Dots don’t always line-up where you might expect them to, because they were taken over the course of about a week, but all displayed on this one page. Here are some random thoughts:

• No one knows that the RSS graphic near the top right is a button/link.
• “Most Popular”, “Videos”, “Drawings” and “Worst Day Ever” are good category names.
• “Journal” and “More”, not so much.
• Some people use the subscribe links at the top (they came with the theme).
• “Misc” pages didn’t get much love. They are gone now.
• A few people click on the delicious and twitter tabs. You know who you are.

There, see? I told you it was boring. But if you want, you can see the whole page and add any other random thoughts too.

Both domain names had expired, and, after we woke up and noticed that the website was gone, it took a little while for all of the name servers to get the message. I wish that we would get an email notice ahead of time, but I haven’t been able to figure out the right combination of setting to get my domain name registrar to send me an email before the, “Surprise! Your website is gone!” email.

Before I finally had the domain name renewed, I had twenty-seven “Offers of marriage.“

Yesterday was a Six Continent Day. The map toward the bottom of the sidebar shows (based on their IP address) where people who come to LloydandLauren live. Once in a while we have a visitor from every continent (except Antarctica, where they hate us), and we go, “Yay.”

If you click on the map, you can actually see what pages the person/people from that location were looking at. Some of it’s pretty predictable. Southeast Asia is usually interested in getting a stuck memory card out of their laptop or in a myminicity plugin. In England they like the idea of cooking things in jars.

It feels sort of voyeuristic.

Bonus info for the number adverse: most commented on posts:

• Simple Simon (71)
• Tag. You’re it. (40)
• I Need a Middle School Movie. (35)
• Bad Friday (34)
• Old Heat (33)

There were 3 tied at 30 each.

Finally, in a weird turn of events, three people told me yesterday that they were getting error messages when they tried to view the site. I have spoken to the site, and it has agreed to not give any more errors. However, it will also no longer give foot massages either. You win some. You lose some.

For a grand total of 6435 comments (if you add to these comments the comments by people who only made one comment). Here’s a bonus chart for those of you who don’t like numbers:

The Most Tagged Post award goes to Lovin the Mac with a total of 5 tags (cdc, Gadget, ipod, macintosh and preschool). There were 6 other posts tied with 4 tags each.

The Most Used Tag award goes to Cooking, but that really shouldn’t count, because it was converted from a category.

The Most Interesting Tag award goes to ninja with honorable mentions to architecture, beard, bee, brats, eek, hottie, paranoid, rectal, romance and TMI.

Finally, the Most Prolific Tagger award goes to Kristi with 385 tags on a total of 338 different posts. Kristi, I’ll soon be carefully selecting the thing(s) that Lauren won’t notice are missing for a couple of weeks. If there’s anything you’re interested in, let me know.

Thanks to everyone who played, here’s the total list along with the most common tag(s) that they used. Feel free to continue tagging as you are so moved.

The latest version of WordPress (the software that makes this website toe the line) added tagging. So we’ve been tagging new posts since, more or less, the start of March. You might have seen the little tags at the bottom of posts, or the Tag Cloud over there in the sidebar (Jeffrey Zeldman said that Tag Clouds are the new mullets).

While adding them as we go has taken care of about 20 posts, there seem to be around 800 more that don’t have tags. There are programs that are suppose to read through posts and “auto-tag” them, but they say that they aren’t very good.

I thought maybe we could do a little tagging experiment. The little box in the bottom right of the post will let you enter any tag you want for that post. Just type it in and hit enter. The link below will take you to a random post. Why not hit a random post or 50 and see what you think about tagging?

Tag them in whichever way you think is best; don’t feel like you can only use the ones in the Tag Cloud, those are only the most popular. There are something like 140 different tags in use now. Oh, three requests:

• all lowercase
• singular
• one word tags

As a sort of incentive, I will send the person who does the best job tagging something of Laurens that she will not notice is gone for a few weeks. May the best man win…

Get me a random post… now!

