As a co-founder of JutiaGroup.com I still handle technical and relevant aspects of the web site. Lately potential advertisers have been making contact, but they have been making contact the WRONG way. I have no idea what’s the logic behind it, but people are using the simple contact form to request information, which is already available on the clearly visible and indicated advertise page. I guess the thing that bugs me most is that to get to the contact form, which they use, a surfer has to find the contact page, which is hidden in a submenu. The information, which they request is available on the page which is to the right of the link on which they have to click to find the contact page.

Maybe they do go to the advertising page, but they just don’t navigate it. It’s called scrolling people, just scroll down the page. All the information people ask for is on that page, plus a very nice and extensive contact form, which was designed to save the time, which is now invested in going back and forth via email to determine something that one should have read and provided at first contact.

Yayeee, finally the Twitter tool plugin for Wordpress, by Alex King, has been updated to add the options of being able to choose the digest post time. The plugin is still in beta, but it still works, and I am happy with it.

The only reason why I found out that there is a new version of the plugin is because I want to tweet (Micro post.) but I want my tweets (Micro posts.) archived. The only way to have the tweets archived is to use the twitter tool plugin, but it does daily digests. I find the post formats some what unapealing, and I really don’t feel like moding the source code to exclude the Twitter digest posts. This resulted in me avoiding Twitter and micro-blogging for most part. For some reason today, I decided to check for a posible update of the plugin, because I was hoping for a weekly digest option. Magically, not only there is a weekly digest option, but I can have both daily and weekly, And I can select the post times for both. If you remember some time ago I complained about how the Twitter-tool plugin would randomly generate the posts, thus missing twets from the same evening.

I am very please with the added functionality and I can also get back to micro-blogging. Thanks Alex, even though you did not respond to my email!

I have decided to change the blog’s theme once again. I want to go with something more professional. I chose BlueBird, because I wanted something less busy, more open and, at the time, I was also high on the Twitter wave.

Lately I have been kind of burned out on Twitter! I am not as excited or obsessed with it, although I do still look forward to connecting with friends and posting random things. I guess everything comes in waves. At least that’s how it is with me. I obsess with something for couple of days to couple of weeks and then I move on.

Anyhow, back to the looks of my blog. I want to have something plain, which will present the content in easy to the eyes fashion. I don’t want to have busy pages, either. I think I will start with trying out few different theme. Currently I am deicing between Mimbo Pro, The Studio and maybe Unbound. I will test their appeal and organization of the content, but I think, at the end, I just might just create my own theme from modifying the classic WordPress them. Just like I did many years ago, when I first started using Wordpress. I would provide some examples, but the Archive.org does not have that many archived copies of my site. Besides, I think this was probably before the total data loss I suffered in July of 2004.

After I have settled on a theme or have created my own, I will reorganize the pages and the content their provide. Then maybe I will finally complete the About page. I am doing this, because I want to make my blog more useful. I want to start posting better articles and attract new and regular visitors. Eventually I would like to also have a forum community.

We will have to see who this will go. I see this as “The Evolution of a personal blog”, the evolution of my blog. Looking through old posts and remembering old designs I can trace the changes in my way of thinking and writing. I am definitely more mature and interested to provided something useful and not just random ramblings. Well … for most part. It IS a journey after all. Correct?!

Progress and development is a must.

This Planet – Currently in development, this site is dedicated to providing the public with information on agencies and organizations, whose purpose is to inform, preserve and restore planet Earth and its natural life and resources. Visit http://thisplanet.info for more information.

Jutiagroup – work on my brother’s site continues. Work should have been completed a while back, but for the moment it is down to only performing maintenance tasks. The site is dedicated to social events, politics, the stock market and money management. Authors are in need. So if you have a topic you would like to write articles on, even if it is not one of the main ones from above, visit the contact page and express your interest.

Bad SPAM, Bad - this one was spur of the moment. I started it yesterday after I came home and had to deal with the daily doze of SPAM. I wrote a “bit” more about it here - http://badspambad.com.

While looking for plugins for Jutia Group I stumbled upon Latest Posts v1.0. It is on the left side, under “10 Newest Entries”.

I needed some more functionality out of it so I took the liberty to modify the code a bit. Just to make it a tad more flexible.

I started by changing the function call for inside the template. I changed it from:

<?php cypher_latestposts(); ?>

to

<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts(); ?>

What this does is, before the function is called its existence will be verified. This will prevent your theme from braking and your pages loading halfway and then displaying errors when the function is called:

• if you disable the plugin (now you can turn on and off the plugin without the visitors getting page errors)
• the plugin file is moved, corrupted or deleted

In other words, if something happens to the plugin and you are unaware of the problem, your site will not brake. This of course is bad, but it will not have a negative effect on your site.

My next change was to make the number of posts being displayed flexible. With other plugins and the ability to call the function in any page or post you might want to display different number of posts at different places.

I started by deleting the variable

$max_posts

from the global declaration.

Then I placed that variable in the function declaration.

Old

function cypher_latestposts($before='', $after='<br>')

New

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before='', $after='<br>')

Now when you call your function you can set the number of post to be displayed at the function call location. Like this:

<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10'); ?>

In this example I want 10 posts. You can change this number to anything you want.

Here is an extra. Some of you might want to display your links in a list, others separated by a comma (no idea why), slashes, hyphens or as in the original just with a line breaker. So what you will do is change the function declaration like this:
From

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before='', $after='<br>')

to

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before, $after)

When you call your function just insert what you want to separate the links with. Here are some examples:

<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','<li>','</li>'); ?>
<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','+','<br />'); ?>
<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','','/'); ?>
<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','==','=='); ?>

Tfnet’s gallery is around the corner! For a long time now I have been saying that “soon” I will have a gallery on the site with all kinds of pictures. Well, I finally got around installing a gallery on the web site last night. I have used Gallery in the past and I am still using it on the Clan MP web site, but i have also come across many web sites which use Coppermine Gallery. So, instead of going the old fashioned way, I decided to give Coppermine a test. I did that only because it uses an SQL database as part of the gallery’s structure. This is an upcoming feature with version 2 of the Galley. At the moment Galley 2 is in its beta status and from reading on its web site i understand that the beta does not even have all the features, which already existing in Gallery 1, active/working. The above is another reason why I decided to test Coppermine. I wanted to see what it can provide me with, while I am waiting for the final or close to final release of Gallery.

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Early, early this morning I finished up with the source code update of the clan Menkey Playhouse’s website. I was too tired to make a post about it when I was done and I was busy today, so here it is now.

I finished with the update of my site about the same time yesterday morning is I did with the updated of the clan MP site today. Read more about it here. Up to last night the site was structured just like mine was before, separate files for each page. Each one of which containing a template, which had to be updated every time one of the others was modified. Well, now only one file, an “if else” statement to maintain and some content files.

I will redesign the site right after I am done with the redesign of mine.

After half a dozen completion attempts and numerous changes to the code I have completed the reconstruction of the website’s pervious multiple page structure to a single page with “if else” statements. This structure is not exactly what I wanted it to be. For one I am not using the SQL database like I had planed before I started. Two I am using a lot more include now, which is opposite of what I wanted to do, if you remember from my post yesterday.
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