Notes on WordPress, php, html, css, search engines, and anything else that I think is worth remarking on.
I've always had a distrust of WordPress 'plugins', and tried to keep them to a minimum, especially when I had a lot of sites to administrate. But on this site, I decided to try something different, and threw in any plugin that looked interesting.
More: Jettison JetPack ...
Just when I finished all the work on the slideshows, I found a serious flaw in the Nivo Slider plugin. If you put multiple slideshows on a page, each one clobbers the one before, and you only get the last one. I guess they never tested that.
More: More Bad Programming ...
A while ago I said I couldn't find where the new Nivo Slider slideshow plugin (above) keeps its data. That's because it doesn't keep it anywhere. It generates each slideshow on the fly from scratch, with lord-knows how many database calls. I suspected that it was grossly inefficient, and I was right.
More: More Bad Programming II ...
Every time I think I'm done with my "Simple" WordPress theme, I think of some new feature, or some way existing code could be tighter and faster.
More: New Features ...
After going through a bunch of WordPress slideshow plugins before I finally found a good one, I have started adding new photos of my projects. Eventually, each one will start out with a slideshow of the finished product, followed by whatever build details I have for it. Some of them are quite lengthy.
More: New Photos and Slideshows ...
WordPress is primarily a blogger, and its favorite thing in the world to do is spit out your blog posts in descending order by date. But it doesn't want to do that for pages or anything else.
More: Pressing Words ...
Since Gargle keeps track of everything, I like to keep track of them. So I added some 'instrumentation' (code) to the site to keep track of when and where their 'spider' comes snooping through. And I was shocked. Even as I was writing the code, I started collecting hits from Gargle, and quite a few. In fact, they seem to be in here every few minutes !
More: R-E-S-P-E-C-T ! ...
Rather than 'responsive web design', which is a catchy name for something that just doesn't work and never will, this site is designed with what I call Rational Web Design.
More: Rational Web Design ...
The new slideshow
A while ago, I took a look at the database tables, and realized that about half of the database was due to the slideshow plugin MetaSlider. MetaSlider crapped out thousands of entries across multiple tables. What bothers me is not so much the waste of storage space as the incredible inefficiency of having to retrieve all of that bit by bit from the database server. I did my best to minimize that kind of inefficiency, while the writers of MetaSlider did the opposite. In computer programming, more is almost never better.
More: Really Bad Programming ...
I recently set up a new account on Bluehost to set up another website using my simple framework on WordPress. Simple is developing into something far more powerful than I originally intended.
This site is grafted onto an account that is over 10 years old now. After working with the new account a while, I began to see differences between the old and the new. Specifically, the new account was subject to server caching of php pages. This can be quite maddening for a developer, as your changes just don't show up, at least not until the cache gets stale and refreshes.
More: Server Caching Madness ...
White pine is the low-grade cheap stuff you find at most home centers. Although strong enough for most things, it is very soft and prone to surface damage. White pine is also prone to dark marks from pitch. These can turn up inside pieces that otherwise looked clean.
More: White Pine ...