There are a lot of addins for making a calendar for wordpress.  Well, I personally like the lovely google calendar.  The reason?  Anyone I want to give permission to read the items in my google calendar can read it, otherwise everything else is marked as busy without giving away personal information.  Also, its easy to put on the site.  How might you ask?  First, you need to set up your google calendar to be accessible from another website.  How to do that?  Thought you would never ask…

1. Goto google.com/calendar
2. If you are not logged into your google account, then sign in
3. Once logged in click on Settings in the upper right hand corner
4. On the Calendar Settings section, click on Calendars
5. Under the column of sharing, click on Edit settings for the calendar you want to share out
6. Select Share only my free / busy information (hide details) under the option of Share with everyone
7. On the next screen, click on Calendar details
8. Under the option Calendar Address click on the HTML button
9. On the window that pops up, click on the configuration tool link
10. Set the options for your calendar as needed and then click on the update URL button.  This will update the html code displayed under section 2.
11. Copy this code to your clipboard.
12. Write a new page in wordpress, and click on the HTML edit button.
13. Paste the code into the box.
14. Click OK

Your calendar will not be in the new page.  Just post it and away you go.  The way that this is a nicer calednar is that if someone who uses google is signed into google’s services and they have permission to see your calendar, then when they visit the calendar on your site, they can see it as though they went right to your calendar.  Why would you want to do this?  I mean, they could just go to their google calendar and see your calendar if they subscribe to yours.  But what if(like me) they don’t like subscribing to calendars?  Well here you go then.

Categories: Tricks and Tips
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Long title, I know. I am probably breaking many rules based on that…..but….here is why it is that long. Have you ever wanted to prevent certain categories from appearing on your front page, without having to do a home.php file? Well, upon doing some research, there is a way to do just that! This is how to do it.

1) go to edit the active theme

2) select the main index template page

3) The start of the file normally starts like the following:

<?php get_header(); ?>
<div class="rowcontainer">
<div class="threequartercolumn">
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

After the last line there(  <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> ) add the following line(or multiple lines in case you want to omit multiple categories on the home page) just after that line put:

<?php if (in_category('6') && is_home() ) continue; ?>

where the number passed to in_category is the categories number

Categories: Tricks and Tips
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My internship project(TIMS) was a nice long project. I enjoyed it as it made me learn many new things. Well. After a little thinking, some time off the project, I am ready to get back on the horse and finish the project. The right way. And finish it the right way from scratch. After some thinking, and some lessons from Drew, I decided how to start upon the project the right way. I guess it will probably take about a year or so to finish as I will do it in between my other projects that I have to do.

The whole portion of this blog will be to keep track of the progress of the project. The reason is that although I am creating the code from scratch on a specific project, the application of the code tips can still apply to many php projects. Also, maybe, through the blogging of the process, one who stumbles upon this might understand the joy and frustration of programming something from scratch that is destined to be open source. Eventually TOM(or whatever it is named to eventually) will be released on sourceforge. I already have a sourceforge account for TOM, so once somethign starts working, I will be using their cvs and listening for input from people on the project.
As the first part of the project, I am looking at a new user interface. Here is a proposed new user interface.

Categories: General, TOM
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There is a bulletin board.  Why?  Because I can! :-P  But seriously, its up there because sometimes there are random things that need to be on there that can’t be on the blog….so yeah….check it out once in a while(if I ever add anything….we will see)

Categories: General
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The holy grail of Wordpress. Integrating Gallery2 into the system. How to do it? Well, I found a partial way on how to do it, but I’m sure that there is a better way. The method that I choose to use is by using a wordpress plugin called WPG2. To read on this plugin, go here: WPG2 Main Page. To use it, you need to have Gallery2 installed on your server as well as a recent version of wordpress. The hinge to make it work easily with the site is to have a wordpress theme that has a fluidic css theme. It is possible to do it without a fluidic design, but harder to get the css right. Download the plugin and READ THE README file. That is important as this points to where to upload the various files. After the files are uploaded and the plugin is activated in Wordpress, click on the option WPG2 on the admin page. This will allow you to set the appropriate settings(just read what they want there). There is one part that they don’t tell you about in the instructions. In the WPG2 options, click on the embeded page options and find where it says width:800px and delete that one attribute(just the width:800px) so the line reads something like: <style type="text/css">.g2_column {margin: 0px 1px 0px 12px}</style>

By doing this, this will allow the plugin to be compatable with firefox :-DAiight, I bored you with that. But try it out. You might have to play with it a little, but you can eventually get it going. And remember, a fluidic wordpress theme will really help you out!

