skriker

What is FeedBurner?

For those who don't know FeedBurner yet – continue to services description. Shortly – you get statistics and some aditional services for your RSS feed for free.

How to use it with WordPress?

If you use .htaccess file on your web – continue to WordPress FeedBurner Plugin.

The other people (including me) who are not allowed to use .htaccess files by their webhosting company. (So we have to have index.php in the permalink structure of our WordPress powered website.) must employ simple hack to achieve the same result.

Step by step

1. Register at FeedBurner and when they ask you about your feed address use this:
   http://addressofyourweb/index.php?feed=rss2
   e.g. http://fredfred.net/skriker/index.php?feed=rss2
2. Now the hack comes. Open wp-feed.php in the root directory of your site and edit it according to this example:

   
<?php
if (empty($doing_rss)) {
$doing_rss = 1;
require(dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-blog-header.php');
}

   //this is the code for FeedBurner
if( $wp_query->query =='feed=feed' ){
header("Location: http://feeds.feedburner.com/skriker/");
exit;
}
//end of the added code


   where you replace http://feeds.feedburner.com/skriker/ with the address that you've got from the FeedBurner.

3. All feeds from the default RSS address generated by WordPress (http://yourweb/index.php/feed/ e.g. http://fredfred.net/skriker/index.php/feed/) are redirected to the FeedBurner but your readers don't notice any change.

Stick Boy and Match Girl in Love

Stick Boy liked Match Girl,
He liked her a lot.
He liked her cute figure,
he thought she was hot.

But could a flame ever burn
for a match and a stick?
It did quite literally;
he burned up quick.

The Boy with Nails in his Eyes

The Boy with Nails in his Eyes
put up his aluminium tree.
It looked pretty strange
because he couldn't really see.

Thanks to: http://homepage.tinet.ie/~sebulbac/burton/home.html

And don't forget to buy this book! (Where to buy?)

If you want to see pictures on your monitor at least a bit like what the author wanted you to see – you should have a calibrated monitor.

I like for example my Dark skriker theme for this web but there are always a few people asking about the reason why I have completely unreadable website. Well, the problem is in their monitor adjustment.

There is a huge theory behind the monitor calibration and also quite many thick books have been written about this topic but I am not going to bother you with all that stuff. You should actually check just two (ok, three) things. Let's do it in two steps:

Brightness and Contrast

The pattern that should be visible on the next two images:

Try to play around with the brightness and the contrast as long as needed to make all "edges" visible on this picture:

If you have a really "shitty" monitor and you cannot find the settings that work with the previous image – try to do the same thing with this one (and you should consider buying a new monitor):

OK, the most important part is behind us and you can stop here.

If you have nothing to do or you have just realized that your monitor has actually quite many buttons that are changing "something" you can continue to:

Gamma

The gamma is a bit more problematic because the difference between CRT (you know, these old analog monitors) and new LCD displays is pretty big when you consider gamma curves. Anyway – you should be able to see the border between 90% and 100% at least on the last two stripes. Preferably the difference should be visible also on the first stripe. Don't care about the yellow stripe, that's another story.

Note: gamma could be hidden under the "Color temperature" in your monitor settings where it could be possible to change the values for Red, Green and Blue separately.

More detailed instructions: http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/

What does it do?

The id3alist is ID3 tag editor (up to version 2.3) and file manager of some kind. It helps you to edit the ID3 tags in your mp3 files and then rename and organize these files according to the values saved in the tags so you'll get well organized bunch of folders that have the structure as you defined. The playlists are created as a bonus.

This program is not for those who have 20 mp3 songs. It's not even for those who have 200MB of mp3 files. It's for those who have to manage tons and tons of music because only guys facing to such a boring work can appreciate this carefully designed and thought out program:) (just co-operation with www.freedb.org is missing)

Screenshots

Well, this is a bad picture but who cares… everybody knows that November 17 is very important day for us.

Velvet Revolution on Wiki

The Barguest, or Barn-ghaist of the Teutons, is also reported to be a frequent visitor in Lancashire. The appearance of this sprite is considered as a certain death-sign, and has obtained the local names of "Trash" and "Skriker." He generally appears to one of the family from whom Death is about to select his victim, and is more or less visible, according to the distance of the event.

I have met with persons to whom the barguest [bar-ghaist, i.e., gate-ghost] has assumed the form of a white cow, or a horse; but on most occasions "Trash" is described as having the appearance of very large dog, with very broad feet, shaggy hair, drooping ears, and eyes "as large as saucers." When walking, his feet make a loud splashing noise, like old shoes in a miry road, and hence the name of "Trash." The appellation "Skriker" has reference to the scream uttered by the sprite, which are frequently heard when the animal is invisible. When followed by any individual he begins to walk backwards with his eyes fixed full on his pursuer, and vanishes on the slightest momentary inattention.

Problem of every blog is that all posts disappear in archive after while and they cannot return back to the front page unless the author changes the publishing date. That’s a cheap trick and we don’t like cheap tricks, right?

So I’ve created Archivist – plugin (for WordPress) that does this job in a nice way.

Installation

Copy archivist.php file to your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it.

Settings

All these settings can be changed in archivist.php:

'number_of_posts' – number of posts from the archive that should be shown on the front page.

'random' – these posts can be selected randomly or sorted by date.

'frontpage_position' – where should be selected post(s) inserted on the front page. Picture above shows the situation where this value is set to 1. (Archive post is inserted after the first post.)

'from_categories' – it's possible to limit the categories where the post(s) are selected from. Just insert the list of category IDs.

'older_than' – defined in days. E.g. 60.

'newer_than' – defined in days.

'keep_the_limit_of_posts_per_page' – Set to "true" if the very last post(s) on the front page should be "removed" from the this page in order to keep the limit of number of posts per page. Set to "false" if these "removed" posts should be just "moved" futher. Only issue is when set "true" that you will "miss" these "removed" posts on the second page:(

'title' – defines how should be changed the title of selected post(s). There is added "From the archive: " before the title of each post by default.

Download

archivist1.2.zip – (WordPress 2.5 and higher compatible)

Other recommended plugins

• IImage Browser
• IImage Gallery
• JÄÅ Preview
• Character Map
• Polyglot
• IImage Panorama