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User icons & WordPress, CSS3, Music and Tolkien’s Shopping Lists Get Published at Long Last!
I’m still working on my series of posts/pages about my WordPress/LiveJournal OTP adventures.
Additionally I’ve just deleted my personal blog/website for a clean re-launch in April. I now feel secure enough in my WordPress skills to take over upgrading and so on on my own, so I decided I’d rather have a complete, clean new install than to keep fudging with a database full of left-overs from trying out plugins and themes and what not over the course of several years. Plus assorted back-ups that my host scattered all over the place (hey, they are cheap and friendly!).
This brings me to considering two essential facets that make a LiveJournal entry fun and that no one who has ever used LiveJournal will want to miss, I think:
- user icons
- mood icons
There are various plugins that provide that kind of thing for your WordPress blog. The problem is that they do not crosspost.
As an aside—have some music!
Magnatune has really cool music. You get to decide how much you pay for it. You can give every purchase away for free to three friends. You can stream the whole albums for free. And embed them in your posts. Yay!
I love the deep smoky voice of that singer!
Back to the problem of user icons. The solution is easy: What are user icons and mood icons? Pictures. And pictures in posts DO crosspost just fine. So all you need is a plugin that provides image management so you can insert your user icons and mood icons in your post, and a little CSS to style them in a nice way.
Plugins!?! Galleries?!?!
Here at Juno’s Magic I use Gallery2 and the WPG2 plugin for that. The WPG2 plugin allows me to introduce special CSS classes for the pictures I want to include in my posts from Gallery2 that I CAN use, but don’t have to. So, .user-icon is the one I pick to go with my user icon and .mood is the one I pick for my moods. The user icon class inserts the image floating left with the padding/margin I want. I could also have a differently coloured background, a border, whatever. The mood class relies on the WPG2 “tag” (which is a short code for even easier insertion of images) and outputs not only the image, but a caption. And the caption is, of course, the relevant mood. “Tired”, “happy”, whatever.
That works for me because I NEED Gallery2 to start with for my gazillion icons. However, if you just need three folders (icons, moods, pictures) having an external gallery installation may be overkill. Also, not all webhosts allow Gallery2 installations (I’m currently trying to figure out if the host of my professional blog/website allows that 
).
As a result I set out trying to find an alternative. And guess what? The media library that is already INCLUDED in WordPress should work just fine. See the user icon for this post: picture PLUS optional caption. So you could have pictures without captions as your user icons, pictures with captions as your mood icons. They would be included in your post and crosspost just fine.
Would.
The ONE thing that the native WordPress media library does not have is any kind of image management system. You can’t create folders, can’t tag your pictures, nothing. If you want to do that, you need some kind of gallery plugin. And if you just want user icons and mood icons and the odd picspam, you don’t really need that. 
WordPress 2.8
What to do? WordPress 2.8, which is supposed to be released sometime this year, is supposed to have some kind of image management system. WordPress 2.8 is ALSO supposed to have an easy-peasy LiveJournal importer for importing your whole journal including ALL comments including the threaded styling of your comments. (In other words, wait for that!)
Alternatively, there could be a plugin to introduce some basic image management capabilities into WordPress 2.7, I assume. That is, if I knew a plugin creator who’d do that for me…
If you happen to know such a person… 
CSS3: I can haz WEBFONTS!!!
Have you ever had a look at “The Apprentice and the Necromancer” as it is posted on my website? You’ll find that thanks to CSS, letters look like letters and scrolls look like scrolls.
This magic works pretty easily thanks to me being comfy with CSS and the TinyMCE Advanced plugin for WordPress, which lets me pick special CSS classes from a drop-down menu. So I don’t have to do a lot of hand-coding; just the once of inserting the CSS into my theme file—after that it’s just a matter of a few clicks and making sure that nothing untoward happened in the html editor…
The one thing that doesn’t work is what I’m most hungering for: CUSTOM fonts. I want my letters to show up with handwriting AND be accessible for blind and handicapped readers via screenreaders without using images and being forced to create alt texts of DOOOOOM or fudge endlessly with image replacement systems. Thus: what I need are web fonts. Of course so far only Safari uses them.
