Category Archives: Site related

Of / pertaining to p4p.com

NetFlix

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This week, I finally decided to sign up for Netflix. The movie place I previously rented from had closed, so I wanted to be sure and choose “the correct” means of obtaining visual media for the future. After reviewing three contenders: Blockbuster, Hollywood video, and Netflix – the final decision was made. In the end, I just hate blockbuster and it’s hard to argue with the ease of use for Netflix.

Since signing up, I have found myself just plunged in to an abyss of rating movies and managing my queue. I’ve been a member for 3 days and my fat maws have already queued up over 100 films – with a little help from Vanbergs of course. I’ve rated over 200 movies. I’ve added “Fleaux” and “teh teee” as friends. It has generally been fun just being a Netflix member. It just sounds cool to say: “I use NetFlix”. All this and I’ve only watched 1 movie. (Casino royale; i didnt like it. 2 stars)

I’ve also taken this chance to do some fun integration with my website. Note the Movies page referenced in the top menu, and also the Netflix queue sidebar snippet. Yeah – I am a tremendous nerd. And I hate PHP.

At any rate… good game Netflix. And also good game NBC (The Black Donnelly’s).

The New P4P

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After probably 6 hours or so of additional work, and maybe 9 total hours – the new theme for P4P has been completely integrated and tweaked to full vanberge customization.

I’m actually very happy with the current look and feel of my website. The Gallery and Google search integration turned out much better this time than it did with my last theme. These two things were my major hurdles, so i’m glad to have them out of the way. I’m still not completely sold on how the Google search results look, but Google doesn’t allow a great deal of customization with that so i think i can live with it. Plus I was able to ditch Google’s ugly html-only search form and mesh the functionality into the default wordpress search form.

I also implemented some other minor tweaks… i widened the site by 100 pixels overall, i increased the font size, added some slight color/border/image tweaks and cleaned up some alignments. All in all, i know way more about css/html than I ever wanted to.

Hopefully Google doesn’t mind that I totally hacked up their search scripts and removed the capability to do a web search from my site. The search form used to have a radio button to search the Web, or p4p.. user had to pick between the two. Now the user CAN’T pick – the search only searches p4p. 😛

If anyone notices any bad/ugly/wrong things with other browsers please let me know… but the site should be pretty uniform regardless of browser.

Look and Feel

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I have obviously updated the look and feel of p4p. I found this theme a few weeks ago and really liked it, but did not want to venture into all the ‘tweaking’ to take all my content and put it into this theme.

The theme I had been using was heavily customized in many different ways – so finally i got the motivation to start that process with this one.

As it stands, most of my content should show up and be fine. I still have a couple big things to take on… Gallery integration, and then using the Google powered search.

Alas – One step at a time.

Follow up…

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A couple more changes to the site. A faint blueish grayish background for the sidebar, an about page, and I also posted my very first blog (straight up html) here: www.palmerforpresident.com/old (clean urls in wordpress rock). There is also a link to that web log at the bottom of my archives (see header nav). I didn’t even know i still had that. It was a wierd surprise to find it…

My first web log dated back to July of 2003. So, i’ve technically been keeping a “web log” for approximately 5 years. It is actually pretty embarrasing to read. I’m definitely not the same person now that I was 5 years ago. But, at the same time it made me feel appreciative of my life. That original website journal chronicles through the most dismal time in my life. I hated my job. I was very lonely. The real world hit me with harsh reality and I had realized i was nowhere near an adult yet. I missed college because most of my friends and brother were still there. The only thing i really had to look forward to during that timeframe was weekend trips to Mulligan’s. Aye. wierd times indeed.

Site Changes

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This week I have been hell bent on adding some functionality to the website and making some other small design changes. It started with implementing google search, and has just spun out of control. to the tune of literally over 10 hours of work. A numbered breakdown:

  1. Implemented google search function using a static html page. search is awesome, but yuck for me using static html.
  2. Removed links to squarehalo and glaven. both dot org.
  3. I cleaned up about 15 or 16 coding ‘errors’ and/or bugs. My site is now apparently valid xhtml.Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
  4. Added an entire archive page to just list out all my monthly archives (top nav bar). The listing of monthly archives on the main page was starting to own my sidebar.
  5. Changed ‘monthly archives’ on the sidebar to now be ‘recent posts’ which displays the 15 most recent blog entries.
  6. Extended the google search function. it now pipes into a real wordpress page using .htaccess url rewriting. *thanks jja. what a hack that static html page was.
  7. *edit* Some simple CSS tweaks. Slight color change. Borders. Underline hover.
  8. Fixed Google search IE bug (finally..!) I wrote the google code into a php function that is then called by the sidebar. Versus just pasting the google code into the sidebar.php file. Then also styled the table with a CSS entry and took out some of the html style.
  9. Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.6

now can somebody seriously tell me how to put an image in your post and have the text wrap around it instead of showing up below it? nm i might have figured it out.