Oh, and I should point out that all of this is made possible by the folksonomy plugin written by Scott Sherrill-Mix.

I think it’s good for a person to do things they are not especially good at. It gives you an appreciation for the people who are. I tell my students (usually in programming I) that it can be fun to work at things that you aren’t especially good at it. I’ve been in several choirs where I’ve been the worst tenor.

1. This is the original one that I did. Lauren didn’t like the alarm clock. I was going with the whole time thing.
2. This one was just me playing around. Lauren said it was like superman.
3. So we ended up with this one: The logo that no one liked.
4. When I first started playing this morning I made it larger (bigger is better) and used some gradient in the text.



5. Hey, why not add in a thought bubble… No, that doesn’t look right.
6. Out in front? Yeah, that looks better. And make the tag line pop out more. Everyone likes the tag line.
7. What about a more interesting thought bubble? But then the LloydAndLauren.com is too busy. Lets simplify it a bit.
8. No, too much. But the simplified LloydAndLauren is definitely better.
9. But Now the “And” and the “.com” are too strong. Lets make them smaller.

I was feeling pretty good about the logo, but then Derek Guenther (a senior at Lincoln Lutheran) sent me one that I’m pretty sure is a lot better. I hate you, Derek.

In fact, Lauren was pretty indifferent to the idea of changing things. I believe her exact words were, “Quit bothering me. Get me a soda.” I took that as permission to go ahead. There were a few things that I didn’t like about the old look, And I tried to fix those with a new theme and assorted new plugins:

• We were starting to accumulate a fair number of pages, but there was no good way to access them.
• There was no way to highlight the few posts (roughly one in a hundred) that were popular.
• I wanted to add new things (tags, delicious links…) to the sidebar, but still keep it short.
• I wanted cool gravatars like Brad’s site.
• Added a few little additions like ‘subscribe to comments’ and ‘social bookmarking’ that will never get used.
• Find some way to get our names on the homepage without being obnoxious about it.

I looked at a lot of themes, and ended up getting one from woo themes. It was pretty easy to customize, and I didn’t really have to do much to it anyway. Most of the changes I made were to get threaded comments looking okay.

I like the way the tabs turned out, and I love the way the gravatars look like little Polaroid instant pictures (I just lucked into that by breaking something else).  I don’t really like the way the logo turned out at the top, so if you do logos, send me a better one.

I would really like to know what you think is worse than before (and anything you like too).

Say goodbye to the Thoughts v2.0 theme. We’ve had some good times together, but you were getting a little old and dated looking, and I wanted something hot new and fresh.

The new theme won’t have all of the sidebar features until I figure out what the h e double hockey sticks is going on with the sidebar anyway. Feel free to look around, but if something doesn’t work, it’s because some things don’t work yet (it really wasn’t working to try to get things working first behind the scenes).

But before you go all clicking around, let us each take a moment to recall our fond memories of old Thoughts v2.0. She was a fine theme, and I’m sure we’ll all miss her.

Well, what do you know. I was just noticing the huge number of comments on Brad’s Birthday Post and the huge number of comments on my Footnote Post. That made me wonder what other posts had a lot of comments, and the one that has the most comments is this post which happens to be the post I couldn’t find. The post with the last number of comments per person list. Thanks Peggy for kranking up the comment count so that I could find it seven months later.

Think of the children.

(click here for larger image) *Um, until the end of the month, I think.

<br />
<i>
<form id=”searchform” method=”get” action=”<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>”>>
<input type=”text” name=”s” id=”s” size=”15″ value=”search ‘em all” onFocus=”this.value=”” />
<input style=”display:none;” type=”submit” value=”<?php _e(‘Search’); ?>” />
</form>
</li>

Initially I thought she could do that with a single page that she updates when she wants to add stuff, but then I found something that I really wanted to share, but wasn’t really the sort of post that we’ve been doing, so I looked again into finding a plugin that would keep posts in certain categories off of the front page. My last attempt at a plugin like that broke something else (I don’t remember what). But this plugin by Rich Hamilton seems to work fine. And, as an added bonus, these ‘meta’ posts that no one is really interested in are not off the front page as well.

