three days ago.

Now, in spite of the above rants, I found a fixed-width theme that I just can’t do without: Dean J. Robinson’s Redoable is gorgeous! I’m gonna have to see if I can hack that into a fluid layout. Even if I can’t fluidize it, I’ll keep the theme around just so I can gawk at it once in a while with a theme switcher.

Speaking of theme switchers, I stumbled across an excellent how-to for Ryan’s theme previewer over on YGG: How to work on your blog without anyone having the slightest clue. Granted, installing a WordPress plugin is easy: Upload to your wp-content/plugins directory, then activate via the Plugins tab on the admin interface. (Still, it would have been good to include those instructions in the plugin.) The thing I found very cool about Travis’ post on YGG was how he’s using the theme previewer to tweak/debug themes and/or plugins without exposing the code-in-progress to his viewers. Great thinking!

So now I’ve got some new themes to play with. I had to disable the old theme switcher, since it wasn’t working quite right under WP 2.2.2. “Fluid Blue” is the theme du jour, at least for the time being…

The network connection at our house is still pretty wonky. Some days it’ll work (at least for a few hours), and some days all I see is a flashing red “DSL” light on the modem. It’s put a bit of a crimp in my blogging.

I wasn’t able to find underground-rated cable at Home Depot, but I managed to get a 100′ spool of indoor-outdoor cable. I’m going to pull this through the conduit (hopefully tonight!) and see if that fixes the network connection.