But 
here’s some glorious news: Firefox 3.1 will have webfonts via @font-face!!!
Webfonts?!WTF?!?!?!
Webfonts are easy.
- Pick free/Creative Commons/public domain TTF or OTF font file, for example from DaFont.
- Upload to folder on your webhost html/yourdomainname/fonts
- Include them in your CSS with the command @font-face.
- Style your font-stack as usual, using the name of your preferred @font-face font first.
The result: Safari, Firefox 3.1 once it’s out there, and soon Opera, will download the custom fonts into a temorary files folder and display the custom font, no matter if it is installed on your computer or not!
(Of course that takes time, so you need to be careful to use only very “light” font files or you’ll drive your users crazy. But we had all that with glittering and moving text and what not; sucky websites will always exist, and a good webdesigner will use custom-fonts where they make sense and look great.)
Other Cool CSS3 Stuff
SO MUCH LOVE. Translucent background without background picture. Drop-down shadows without background pictures. Rounded corners without background pictures. Background images for borders. Several background images in ONE div. Whoohooooohooo!
Of course Internet Explorer refuses to play nice, and font designers scream as much bloody murder as the copyright owners of images in the dark ages of internet history. (Yeah, sure, fonts can be downloaded illegally. Images can be hotlinked. Someone could steal your car. The sky could drop on your head. What about the majority of users who’d actually only use free fonts???) But things are moving and the result will be oh so cool for everyone interested in webdesign.
Finally: Tolkien’s Shopping Lists are Getting Published at Long Last!
Actually, not yet. But I don’t think we’ll have to wait for that much longer. What IS getting published, however, is yet another of his unfinished/incomplete manuscripts: “The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun”.
Is that really necessary?
I mean, nothing against post-humous scholarly analyses of unfinished manuscripts, really, that kind of thing can be fascinating. But publishing every random scrap of writing that can SOMEHOW be put into book-shape? Just so a long dead author can make the headlines again?
Tolkien Estate’s publishing efforts are slowly getting ridiculous. Just MHO.
More Music
Last but not least: have some nice free French reggae music from Jamendo:
February 19th, 2009
2 comments to “Brains, I need them!”
Send an Owl?
I agree with you on the “new” Tolkien book. It’s one thing for the students of his work who study his writings, but this stuff is always being repackaged and rewritten to con in a general readership seduced by LotR to buy anything with his name on it. I still feel betrayed by The Silmarillion … yes, and I study it. ;) So it was a negative-into-a-positive overall, but I expected something from that book that it wasn’t because the blurb on the back only emphasized it as it related to LotR. And I hear that a lot from Tolkien readers I talk to outside of fandom, how they wanted more Middle-earth and got the New Testament with Elves. And the HoMe … I honestly tell people not to waste their money unless their students of his work. If they want to check it out and see if they like it, they can borrow mine (since I primarily use my digital copies for research, the hard copies acting mostly as impressive shelf-dressing!).
It comes off really crass, imho, on the part of his heirs to keep trotting out “new” content every few years. At the rate he’s going, he’ll exceed V.C. Andrews as far as output from beyond the grave. If they want to make this content accessible to scholars and fans, I think a brilliant idea would be to start a project to scan and put online all of the notes that CT & Co. mangle into these “new” books. They could even charge a subscription! Geeks like me would pay it, gladly, to not only have access but to be done with the guesswork as far as what in these books are JRRT’s words and what belongs to someone else.
ETA: Something on your site is taking forever to load. It could just be my computer, but the page freezes my browser for about five minutes whenever I try to load/refresh a page. The info bar at the bottom says it’s loading from he3.magnatune.com when it freezes. It’s not a big deal because I’m working on a story simultaneously, so I just switch to that till the browser starts working again, but I thought you’d want to know, one web designer to another. :)
And indeed, it does feel rather crass. Like leeches, sucking the last bit of commerce out of the last scrap of his writing…
Re: magnatune -
Must be something with your connection or some blocking programme you use.
Magnatune is the source of the first music player used in this post (check it out, you are really missing something there – they have lots medieval music, too!). It works fine for me.