Part two is listing these posts somewhere. For that I’m going to try this plugin by Scott Reilly.

Here’s the function I’ll use with default:

function c2c_get_recent_posts ($num_posts = 5,
$format = “[li]%post_date%: %post_URL%[/li]“,
$categories = ”,
$orderby = ‘date’,
$order = ‘DESC’,
$offset = 0,
$date_format = ‘m/d/Y’,
$authors = ”,
$include_passworded_posts = false)

Here’s the snippet of code for the sidebar:

[li][h2]Found[/h2]
[ul]
[?php c2c_get_recent_posts(5,"[li]%post_date%: %post_URL%[/li]“,’Found’); ?]
[/ul]
[/li]

And here’s the complete lists of variables that work:

%comments_count% // Number of comments for post
%comments_fancy% // Fancy reporting of comments: (see get_recent_tagmap())
%comments_url% // URL to top of comments section for post
%comments_URL% // Post title linked to the top of the comments section on post’s permalink page
%last_comment_date% // Date of last comment for post
%last_comment_id% // ID for last comment for post
%last_comment_URL% // URL to most recent comment for post
%last_commenter% // Author of last comment for post
%last_commenter_URL // Linked (if author URL provided) of author of last comment for post
%post_author% // Author for post
%post_author_count% // Number of posts made by post author
%post_author_posts% // Link to page of all of post author’s posts
%post_author_url% // Linked (if URL provided) name of post author
%post_content% // Full content of the post
%post_date% // Date for post
%post_excerpt% // Excerpt for post
%post_excerpt_short% // Customizably shorter excerpt, suitable for sidebar usage
%post_id% // ID for post
%post_modified% // Last modified date for post
%post_title% // Title for post
%post_url% // URL for post
%post_URL% // Post title linked to post’s permalink page

Just to be complete, I also added a table to the ‘stuff’ sidebar so that I could have two collumns. I know, I should have used CSS for that. Tough.

1) Comments for the most recent post appear on the main page. This was the hardest to do. There are now two event loops, but the first one just grabs one post and the second one grabs everything but the first post:

[?php $my_query = new WP_Query('showposts=1'); while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; $withcomments = 1;?]

[?php endwhile; endif; ?]


2) Added the random post seperator between posts. This uses a random image addon. Any of them should work. This one is just a PHP script that sits in a directory with a bunch of images. You call the script as the source and it pulls in a random image. The image is placed via CSS which I haven’t seen before and probably breaks in older browsers.

Shoot, I thought I did more than that, but that’s all that I can remember. Sorry about the boring post.

Normally, that sort of idle wondering would have been enough for me, and I would have gone back to reading a book or something. But not this time. No, not this time. This time I have set forth a chain of events mighty to behold and… um… now I sort of need some help. See, John and Cheri have a website: www.schmidly.com, and as we know, the fun bit about having a website is having other people post comments about the things on your website. So, for a limited time only, everyone who posts a comment on their site can be one of my evil minions.

Evil minions don’t have health benefits yet, but we are starting a 401k program at the start of the year. Ah yes, soon my plan will be complete.

Here’s the line: (?php list_cats(0, ”, ‘name’, ‘asc’, ”,1,0,1,1,1,1,0,”,”,”,”,”) ?)

Sort of makes you wonder what all of that stuff does.

I had to add a plugin to WordPress to get the movie to showup on the MRI post. But it’s a fairly comprehensive plugin, and it also changed links to songs (.mp3) to “click to listen” buttons. That’s not what I wanted –at least not to the links to songs that were already on the site. I changed the file anarchy_media_player.php in the Anarchy Media plugin by changing the tag that it searches for to do the replacement from an anchor (A) tag to an (A3) tag which doesn’t exit in html. I’m assuming here that an actual (a3) tag would become a “play me” link, but I have not tested it.