I have been working a lot lately on customizing my personal homepage theme. One thing I have not been happy about has been the right sidebar. The widget heading were just html text and didn’t have the rendered look that I wanted. I decided to reformat the sidebar and use images for the headings rather than just text. I had done some custom sidebars before but I wasn’t sure how to style each widget independently. The problem is that WP gives a generic class to each sidebar widget and you are only able to style all of them to look the same. The first place I looked for a function to do...

One problem with the ways that Wordpress handles excerpt is that it always strips the HTML out. This is fine for most casual bloggers but when you are really trying to customize something for a client, it simply doesn’t cut it. What we wanted to do was use some of the NextGen Gallery markdown code in the “Excerpt” box of the post and have Wordpress render this in the category archive. After some initial research I discovered that this markdown code is called “shortcode” in WP terminology. They have a whole Shortcode API. Now it was just a matter of finding the correct...

My friend Andy recently asked me to help him redesign his website. He runs fly fishing tours here in Mongolia and wasn’t happy with his current site design. He recently switched most of his websites from Joomla! over to Wordpress. When he came to me with the request I was very excited to help as most of my templating/design experience has been strictly for Joomla! or custom projects, I had yet to really delve into creating a Wordpress theme. During the whole process I learned quite a bit about the inner workings of Wordpress and have already applied this knowledge to working on my own blog...

I just received an email from one of my old Peace Corps friends who lives in D.C. and she said that she saw me on TV yesterday. There was a big (by mongolian standards) party at Grand Khan Irish Pub for the superbowl. Me and some buddies woke up early so we could catch the game. I was quite surprised to see so many people, especially Mongolians who were totally hyped about the game. While I was there a reporter I knew gave me an interview for the AP. Little did I know it would wind up on CNN. Life goal #64 – 15 Seconds of fame. CHECK!

Obviously web reporting is nothing really new; one basic approach is this: Aggregate your data and output it in some kind of structured format, usually XML Request this information and generate some visualizations of it Serve these visualizations through a web server Pretty basic stuff. All of the tools that I have seen essentially make one or all of these processes easier. Unfortunately no matter what tools you choose, the rule of engineering stands: Fast, cheap, good – choose two In this context it is more like: Less proprietary code, free software, easy to use/maintain – choose...