Sillybean

Say hello

The baby was born December 22. He was over a week late, and then was a bit distressed during labor, so we had to have a C-section. Easier on him; not so much for me. We’re all fine, though — except my laptop, which has been in kernel panic for most of the last week! So I’ve been on Twitter and Facebook via my phone, mostly at odd hours in the very early morning.

Support forum answers and email replies will be delayed until the little one settles into a schedule. Right now, he’s all over the place.

Happy new year!

Countdown to insanity

Life has been more interesting than usual lately.

First, work is stressful at the moment. The Provost has decided to consolidate all the IT-related positions in the academic offices, and that includes me. As a result, on Friday I’m being moved out of the Writing Center and into the new group. Aside from the fact that I love the Writing Center and don’t want to leave, the timing really stinks — the baby’s due in less than a month. There are other issues that make the whole thing more fraught than it needs to be, about which the less said, the better.

One baby shower fell through at the last minute due to a death in the planner’s family, but there was a second one for my college friends, and that was awesome. Now I’m trying to get the family and local friends together for something informal at my house so they don’t feel too left out. Lots of timing problems there, too.

I thought we were just going to have my parents and one aunt over for Thanksgiving — I can’t travel anymore, so they sort of have to come here — but then my cousin somehow obtained tickets to the UT game, and now that whole side of the family is also coming over. I’ve just now figured out where they can all sleep. (Our house is just not that big.) Complicating factor: the delivery of the new couches we ordered a couple of months ago. They were going to be here on the 12th. Then they weren’t going to be here until after Thanskgiving. Now they might be here next week… but if they are, I won’t have room for the last couple of relatives who might need to sleep on the floor. So, people will either have no place to sit during the day or no place to sleep at night. Faaaaantastic.

(Why can’t they just sleep on the couches, you ask? Because this is the freakishly tall side of the family. None of them will fit on the couches.)

On the bright side, the baby’s room is painted, and Michael is almost done with the new kitchen island he’s been building on and off since we finished the rest of the remodeling last December. He couldn’t work on it for about six months because the garage is his workshop, and you might recall that it was hotter than the fires of hell this summer. By the time he got back to it, all the plywood had warped in the heat and he had to start over. He’s pulled it all together in about a month, and it looks wonderful.

I had a few weird pregnancy side effects pop up while I was at HighEdWeb, but they’ve mostly disappeared now and we’re both fine. And HighEdWeb was a blast, as always.

So now I just have to move offices, rearrange the living room, sell the old futon on Craigslist, get the new couches moved in, feed eleven nine (thank goodness) people a holiday meal, and host a last-minute, mom-organized baby shower. Then I can kick back and, you know, give birth.

… shoot me, please?

Small update to Twenty Links

I’ve just posted a minor update that fixes several bugs: incorrect URLs for subdirectory installations (props aldolet), an endless link tag in trashed post notice, and a bad layout on “not found” pages. I’ve also removed the plus links when viewing the home page, where they’re not needed and don’t work there anyway.

Download 0.6.2.

Getting tag autocomplete (and other jQuery stuff) to work for visitors

The trickiest part of the latest updates to Twenty Links was getting the tag suggest function to work for users who aren’t logged in. I’m pretty much a n00b when it comes to jQuery — JavaScript in general has always been my weakest skill — so I went looking for a handy tutorial, and I found one: Using WordPress built-in tag auto complete script in your Plugins, posted a couple of years ago by Sudar Muthu. That did the trick — but only for logged-in users.

Why it doesn’t work

WordPress handles jQuery requests using the /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php file. Here’s the catch:

The only cave[a]t to this method is that right now the admin-ajax.php file needs you to be logged in and therefore can only be used in admin pages. But in WordPress 2.9 even anonymous users can load admin-ajax.php file. If you need use auto tag completing in blog pages, then you may have to wait till 2.9 is released.

Obviously that was written before 2.9 came out, so it’s not quite accurate. As it turned out, admin-ajax.php does handle requests from anonymous users — but it kicks them back out to a callback function you specify. I didn’t quite understand what was going on until I actually opened the file and read the code. (more…)

Delicious XML Importer plugin and Twenty Links theme updated

If you use Delicious, you’ve probably noticed that AVOS has started rolling out some changes. As a result, I’ve updated the Delicious XML Importer plugin and the Twenty Links theme. Between the importer and the theme, you can set up a pretty great alternative to Delicious on your own site. Here’s mine.

Twenty Links theme

Twenty Links now includes autosuggest on the tag filter. It shows an RSS feed link and a count of all the links found for the selected combination of tags. (If you’re logged in, the count will include your private links.)

It also has a snazzy new (responsive) mobile version!

You can use the built-in Press This bookmarklet to save links to your site. The theme includes a few customizations for that screen to turn off things you probably won’t use (the Save Draft button, the Categories box).

Since this is a child theme for Twenty Ten, and Extend doesn’t allow child themes yet, you’ll have to follow me here to find out about updates to the theme. Use the Twenty Links tag feed if you’d rather not subscribe to my general feed.

Delicious XML Importer plugin

Recent changes:

• Supports importing links into a custom post type.
• New option to save the link into a custom field rather than the post content.
• Delicious now exports links with the word “empty” in the extended description if you didn’t enter any notes. Links without tags are also tagged with “empty.” The importer will ignore this, so that your notes and tags are actually empty.
• When importing links as posts, the link will now be the first thing saved in the content area, followed by your notes. (In previous versions, the notes came first.)
• The export API now handles only 1000 links at a time. See the plugin page for a workaround if you need to export more than that.

Support

There’s a combined forum for the importer and the theme over on my support site.