I felt a pang of anxiety when I read that Interstate Bakeries Corporation has entered Chapter 11 (via BoingBoing). They manufacture Twinkies!
I haven't had one in years, finding them far too sweet, but they're one of America's Great Pop Cultural References. The deep fried twinkie is a testament to this food's continuing ability to frighten and intrigue carb addicts everwhere. And without them, our slang would not be quite as sweet.
Perhaps they will be transmuted to organic form or become haute cuisine, but I'd hate to see the original Twinkie go away. So do your duty and buy a box (just don't eat them all at once, geez). Pick up a loaf of Wonder Bread while you're at it!
My sister commented that her local NPR station, WRNI, seems to be up for sale...distressing! That reminded me of this article about the rise of 'middlebrow culture' and how the nature of public radio changed when threats to their endowment allowed them to seek advert--er, underwriting from other sources. Also, how the demand for talk and news has displaced classical music over the years. Great article.
UPDATE: You can download a much more useful plugin at from Ryan Duff's site: wp-contactform. There's also a version with more validation of the email address (through DNS, no less) called PXSMail, which I haven't tried.
My own contact page now uses wp-contactform...I hope my email contact woes go away now :-) For historical purposes, I'm leaving the old information up.
UPDATE: Use Ryan Duff's WP-ContactForm Plugin instead.
I decided not to put my contact address directly online, but my original instructions kinda sucked. So I modified the php email script at StarGeek to work for my contact page.
To make the basic form look like the rest of this site, I copied index.php as email.php and replaced everything in the content div with the contents of this text file
Instructions
Just replace with your email address, and this might work for you too. Use email.php for your email links, and this should work. The original script makes some assumptions about how sendmail is setup on your server, so you'll need to dig into it. I'm not a PHP or linux expert, so your mileage may vary.
The CSS class might not work for IE users though unless you are applying text-align:center in a containing DIV outside of this block, or so I'm told.
Other Notes
I also was reading about a built-in email validation function at ScriptyGoddess, so I put that in too.
I'm sometimes distracted by too many project ideas. When the ideas pile up, my productivity sinks because I keep thinking about them, and multitasking slows me down. To keep focused, I evolved a mind trick called The Pickle Jar that, despite its hokey name, actually works for me. It got me through my thesis, when writing was the last thing I felt like doing.
The Pickle Jar is an actual glass jar that once held pickles. Next to it is a square pad of paper, about 4 inches on the side. To get unrelated thoughts out of my mind, I write down a brief synopsis down, fold it twice, and put it into the Jar.
The physical act of writing down, folding, and then "pickling" the idea for later consumption is weirdly cathartic. Since I'm no longer in danger of forgetting the thought, I can relax. The act of formulating on paper has also satisfied the urge to follow up on it. The size of the paper also prevents you from writing too much...there's just enough room to get the essence of the idea down.
The best part: You can see that you've got the ideas queued up, but it's hard to retrieve them. They're in a jar! Getting at the idea entails trying to stick your hand in the jar (which shouldn't fit, if you've chosen your glassware wisely), or dumping them out in a mess and unfolding all of them. It's just inconvenient enough that I tend not to look unless I really am in the mood. The use is similar to that of a piggy bank, in that it encourages easy deposit but prevents casual withdrawal. So you tend to deposit and get on with your life, which in my case is getting back to #&!@*! work.
One side effect of the Jar... after pickling, some of those ideas don't really seem that interesting anymore, so I end up tossing most of them.
Sadly, my official Pickle Jar was destroyed or lost during my last move, so I'm going to try using WordPress as the idea containment system. I suspect it might not work, but I'm curious to see if the physical act of pickling is as important as I thought.
(Update: I repurposed a canning jar as the new Physical Pickle Jar. See the picture!)
ACHTUNG!
The Markdown Image Hack has been retired. Please check out Lazy Image Layout instead!
The code has been separated from Markdown, and is now a stand-alone plugin called LazyImages.
Continuing with the markdown/pictpress hack, this post with serve as a to-do / issues list.
Download MDIH 0.3, the MDIH 0.3 changes, or follow the development history.
In version 0.2, note that the syntax has changed, so you will have to update your old posts if you were using 0.1. But no one was, so I doubt it will be a problem :-)
done I want to add a special popup value for the link url, which would automagically put the full size image in its own tasty window. I'm not sure where I would insert the javascript code for this in a portable way. For all I know, there is built-in javascript already in WordPress, so I should do some more digging.
done What about GIFs? So far, this is JPEG only! I can either snoop the file's extension, or maybe there is some kind of "magic number" routine that can identify filetype in PHP. That would save me some string processing work :-)
fixed I just realized that I have the syntax kind of backwards. I should put the link as the second parameter, and have all the image control in the first link. This came to me when I found myself wishing I could use the global link defs in markdown. Maybe something like...
!@[image_uri](url "title")(L 120)
!@[image_uri][id](L 120)
...where the parameters get their own little extension parens. I think I can write a regex that treats that last as optional, and it can default to a standard left-justified thumbnail. Or maybe I don't use regex at all on the individual backreference level and just get the entire match, and EXPLODE it. That would make life easier :-)
done Use global link defs, because I love 'em.
done It would be useful to have a CLEAR ALL indicator. The half-assed way I'm designating alignment (due entirely to my weak grasp of regular expressions) could be extended to support this, perhaps by using lower-case to mean "float" and upper-case to mean "clear, then float".
handled The way alignment and width are glommed together is because I wasn't sure how to handle extra or out-of-order parameters gracefully using regular expression references, so I put them into one thing. Since they are all required, though, I could just have a separate alignment parameter. Though I kind of like them as one thing. I don't want to require too many parameters, because that defeats the purpose of Markdown.
If I use syntax changes, I could introduce longer keywords, but that gets away from the spirit of markdown. Maybe L for left float, and LB for left float break?
Put a quick upload form on the Write and Edit admin pages, so they are automatically uploaded to the right directory? It should be possible to hook into the post page, since I've seen other plugins claim to do it. This would simplify uploading, especially if the upload manager automatically uses the post_id to create a containing directory. That would totally rock. The links inside the markdown syntax could probably just access files by name, and you'd never have to use a directory again.
done Change the cache file naming scheme so cache comes FIRST in the name. I thought at first that I wanted files to sort alphabetically so related files were in a nice block, but that kind of sucks when you are looking for just the important originals. Also, put them in their own directory.
