The Cerebral Mum

I know it’s crazy, but I feel like I haven’t written a real post in ages.

A gallery post doesn’t require much work. At least, not with the plugin I use, WP-Simpleviewer. All I have to do is upload my photos into their own folder and the plugin creates the thumbnails and the flash gallery. The only thing I don’t like about this plugin is that I cannot get the captions to display correctly so for the time being I’ve given up on that. If anyone knows of a plugin which does everything as easily as WP-Simpleviewer AND has working captions, let me know.

And then there are my poetry posts… I’ve stalled at Assignment #3, which was to write about issues. That one is definitely on the back-burner for now while I struggle with it. (It is, after all, 30 poems in 30 days, not A poem a day) While I’m so rusty the writing process is very self-conscious. Once I’ve “found my voice” (and isn’t that a horrid phrase!) I will be able to approach the serious content and stronger emotion with more integrity.

But back to my point.

I really like this poetry project but my bias is toward prose. Or it’s my comfort zone. Or something. So my poems don’t feel like “real” posts either which means I think I need to write two posts a day.

On top of that, I discoved that my contact form was malfunctioning yesterday so no writing got done at all. But it was passed time I started in on that tweaking you need to do when you are using someone else’s theme; adjusting styles, improving navigation, getting posts and pages to appear “just so”.

Last night I started incorporating the Ultimate Tag Warrior into my theme. You can see the results under each post which now shows site search tags and related posts, and on the Archives page which now displays a complete coloured and weighted tag cloud. I am pretty proud of this achievement. It involved me editing my CSS stylesheet and 5 different PHP files.

I don’t know PHP, but with Lorelle’s article, Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin for Dummies, the extensive help files the plugin author, Christine Davis, supplied, and some rigorous searching of the WordPress forums to steal a few extra snippets of code… I got it done.

Well, not quite done. I still need to do some work on my sidebar to improve the navigation there. I need to go through all my posts so the excerpts shown on a tag search are not necessarily the default number of characters. I still need to clean up the tags I’ve been using so far. Just a little.

And then there are the other things I need to do.

• Set up a new contact page that functions properly.
• Write an About page.
• Add social bookmarking links to each post. (I’ve tried a few plugins but have found they slowed down page loading significantly.)
• Add RSS feed links and RSS comment feed links to each post.
• Change existing galleries to category posts instead of static pages.
• Create my own “logo” to replace the star in my header.
• Tweak the css until I’m happy with it.
• Add alternate sidebars to display on different types of views.

And the really really big one…

• Change my theme from fluid to fixed width, and from two column to three column.

That will happen when I buy my own domain name and get a host I actually pay for. My present to myself once I sell my house.

I’m pretty sure this to-do list is not exhaustive, in fact my mind has just multiplied it, but last night I made a start.

And tonight, letting all the technology take care of itself, I will get back to writing.

_{UPDATE: New Contact Me page is up and functional. My email address is available there, or you can leave a public message in the comment form.}

_{UPDATE: Contact Me has been updated again and now has a contact form which will deliver email directly to my inbox. I have left the comments open for anyone who would like to leave a public message.}