Categories: Tricks and Tips
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Temporary files are a pain.  They can take up so much space on a hard drive, its crazy.  I was reminded of this recently when I deleted all the temporary files on my desktop.  4 GIGS had fallen victim to the dreaded temporary file bandits.  How to clean off all of these file in a jiff?  Try a great program called Crap Cleaner Its a great free program.  Try it out, and clean up that crap!

Categories: Tricks and Tips
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Ah the beautiful sunset………….

Just testing out the integration of Gallery into my wordpress. In case you didn’t know, I am trying out gallery2 again. Why? Because my hosting service has changed over to Dreamhost, and they have this wonderful thing called one click install. Well I got wordpress up and running and I saw this theme. I love the colors orange and black/grey, and I just had to have it. Don’t know why I like those colors that much, but I just do. Well anyways, click on pictures up above(the others rae coming soon) and enjoy!

Categories: General
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So, Ryan decided to get a group together to go camping over this past weekend. Well. I went. Lets just say that it was a good time. The drive out there wasn’t bad. Then once we got there, we loaded up the boat and drove off in his paren’t diseal van. Thats when the fun began. First we made a pitstop over to a local grovery store in his hometown, and off Ryan went. You ever see those cartoons with the roadrunner. That was Ryan entering and navigating through the store. Kinda funny actually. The rest of us decided that we wernt going to try to keep up with him, so we stayed near the front. What are stores trying to get rid of right now? Did you just think fireworks? Man, you must ESPN(insert horrible moan here).

now……

So upon making sure that daddy was ok that we brought fireworks with, both me and Josh picked up a pack of fireworks….more on that to come later

Well, we made it back to the van without incident, and took off. Ryan got the boat in the water, and away we went. Nothing much happend that was too exciting on the boat. What is worth mentioning is that the GPS cordinates that we followed…now that is something. Ryan followed the GPS coordinates that his dad and bro had mapped out for him. Were going along, and then we hear a “thunk”. Being the boathing novice I am, I just think “Sweet, were dead” and just go about my business. Well, turns out it was just a rock. Good news……….right? Not quite. What ended up happening is that shortly after the thunk, we ended up coming to a stop…..sand…shallow water…sweet!

So back out we went to try to find other ground. As Ryan put the boat in reverse, a big cloud of black filled the water, don’t even wanna think about what that stuff smelled like. Bet it was rotting smelling….but longer story shorter…we went back to the bay with the low water and got the boat in the sand and as forward as possible. The two Sarah’s got off the boat first—and immediatly we hear a cry about the “seaweed” in the water, and that it was gross. Whatever. So the Sarah’s walk to the shore, and start looking for the firepit that was supposed to be on the island. It wasn’t until after they were gone and that were loading stuff off of the boat that we relized we should have had the girls take some stuff. Whoops. We made the best of it and got it done(Get er done!) and got the stuff to shore. What was interesting about this island was the weeds/grass on the land. It was tall. First thing I thought about while walking through it was those scenes from Jurassic Park where the Raptors were running through the tall grass. It was sweet. On the way back and forth on one of the trips, me and Josh ran across the skeletone of a big fish laying on the shore. Josh took the spine back and thought it would be funny to say that there was proof of a monster on the island. Needless to say, the two Sarah’s didn’t think it was funny. Camp got set up quite quickly, and Josh and Ryan went out to get the first round of firewood. By the time all the firewood was back to camp, and everyone was settled in, it was around 11. The fire was going, and Ryan was carvin some hotdog sticks when Josh got out his package of fireworks. I got mine out, and then they were shot off. What is funny, is that most of them were lit off by us just throwing the fireworks in the fire. I hope there isn’t anything toxic in those things………That night was good sleepin for Ryan, Sarah K, and me, but the other two had trouble sleepin……
Saturday was followed by more exploration of the island. It started out when Sarah K saw a dear run in front of her. After a little exploration, there was some tubin on the boat followed by a breakdown of camp, and then a wet and slightly choppy boatride back to Ryan’s parents house. His mom made a huge lunch, and after some loungin around, Ryan started making the drive back home. Some cool things happened at Ryan’s house too. For one thing, we got to go up in a bucket on a firetruck that was on his parent’s business. After Ryan brought the cab back down, and was getting ready to go back up, a hydrolic line busted at one of the connectors. We also got to ride in the cab of a semi truck with good old Ryan driving it(Its been a while, so it was a little choppy at first for him—and for us toooo……) Ryan also tried to repair his AC, since it was blowing out some decent amount of heat while he was drivin….but that didn’t get fixed…….

So yeah, that was a fun trip. I just feel sorry for Ryan, he was beat on the drive back. One thing I do have to say………”I want a marshmellow”

Visit the pictures at my new gallery(will be finished updatin soon if it isn’t already) at http://www.randomizedharmony.com/gallery

Yes, I am trying Gallery again.? Trying Gallery 1.5 to be exact, and I like it better than Gallery2!

Categories: General
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