Brainspill

My wife pointed out that the theme I was using, jQ wasn’t her favorite. So I looked around and found Mystique, which is beautiful (imho) and works well with what I want to display.

And then she noticed that the random Interesting picture from Flickr wasn’t working anymore, and I missed it too… (it’s sudden absence is why I ditched the Vigilance theme in the first place… and I later found out it wasn’t even related to Vigilance. Oops).

So now I’ve updated the Flickr Interesting photo code appearing at the top of my posts/pages. It’s now WP-Super Cache friendly, doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes via a JS call. Note to self: disable hotlinking on that file.

Now the site’s faster (Super Cache is enabled), and prettier (Flickr Interesting is back), and rounder (I added rounded corners to the image area… unless you’re in IE. Sorry.).

That’ll do for now.

Oh, and the reason the Flickr Interesting photos went away in the first place: my host updated the PEAR php library in use, and that broke phpFlickr, until I forced phpFlickr into using it’s own built-in edition of the PEAR files. Now wasn’t that just a bit more than you wanted to know?

MAJOR Update:

I’ve pretty well ended support of this. I’m not intentionally avoiding emails or comments, I’m just out of time and need to make you aware there’s a better way.

I’d like to encourage you *not* to use the WP-Password Plugin. Here’s why: It doesn’t protect items in feeds, it can be broken by future wordpress versions, it doesn’t protect media/videos/images in your feeds (only pages powered by WP), and at last check, changing WP to do what I want the plugin to do really jeopardizes it’s security of all other things WP. I just don’t want to do that to you.

Instead, I recommend using .htaccess to protect the directories you want people to see. Here’s a good tutorial on it: http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess3.shtml

If I am going to do anything else with the plugin, it will be a re-write to help people create their own .htaccess rules.

Minor update to the WP-Password plugin I’ve let languish. I think I’ve fixed the redirect bug.

http://www.broome.us/wp-password/wp-password_0_6_1.zip

You’re welcome to try it out. Update the comments with any bug reports, ideas, complaints, etc.

Future plans might involve integrating WP 2.7 (and later) internal password protection to provide a better UI, handling it’s inherent per-page/post nature better (Default value, etc). Preliminary checking looks like it’ll take some changes to the WP Core to really work well, but I’ve been known to think on problems like that slowly for a while and suddenly come up with a solution… we’ll see.

I switched to the Vigilance theme on my site because I like it’s clean look and lines… but thought it was missing something.

I didn’t want to specify a single image for its optional banner, and don’t actually use Flickr myself, but I spent a little time tweaking phpFlickr and some CSS until I got this spiffy new header. Since Vigilance is pretty much just black and white, every spash of color Flickr gives me matches just fine.

Every page load pulls a random-ish “Interesting” photo off flickr, and I get a surprise every time I visit my own site. And so do you. Plus, mouse-over the image and you get links to the Flickr Interesting page, OR can go see the whole photo you’re only seeing part of now.

I rock. 🙂

If anyone’s interested in the code, say so… I may turn this into a plugin.